SCLORP
About
Trash Planet is a 3D, Third-person Runner game where you play as a little robot that tries to clean up the Earth in the fastest way possible. Collect trash cans in order to boost your speed, but stay away from cars and other obstacles, they'll slow you down...
DEVELOPMENT TIME:
2 WEEKS
TEAM SIZE:
10
During my time at Futuregames, this was our first actual game project, and the purpose of it was to prepare us for upcoming game projects.
The task was to create a game in two weeks, with accessibility in mind. The game should also be fully playable with Xbox Adaptive Controllers.
My contribution
My responsibilities in the development included:
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* Game Design Generalist
* Documenting (Created and updated the GDD)
* Sound Design
* Audio Design
* Composing Music
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As Product Owner, I was the vision holder for this project. I had to make sure that everyone on the team shared the same vision during the entire production. In my role I felt a strong need to communicate with every department as often as possible, to make sure that everyone was on the same track and that the development moved forward in a way that felt good to everyone.
1. The overall feel of the gameplay ended up in a satisfying way.
2. In the end, we received good feedback from the jury, target audience, and play-testers.
3. We managed to create a good balance regarding the accessibility limitations we had, and it didn't conflict with the player progression.
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The time for pre-production was little to none.
We rushed and began developing the game without knowing much about our limitations. We also didn't take the time to really get to know each other, which ended up in people feeling uncertain about their work. If we would have taken an extra day to really gain some knowledge about our different strengths, maybe the product would've turned out better.
SCRUM? What's that?
We only had a pretty unorganized MIRO board that was cluttered with everything. As a Product Owner, I tried my best to communicate my vision, but since we had no structure, people didn't know what others were working on. This resulted in a lot of waste of work.
What went well?
Challenges along the way?
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1. Without any project management, the collaboration within the team will suffer.
2. It's important to know your team. Talk and discuss a lot, figure out what each person can bring to the table, and have fun doing it.
Lessons learned?
Feedback & Adjustments
From the beginning, we had plans to create solar-energy looking pickups for speed boosting. When we received our feedback from our first playtest, it became clear that is was a bit "unclear", narratively speaking. But we were lucky! We already had trash cans as obstacles in our game. And we ended up using them as speed boosters, instead of solar-energy. This created a lot more meaning in the game's mechanics.
FEEDBACK
THE FIX
Level Design
Building Blocks
We developed the game using several level blocks, for a complete random generation of smaller level sections. That way, the player would have a different experience when replaying the game. We designed several level blocks according to three different difficulty levels.
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I designed some of the building blocks in Paint, then our main level designer put those together in Unity.
We also added 3 level stages, with a satisfying ramp-jump by the end of each one. The idea was to create more variations, adding more obstacles AND speed-boosters with every stage, for a more solid progression. We also planned for having different environments with each stage, but in the end there wasn't enough time to implement them.