Metroidvania

Context

The winter of 2022 saw the realization of projects of Metroidvania type games with a story based on a known literary work. So I had the responsibility to work on two projects at the same time.

The first one was inspired by "Treasure Island" of R.L. Stevenson where the player embodies a blob, hence its name "Curse of the Blob".

The second one was inspired by "The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" again by R.L. Stevenson, which will give the project "Serum".

This project was one of the most interesting to realize because of the complexity of following two games at the same time and how to adapt to two completely different situations.

When :

January-February 2022

Duration :

3 weeks

Project size :

2 groups

Serum : 9 members (4 designers, 5 artists)

Curse of the Blob : 9 members (4 designers, 5 artists)

Producing

Despite assigning groups to people who wanted to do production management, our young experience in the field led us to help each other with the tools we were going to use to manage the groups. Some of us therefore created templates on Google Sheets and ClickUp to establish a basis for managing all the groups.

Task exemple

As said before, for the pure management of each person's tasks, we used ClickUp for practicality due to the customisation and use of the application. But also because the software was known by the rest of the students and we did not have enough time to set up a new working environment.

We therefore organised the work into several classic statuses: ToDo, In progress, Waiting, Complete, Built. The Bonus status was, as the meetings progressed, what we put on hold to be on time and which could be completed if someone made time or after the rendering for those who wanted it.

Tasks had a tag and an assignment so that the filter would work and people could find the tasks they needed to do easily. They also have a priority to be able to organise the work intelligently and to do everything related to the main gameplay before the secondary.

ClickUp therefore had a really positive impact on the groups by making all the tasks very visual and allowing everyone to organise themselves as best they could to move forward with the project.

Overall view of the ClickUp organisation for each group

We have also set up schedules.

They were more or less followed up, but they still allowed me to make the project run smoothly. Every day I took a moment with the person to see if the schedule had been respected and the objectives for the next day. Shared with the whole group, this allowed everyone to see where the others were and thus to have a real group spirit.

Example of a schedule

Nevertheless, I had to adapt to the two groups which had to be managed very differently.

I realised that one of the two groups with more autonomy allowed me to have a more flexible follow-up than the other group. So I let the group's leads organise the meetings and I dropped the plannings to do a more direct follow-up when there were situations that required a framework to be put back in place so as not to spread out.

I was therefore able to invest myself a little more in the other group, which had more difficulty in motivating the project due to a lack of reference points in the genre. It took many meetings with certain members to find this guideline which could set the machine in motion. But in spite of the efforts, a certain delay was created and was complicated to catch up.