Hi! My name is Joseph Ceranski and I have been the Producer of Inconvenience Store for the past year. This means I helped oversee the project as a whole and tried to keep us on track to making the best product we could by the end of the year. The progress that we have made in the past year has been astronomical, and I am proud to say that I have worked with this extremely productive team on our project. But what really changed from the beginning? How were we able to keep organized throughout the year? And what process is used to refine our game now that we have most decisions made?
Our final version of the starting menu screen
In the early stages of development, many of the team meetings were sitting in a room talking about what we wanted the game to be. For most of our first half of the year of production, this dominated our time and efforts, talking about what decisions to make and what our game should be. After we decided on “wacky party game in a grocery store with mini games”, the discussions became about things like what color palette we should use, what mini games should the game have, and how should our character move. While this was essential at first, there were times when we got caught up in discussions. Quickly we realized that it was more productive for us to just start making the game, and ask questions about it later. Everyone was hesitant to make decisions early on, but once we realized we all had agency over our own workloads, progress really started to come together.
Example of our progress- left image shows mini game “The Back” at the beginning of the semester, right image shows an almost completed level now
Once we started pumping out work more regularly, and assets/code were being made by multiple people, an official need for organization was recognized. In our second semester, a spreadsheet was created that had goals for the remaining time, separated into “sprints”.
Green indicated completed, yellow in progress, and red not started or barely started
While that spreadsheet helped overall, we needed help organizing our individual tasks. For this, we used Azure DevOps, an online organizational tool that allowed each member of the team to list tasks, keep track of how long they worked on something and also allowed other team members to see what everyone was doing. Progress within the art department was tracked with another spreadsheet that showed each individual object that needed to be made. We could list who was making that object as well as how far completed it was. Programming organization was done through branches. Through the branches, people could work on their own sections of the game without affecting other people’s code. This avoided errors when everyone merged their code, as branches were eventually merged into the “master” branch. Our programming lead, Kiran Cotting, made sure there were no errors with the merging before things went onto master, leaving the master branch as our most official game to date.
After decisions were made and implemented into the game, they still needed to be tested to make sure they work and feel good to the player. While this was done by our programmers while making the game, it is always good to have other feedback. Throughout the second semester, a number of builds of the game were made showing our progress and new aspects of gameplay. By having people playtest, we got their opinions on what we should change. Most recently, I have been playing our builds and reporting my findings back to the team to clean things up for our final game. This included things like finding broken menus, looking for game objects that were not finished yet, as well as thinking about how the game could be improved in general. Overall, through all of our feedback, we have been able to refine our game greatly from where we first started.
And that’s it! The team and I are excited to launch our game in less than a month, and we hope you all enjoy it! It has been a long and hard process, but we do all of this work for the players. Personally, I am glad to have worked on this game with the team. This has been the most productive team I have ever made a game with, and communication was always a focus. I hope everyone enjoys Inconvenience Store, and thank you for keeping up to date with us through our posts!