GGJ 2024: Stand-Down Comedy

Theme: Make me laugh | Period: 7 days | People: 13 | UE5 

Do your best to make the whole room laugh, in an old dusty theater populated only by your illusions

I was the lead designer in a team of 13 people. My job was to make sure that everyone was pushing in the same direction, during the 7 days of the jam duration.

Such a big team with a tight deadline led to many voices and discussions about the game everyone wanted to build. My job was not to enforce my vision over the others, but to make sure that everyone was aligned with the idea chosen together.

I was able to keep the goal clear and reachable with a scope that was comfortable with everyone's possibilities.

We wanted a game that everyone in the team liked, to keep them engaged during the whole week of development. 

The first goal of the jam was that everyone would enjoy it. I thought that everyone in the team should have liked the game and to do so, I insisted that the brainstorming about the jam theme should not be limited to game designers only. Everyone can have a good idea, the game designer's role is to analyze it and make it practical.

We took 2 days to talk about ideas, but I soon understood that it was impossible to make 13 people choose one. I organized a war room with other designers to try to analyze the ideas in the most objective way possible, ranking them by doability and theme relation. We then returned to the team with a shrunk choice of 3 ideas. (here is the whiteboard we used)

It was hard to explain why many ideas were discarded, and someone took it personally. I took time to make them understand the design choices behind it, and we resolved it. I never forced my ideas over the others, my goal was to choose the one most aligned with our abilities and with the right scope, and it wasn't mine.

We got some arguing and some voices stronger than others in a non-constructing way.

Right at the start of the development, we had some misunderstandings between team members. I was expecting that because they never worked together and there were different backgrounds and ways of working.

I was reached in private by a panicked lead 3D artist who was praising my help because she was arguing with the concept artist. She made the wrong move of suggesting that we could proceed without waiting for the concept art because the scene was simple and because we could have found many references online (of course a 3D artist is used to finding real-world references online, but a concept artist is used to draw the references for the team). As a result, the concept artist lost respect for the lead 3D artist and stopped collaborating.

The 3D artist asked for my intervention to stop the discussion. I answered by saying that I could not force someone to collaborate or to listen to someone else, even if I was leading the project. I suggested to her to take a step back, remove the ego from the messages, and focus on what was good for the project. It was crucial to make the concept artist feel important again (and it was) and to organize the work with priorities, dividing what the artists could start doing without concept art and what needed it. One last step for her was to chat in private with the concept artist and feel sorry for the misunderstanding, taking back what she said in a moment of rush.

The later days went better with fewer discussions and more focus on the project's vision.

The initial development of the first mechanic was slow to start

We designed the game to be incremental in production, with a simple core mechanic (the Guitar Hero style Note Highway) on what we wanted to build on with power-ups, distractions, events, and so on. Doing so we had a strong core mechanic, with as many nice to have as we wanted that could or could not make it to the final game at the jam deadline.

The plan was perfect but after 2 days of development, the core mechanic was later to come. We wanted to iterate on it many times, but this delay wouldn't allow us to do it. To resolve this bottleneck, I stepped down from my leading role and went to help the developers. There was no need to design new mechanics or interactions, if there wouldn't be time to develop those.

My help was crucial. I was able to lower the time of discussion between developers and designers because I was working next to the developers. I kept them focused on what was needed to make the MVP as soon as possible, and I helped in the development of some of the interactions we designed.