As a grad student at the University of Central Florida's Interactive Entertainment Academy (FIEA), Sultans of Scratch (official site) was my first major foray into the world of game development. Our game, which we took from concept to completion in seven months, began pre-production with nine of my fellow students. Our team size grew to twenty-three (plus quite a few outside contractors), once production began. It was an arduous affair, but one rich with experience.
The initial pitch for Sultans was something that pushed our school's view of what a graduate student game could entail. We promised fully motion-captured animation of professional break dancers, original music, and a custom peripheral. When pre-pro began we kept the same envelope-pushing spirit, deciding to increase the scope of the game design as well; instead of a single player turntable experience, we were going to create a Rock Band for the hip-hop enthusiast. The game would be a four player, competitive/cooperative rhythm experience.
This certainly sounded like a tall order to most of the cohort, but the core of us believed that we had an ace up our sleeves. FIEA was the perfect, and only, school that could enable a group of students to create this type of game. Not only did we have a license to Gamebryo middleware, a motion capture studio, and the UCF engineering department, but we also had been working in multi-disciplinary teams throughout the first semester. These resources, plus being in Orlando, with its thriving hip-hop scene for recruiting dancers, were all the ingredients needed to make Sultans of Scratch a reality.
When we began pre-pro, the core members of our team had a chip on our shoulder; we had something to prove to everyone who said it couldn't be done. This served to be both helpful and harmful in terms of team dynamics, as it's hard to get everyone adoptive of this kind of attitude - especially when none of us yet had the credentials to back it up. But seven months later, we have accomplished all we set out to do.
What Went Right
1. Prototyping early and often.
One area we felt strongly about in preproduction was prototyping. Instead of jumping right into Gamebryo and realizing our game designs there, we first put them through hours of brainstorming and white board sessions. When a mechanic was finally decided on, we moved into flash to test it. This is where our pre-pro programmers became dev heroes, knowing that they were making throwaway efforts for the greater good. While our vertical slice was certainly not all it could be, we picked up a tremendous amount of speed once production began, knowing exactly what mechanics to implement.
2. Tools based approach.
At FIEA the programming professors teach a tools-based approach to enable the designers to take increasing amounts of workload out of the programmer's hands. This was a huge benefit for us because our programmers made XML based tools in C# that expedited our designers' workflow in laying down notes for each music track, and assigning combos/sound/animations to each of our DJ and Dancer moves.
3. Pod Structure.
Once we moved into production and assimilated 14 new members onto our team, I decided to go with a pod structure for seating. I'm sure it's common in most dev teams that once an issue arises and someone is blocked, it's much easier to procrastinate a bit knowing you have to track down the person needed to resolve it. A pod structure helped alleviate some of this, and was also a huge benefit in motivation as dev members who were frequently working on common tasks needed only turn to the person next to them to resolve an issue.
