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Erwann Pottier
Nayad's Project
Genre: Puzzle-game based on narration
Made on Unity for Windows
You play the grand-daughter of the Captain Nemo. His submarine, the Nayad, has been discovered. Go into it and discover its secrets by solving puzzles in a first person
My role in this project
During this project, I had one role that has one main goal: being the Project Leader. I had to do management, planning the schedules, and keeping the link within the team. I had also to check if the game's production didn't have any problems of people being late or of lack of informations.
Design goals
We had 3 guidelines to do this project: do a story-rich game, make this game on Unity. But also having a game that follows the theme "Unknown".
Concept art by Robin COSTET
We had 2 main issues to solve during that project:
- It was our first video game project. This will, of course, lead to multiple problems during the game production that we will see during the post-mortem.
- It was also our first long-term project on Unity. We've done other jams on Unity but nothing that lasts more than a week.
Post-mortem
This project might have been the most challenging for me. I didn't have to care about the level or puzzle design. I had to maintain a cohesive team for 5 months despite going to the unknown. All of us didn't have any experience with the game's production and this lead to multiple strong problems:
1- Lack of QA during the game:
We did really a few playtests during the game's production. We were designing in autarky, which is the worst way to design a game. Also for the bug hunting, it made us notice strong problems way too late during the development. This made me see how important it is to do playtests and how crucial QA can be during game production. This will lead to making me start to get interested in QA.
2- Problems of managements
Again, with our lack of experience, we couldn't play properly the time that could take the creation of assets, levels, puzzles, or scripts. This leads to a huge crunch and being extremely late to our defined milestones. It, of course, leads to a huge lack of polish and quality to the final product.
It was, also, challenging for me to manage. I had to question myself on ways to manage the team. To rethink the quantity of work given to the team-mates but also to myself. And most of all to cut the game's scope to see a smaller but better vision of the game.
3- Lacks of Game Design
Finally, the project was doomed at the very beginning. Because of our lack of practicing game design in real projects, It leads to real problems. We believed some elements could have been relevant in the game and could fit the scope of 5 months of production. But it proved not.
To conclude, this first experience has been, of course, rough. But It might have been one of the most important I've done because It made me learn basics of game production, management and pratical game design.
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