DEATH TO YOUR BALLS!
by Jon Frisby · 08/27/2008 (11:29 pm) · 2 comments
So, it's been far far too long since I've posted a blog entry. I've been heads down working on a number of projects and making sure that MrJoy can continue to pay the bills, but in the meantime I have tried hard to follow the first rule of being a successful leader: Delegate, Delegate, Delegate.
It's easy to say "I can do that myself!", but You are a finite commodity, and a fragile one at that. (One stray bus and you're toast!) It's a much harder task to hand things off to other people and to trust that they will produce a better result than you could yourself but it's necessary if you ever want to be more than a one-man-band.
For a couple months now, an elite team of Ninja Game Developers has been hard at work crafting the next MrJoy production, and I think it's finally time to start showing just a little bit of it...
The team consists of a project lead / lead coder, an artist, a composer, and a couple other people chipping in here and there with QA, game design ideas and feedback, and some code here and there. I am one of those chipping in here and there. I provided a working prototype, a mandate, and have been the PITA driving the people involved to do their very best but I am most decidedly NOT the guy in charge. In fact, the game hardly resembles my prototype at all!
The mandate was simple: 0) It's about ball physics. 1) Get it done FAST. 2) Get it done CHEAP. 3) Make it FUN. 4) Everything else is up to you.
No hard requirements about feature X, or feature Y to get in the way of getting it done. If one idea is too hard to implement, there's lots of other good ideas out there. No rigid roles -- everyone can chime in at any time with their ideas. The short deadline has kept everyone focused and realistic.
This may sound like a dream job, but it's actually quite challenging! It's much easier to do your job when you're told specifically what needs to get done and how to do it. It's boring, but it's easy. This has not been like that. It's been stressful, and challenging for the whole team. Some things have gone remarkably well, and others have been much harder to deal with than anyone involved imagined.
We spent several weeks just iterating on ideas for the core game mechanic. Then we spent a few more weeks iterating on the core look and feel and finding ways of making things run fast and fleshing out the code to create a necessary amount of variety and to get the play control in the ballpark of "right".
Now that we had the toy, and the look, and the sound, what about *the game*. The core mechanic was fun once you got into it, but lacked direction and certainly lacked a "hook" to engage people. Well, after some discussion we found it. A game that once could only be summarized using several sentences of hard-to-visualize abstractions can now be boiled down to one simple sentence that my mom would instantly understand.
No, I'm not going to say what it is. You'll just have to wait for Banzai Ball to come out. In the meantime, here's an in-game shot from the brilliant artist tasked with making this a gorgeous experience.
And for the record, the idea that crystalized this project and took it from an interesting toy to a real game concept came from the artist; not me, not Brian, not from a dedicated "game designer". In fact, while my role typically was closest to "game designer", at the end of the day he did a better job of it than I did and took the project from "good" to "great".
Bottom line: If you aren't surrounded by people that you KNOW are better than you, then either you're Really Really Good, or you're doing something wrong. Guess which has higher odds?
Aaaaaaaaaaand, without further ado, the first "real" screenshot of "Banzai Ball":
It's easy to say "I can do that myself!", but You are a finite commodity, and a fragile one at that. (One stray bus and you're toast!) It's a much harder task to hand things off to other people and to trust that they will produce a better result than you could yourself but it's necessary if you ever want to be more than a one-man-band.
For a couple months now, an elite team of Ninja Game Developers has been hard at work crafting the next MrJoy production, and I think it's finally time to start showing just a little bit of it...
The team consists of a project lead / lead coder, an artist, a composer, and a couple other people chipping in here and there with QA, game design ideas and feedback, and some code here and there. I am one of those chipping in here and there. I provided a working prototype, a mandate, and have been the PITA driving the people involved to do their very best but I am most decidedly NOT the guy in charge. In fact, the game hardly resembles my prototype at all!
The mandate was simple: 0) It's about ball physics. 1) Get it done FAST. 2) Get it done CHEAP. 3) Make it FUN. 4) Everything else is up to you.
No hard requirements about feature X, or feature Y to get in the way of getting it done. If one idea is too hard to implement, there's lots of other good ideas out there. No rigid roles -- everyone can chime in at any time with their ideas. The short deadline has kept everyone focused and realistic.
This may sound like a dream job, but it's actually quite challenging! It's much easier to do your job when you're told specifically what needs to get done and how to do it. It's boring, but it's easy. This has not been like that. It's been stressful, and challenging for the whole team. Some things have gone remarkably well, and others have been much harder to deal with than anyone involved imagined.
We spent several weeks just iterating on ideas for the core game mechanic. Then we spent a few more weeks iterating on the core look and feel and finding ways of making things run fast and fleshing out the code to create a necessary amount of variety and to get the play control in the ballpark of "right".
Now that we had the toy, and the look, and the sound, what about *the game*. The core mechanic was fun once you got into it, but lacked direction and certainly lacked a "hook" to engage people. Well, after some discussion we found it. A game that once could only be summarized using several sentences of hard-to-visualize abstractions can now be boiled down to one simple sentence that my mom would instantly understand.
No, I'm not going to say what it is. You'll just have to wait for Banzai Ball to come out. In the meantime, here's an in-game shot from the brilliant artist tasked with making this a gorgeous experience.
And for the record, the idea that crystalized this project and took it from an interesting toy to a real game concept came from the artist; not me, not Brian, not from a dedicated "game designer". In fact, while my role typically was closest to "game designer", at the end of the day he did a better job of it than I did and took the project from "good" to "great".
Bottom line: If you aren't surrounded by people that you KNOW are better than you, then either you're Really Really Good, or you're doing something wrong. Guess which has higher odds?
Aaaaaaaaaaand, without further ado, the first "real" screenshot of "Banzai Ball":
Torque Owner Vis
very nice build up...
best anticlimax I've seen so far this year........
But overall its nice to hear alternative ideas to project management your mandate should be held up as a template for any aspiring development team, a real Gem.