We have had a fantastic last 7 weeks! Our first title, a top-down action-puzzler titled Return All Robots!, has reached alpha; we submitted a nice playable demo to Microsoft’s Dream-Build-Play competition, and we are on track for a full game release to Xbox Live Indie Games by the end of 2nd quarter, 2010.

So, we just had our Space Whale Super Space Meeting (©), and have mapped out the next set of sprints. Basically, we’re creating final art and audio assets, and fleshing out the levels to have a fully playable game.

That’s the good news. The bad news is; we did a lot of things wrong during our alpha sprint. And, I mean, a lot. We did not communicate as well as we should, we didn’t manage our asset version control well, and our testing was… well, it wasn’t quite as robust as it should have been.

But, coming through this spring, our studio learned a hell of a lot about how to manage our pipeline, and how to produce a title. And that was the single best experience our group could have had! I thought I’d share with you a couple of lessons that I personally learned from creating your own project and driving a team through it.

1. Just do it. We could have spent hours planning and probably over-planning how to get to our alpha (ask Aaron, I’m legendary for over-planning). But, at the end of the day, we learned more by just jumping in, visualizing our goal, and getting the goal done while making lots of mistakes. But that’s okay! Because in just 7 weeks, we learned more about working together as a studio than 7 months planning for every contingency. As long as you keep your eyes open, and observe what’s working, and what’s not… there’s nothing wrong with jumping right in and creating something!

2. Welcome the feedback, and make changes to improve at the next go around. Our leads (Jordan and Andrew) took the feedback head on, and put into play a fantastic centralized web information system for all of our communication. This information storehouse is solving every single one of our issues that were brought up at our sprint post-mortem. If we hadn’t taken the initiative to fix the issues, we’d still be in the same place, project management-wise. But, because of our steps, we are approaching our final sprint with high morale, confidence in our workflow, and increased trust and communication. Win-win, in my book!

3. Forgive yourself, and focus on the successes. Yeah, we didn’t manage our testing scripts as well as we wanted. Yeah, we pooped on Aaron and had him do audio implementation (I owe him a beer for that). But, every single project will have its’ share of “oops’ies”. You know what our studio did do? We finished our alpha on time, and to spec, and submitted it to Microsoft. That’s a pretty @#*&$%*& big success, if you ask me! Don’t forget your victories, even as you shore up where your defeats occurred.

Okay, that’s a good “feel good” blog post. Now that we’re producing final assets, we’ll start posting more art and audio. Jordan, Aaron, or I will also post a bit about the production process, as we’re going through it so you get to see how our twisted minds operate, as well as some teasers for the game!

Swim on, Space Whales!

Mike

Tags: feedback, production