Root Cause
I made another game! This was the monthly project for March, and was a huge success on several counts. My goals were to:
make a game
in Unreal
in a month
with some other folks
And I managed to do all of those things.
Firstly, I worked with some great people. In the order that I recruited them onto this endeavour: Cassandra Greye did the fantastic concept art, Aly Stuart and Graham Godfrey modeled everything that looks good (all other models were mine), and Hunter Bos (of Theseus fame) did all the audio. I thoroughly enjoyed working with them all.
The game we made is called Root Cause. It features you as the lone crewmember on a ramshackle airship adrift in the sky, trying to hold everything together until you reach your destination.
Imagine a first person Overcooked, except instead of cooking food you’re repairing engines. The twist on the design is that the airship systems are interrelated, so if your engine isn’t working your might need to fix the engine but it might be some upstream component that is broken.
There are many things that went well on this project. I managed to spend some time tweaking and tuning the gameplay balance to make it more fun than the random parameters I chose at the beginning. In the past I struggle to get to that point in game jam type projects out of a mixture of time pressure and anxiety about having to make a thing fun, so I’m happy about at least poking at it this time around. My goal for next time is to get it playable in time to do playtesting with other people.
This was also my first experience with Unreal Engine. Coming from a Unity background it is still very strange, but I have enough of a grasp on it to make some stuff now. More importantly, I have a long list of questions to ask and systems to dive into that I did not have before fumbling my way through this project. In particular I’m curious about how to strike a balance between working in Blueprints vs working in C++, especially when collaboration is involved. Much more to explore in future projects.
I also managed to fit this game into exactly a month, and since it was 3D there was a much longer pipeline to wrangle into that time than on previous projects. Almost everyone on the team comes from the Animation Capstone so we all have some production experience in common, although we’ve never worked on a game together. This helped us get going quickly in some ways, although it also pushed us towards a process that works well for a year long film project and less well for a short game project. We will certainly all speed up with more experience, but I think that there are more significant process changes that can speed us up enough to to get something with textures or animation or more elaborate lighting done on this timeline. Some of that is organizational, some of it is tooling, and some of it is likely a third obvious thing that hasn’t occurred to me yet.
On the organizational note, this was also the first project I have done in a long time in which I had some kind of supervisory role over artists, at least in terms of giving feedback and greenlighting work. This has opened up whole new worlds of skills that I am not yet good at. I have newfound respect for the challenges that all of my previous supervisors have been up against, and I also had a whole lot of fun doing it. While I was giving plenty of feedback on concept art I will likely never be the most talented concept artist in any room, and it’s a fascinating challenge to figure out how I can be most helpful in enabling artists to do their thing with the skills I do have.
Overall, great experience and great success. My project for April is to sleep a little bit more and take some time to recharge. After that, I’ll probably do another something like this. We shall see.