Producer Blog #6 Postmortem

Hello all and welcome to the postmortem for Robot Riot. I am the producer Miciah Coley. We’ll be discussing what went good, what went bad, and what I learned from this experience. For the people who don’t know Robot Riot is a competitive battle royale game in which you will face off against another player, collecting various weapons and powers ups to fight them in battle and win. The game takes place in the main facility of Atonal Industries, a robot manufacturer that also specializes in quirky weaponry props. Players will square off against each other in a best of three lives on four different levels to determine who is the best robot. I’m super proud of the team and what we accomplished. We completed a total of 807 points.

What went wrong?

A huge portion of our problems stems from the team not communicating. Whether it be in class or outside of class. Which was really bad because no one knew what each other were working on. It made it hard for code to work together and hard for the models to match the theme. To help alleviate this problem I added a completed work section into the discord and that was able to help with people knowing what each other were working on. It also helped with team morale with team members congratulating each other on the work completed and how good it looked. I also made sure that each department was close to each in class as a way to get them to speak to each other. It worked because by sprint 2 I couldn’t get them to stop talking to each other in class. 

What went right?

Our workload during the sprints went really well. We had 100+ points every single sprint. Since we were doing a hundred points a sprint it helped us finish a level per sprint. By the end of sprint 4 / the beginning of sprint 5 we were completely done building our levels. Which allowed us to go back and polish these levels with lighting and more colliders. We were able to spend 2 sprints polishing our levels which went great because every single level has a different feel to it. Which I think is phenomenal because even though the core game loop is the same you are still able to have different experiences between each level. 

Another thing that went right was the scope of the project. We were able to get a bunch of our wishes into the game thanks to us completing our levels really early into the project. Some of the wishes included transformation animations, a cutscene, sudden death, and vfx for our traps. It’s very rare to get wishes into the game with our limited time in during production so I was super proud of the team. 

What would I do differently?

In the future I would like to split build nights into two nights. We spent anywhere from 6-7 hours on call during build nights and it was horrible for everyone because we’d walk into class all tired. So in the future I would either split up build night into two nights or import stuff into the game as we go to help combat this issue. 

What would I do again?

Something I would do again is cut down our animation workload. When the project was first pitched I was given an animator and we went down the list of animations we needed. The list was like 20 per character and I knew that was not possible with one animator so I made the decision to have floating robots instead of walking ones. That cut down our animations by a huge chunk. So much so that my animator was able to do VFX work for some traps and weapons.

Another thing I would do again is have an A.L.R that was updated weekly. Since we had an A.L.R we were able to keep track of work a lot more efficiently. It helped a bunch whether it was sounds, models, animations we were on top of keeping track of it

In conclusion, what did I learn?

I learned a lot from this process. Simply having a bigger team does not mean it’ll be easier. I was like I finally have a huge team this will be a breeze. It was hard making sure everyone was doing their work during the sprint but in the end we had a game that everyone loved. I learned that you have to have meetings outside of class as much as you can to make sure everyone is on the same page. Inside of class check in on your team and make sure they don’t have any questions about the model, the code, or something that is supposed to function or look. Most of all is to stay on top of the board. Staying on top of my board helped me so much throughout the process because it let me know if we were gonna hit our goals or not and very early on I realized that we would be able to.

Well that’s all folks until next time. Thank you team for all your hard work. Thank you (viewers) for listening to me rant week after week. 

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