I want to start out by saying that if anyone, back at the beginning of the year, told me that capstone would have gone this well then I would have responded by saying they were crazy. For the most part, the games that came out of all the sections this year were really well done, covered a broad variety of genres, and really just looked super fun. As far as my own team was concerned, I knew we'd be pretty okay because I knew the people on my team were at the top of their game, it's the reason I asked them to be on a team with me. However, even I didn't expect everything to go as smoothly as it did, as we managed to hit deadlines and builds each week, showing off new tech, features, levels, and art on an almost constant basis. I'm going to go into more detail on this during the "What We Did Well" section, but I wanted to open with how impressed and proud I am to have been apart of such an all-star group of people.
Why Paper Wings?
Let's open up with this, why did we choose Paper Wings? Well, as members of capstone know, we initially didn't come in with this idea. In fact, we didn't come in with any ideas, which surprisingly enough put us in the minority. We had general ideas, such as we wanted to make a game that couldn't really be defined as one specific genre of game, something that would turn heads, and would utilize a new mechanic, but nothing solid. As a team, we wanted to make a game that we'd be proud of, something to headline portfolios, and something that showed off what we had learned the past four years. As the producer, I wanted to be able to proudly say we stayed in scope and were able to ship a completed product.
Paper Wings, like many of our other ideas, were born on a whiteboard. We had a huge whiteboard filled with ideas and arrows connecting these ideas together. As a team, we found about twenty ideas that we liked, and narrowed it down to a couple that we pitched. One was a labyrinth game that still gives me chills as to what could have been done, if we maybe had a year to work on it and a larger team. The other was a better scoped project about paper airplanes and running around on the top of them to control steering. After some internal struggle and convincing, as well as resounding encouragement from the class, we chose what we dubbed #ProjectSky.
What we did right, or so we'd like to believe.
Iterations
As a team, we did well at making new iterations and prototypes each week. We had a goal we would set for each week, such as building levels or getting new flight mechanics in. Once we had something we liked, such as a fun looping area or turning that felt better, we'd improve on it and determine that by the next check-in, we'd have another iteration that felt better. In fact, I'd say our entire game was built on that. On the design side, the courses were built off of fun things that I enjoyed doing while flying around. Things such as weaving or taking two sharp turns into a third long bank were first smaller iterations that we transitioned into the final level. Even our final levels were built of iterations that started as small as how a flower looked.
Recognizable Icons
Initially, we scoped Paper Wings up way to much, thinking we'd have time for many different levels and perhaps if none of us had other classes, we would have, but alas that's a different tale. The final product is a mystical area with a bunch of rolling hills, vines, and humongous plants that looked a lot more in theme with the characters that had been created. However, what led us to that was our initial level, which was Chicago's Millennium Park. After taking a team trip to look at the sights and map the land, we built what was a pretty accurate representation of it. However, we didn't like it all that much and our professor, Brian Schrank, told us that he felt like we had put the Player in a prison. In fact, we had, but instead of rebuilding the level we decided to iterate on what we got and create a mystical, organic based city that looked like maybe Chicago, but we kept a lot of the iconic recreations such as our own interpretation of The Bean. This turned out to work in our favor as everyone still says "Hey look, Chicago!" but they also enjoy the world that we've created. It's the Chicago we would love to see, but probably never get.
Team Accountability/Communication
What worked well for keeping us on tracking was everyone being accountable for each other. Everybody saw what everyone else was working on, and we all did a good job of checking in with each other to see where tasks were at. Sometimes this lead to the same question being asked twice, but we all would be reminded of what we needed to work on. Communication was also open, as we all used the web app Slack quite frequently, to talk even when we couldn't work in person. Even if it was a simple "How'd the weekend go?", we kept dialogue open so that we could gain confidence talking to each other about different things. I honestly think this is part of the reason that we created a good project is because we cared about making a game not just for us, but for the teammate next to us.
Taking Feedback Seriously
One of the reasons we were able to keep iterating on ideas is because we constantly sought feedback from both the class and from external sources. We made sure to check in with all of our advisers, seeing what they had to say on the game, and taking feedback seriously. Same with when we would present to the class. Our artist/designer Ashley would take notes while I ran the feedback sessions and we'd focus on areas of the game that we were unsure about, as well as opening up the floor to all feedback. We understood that the class, as well as being designers, were also gamers, so we wanted to get their opinion on how our game was coming along. Every time we asked for feedback, we'd get a mixture of great advice, and other advice that just wouldn't work with what we already had, but we took it into consideration and chose to make changes on what we thought was the best advice given. I honestly think that if we ignored everybody, we would have a much different game and probably a game that wasn't as good.
Scoping Back
This one is really production based, but something we did well was scoping back on our idea. One of the reasons we chose Paper Wings was because of it's small scope, but somehow we managed still get out of scope. Between wanting three levels, free-roam missions, AND a minigame, we wanted a lot from the end result of capstone. However, as we moved forward with production, we realized that we were out of scope, so as a team we were able to make the decisions to get rid of things that we hadn't worked on. Instead of giving out three meh levels, or features that didn't feel right, we scoped back to one level (with two different course variants), and completely cut out our minigame since we knew it wouldn't feel right and we'd be taking time away from other things. In fact, the decision to kill the minigame came down to either working on it, or reconstructing our menu system. We chose to reconstruct the menu and I still think it was the right choice.
What could have gone better?
Scale
Man, from a design side, I'm never going to hear the end of this one from Ashley. Quite simply, we screwed up with our scaling and if anyone was to go into our scene, they'd be in for quite a shock. Everything is simple massive. We've tried to hide it well, but it's caused us some problems with both lighting, resources, and importing. We know exactly what happened too and it's squarely on my shoulders. When I built the prototype level that we worked from, I made everything bigger than it should be to help sell the idea that the airplane should be small. However, what I should have done was just get a scale model of the size we wanted for the airplane, make sure it looked fine in the camera, and then built a world with smaller assets. I didn't realize we were in this position until I got the terrain involved and as I was molding it/Ashley painting it, we realized everything was super massive. I should have also had the terrain involved early, to help give us an idea of the size of terrain that was involved. I have learned from this, but it's still something that I'm not proud of.
Level Design
While I love the level we created, I still feel as though I haven't done it complete justice. There are still lingering aspects of the previous world that keep us tied too closely to Chicago, which we never meant to be the only place, and part of me wishes that I could have done more to get off of it. What I would say to teams in the future years is don't decide on three levels right off the bat. Find and pick one level that you'd be totally amazed with and then add on if you can. We started moving in that direction as we infused nature into Chicago, got a better terrain and lighting scheme, made everything appear for fantastical, but it took us an entire quarter to get there.
Builds/Development Style
While we did a good job of iterating on features each week, from a Production standpoint I felt like we could have done more to stay on track and avoid rushing to find tasks that we had forgotten at the end of the week. We switched to a complete Scrum style about halfway through and our best work/movement came once we did so, but before that I tried looking at too big of a picture. We always were agile with our development, but we probably should have switched to a smaller scoped Scrum style much sooner. What I would say to future teams is to not focus on the end goal, beyond deciding on your M.V.P (minimum viable product), and then taking things in one or two week sprints, talking about things as a team and deciding what needed to be done by the end of each sprint.
Final thoughts
We nailed all of our goals, creating something that we could only make after taking every other course that we could at DePaul, and I would say all of us are proud of this. Every showcase we had people smiling, laughing, and enjoying our game, which was a super goal for us. We even got Paper Wings approved for Desura (which right now is shaky), but we will have a shipped product shortly after capstone ends. After looking at all the games the were produced and then go back twenty-two weeks in time, I'd still want to be on the Paper Wings team. This crew was awesome to work with and I think they in fact All-Stars. We're going to continue focusing on our Desura release before switching gears to focus on the Nintendo Indie Store, which is exciting to think about. If I could offer one word of advice to incoming teams, it would be don't worry about making capstone a competition. Worry about just setting your game against your goals and making it. I don't see any games that could really compete again each other, which means that I can be excited for every game that has been finished, and smile to think about the company that our game is in. Cheers guys, we made it.
