Alien Bugaloo is a game created by a team of eight developers over the course of four weeks. We started the project assessing everyone’s individual expertise and experience, and created the game concept and expectations based on this assessment. One of the major expectations was an hour requirement of 10 hours per week per person on the project, resulting in 40 hours total, per person, at the end of the 4 weeks. Of the eight developers, there were four level designers, two narrative designers, one programmer, and one audio designer. Based on the high number of level designers, we decided to make a game that had one central “hub” level, with three main levels connected to it, accessible by doorways, like spokes on a wheel. Each level designer picked a level they wanted to work on, while the narrative designers, myself included, would create an overarching narrative connecting the levels together. With the low number of programmers on the team, we decided to work in Unreal Engine 5 so designers could more easily create their own tools, as well as design around the default first person character controller and its base functionality, including walking and jumping.
In terms of what worked well on the project, the team had a good understanding of the division of work. Each team member knew what they were working on, made and completed their own tasks, and took ownership of their individual contributions. Narratively, we as a group decided what the main premise of the game was; An alien accidentally abducted a human (PC) and their keys, and is requiring the human to perform menial tasks to get their keys back. This basic premise, as well as some themes for the individual levels, was decided in our first meeting as a group, and really helped bring everyone together. Finally, the narrative systems and workload that we decided on as narrative designers, was accurately within scope. We had planned out enough task work from the beginning to hit the required 40 hours per person without going over and gave ourselves enough time to properly test and polish our work.
However, that isn’t to say the project went off without a hitch. Far from it. An immediate issue was that not everyone had planned their capacities well. This resulted in a level designer creating an additional level during weeks 2 and 3 that, as a narrative team, we had to go over capacity for. Additionally, there were instances where team members would overwrite other members' work. Sometimes this was accidental, but there was more than one instance where a team member would overwrite someone else’s work intentionally, resulting in broken code, as is what happened with my dialogue system in the third week. Finally, and one of the biggest detriments to our project throughout development, was that we were using GitHub for version control, which doesn’t play nice with Unreal Engine projects, and resulted in many issues including merge conflicts, impossible to read pull requests, and even errors cloning the repository in general.
So, what can be done in future projects? Firstly, capacity. As a producer on other projects, I’ve learned that figuring out and accurately planning out the capacity for resources is something I will improve on with practice. In the case of Alien Bugaloo, establishing an accurate capacity plan early on for all team members would have resulted in the whole team being able to plan around five levels instead of four, which likely would have changed the design of the hub level and the scope of the narrative and audio team. Second, research. The majority of us were familiar with GitHub, which is why we chose to use it as our version control. However, researching what version control to use for a project in Unreal Engine 5 would have helped us discover not to use GitHub and use something like GitLab instead. This would have saved us lots of time and headaches when resolving merge conflicts and creating pull requests. Lastly, communicating with one another to avoid overwriting someone else’s work. As this happened to me personally, several times, often resulting in game breaking bugs that I had to fix, the problem would have been solved, or avoided entirely, with proper communication from team members. I don’t exclude myself in that, either, I most definitely could have communicated better with my team members. This was something that seemed to resolve toward the end of Alien Bugaloo’s development, but would have been incredibly valuable to establish early on.
Overall, I think it’s important to note that this game was a success in that it was completed and you can play it from beginning to end. Many of the issues we ran into during development could have been solved with better research, documentation, and establishing of expectations at the beginning of development. We took the problems we faced and tackled them head-on, overcoming them, but the problems could have been avoided completely had proper care been taken early on. For me and my personal contributions to the project, including a narrative system, dialogue, voice recording, quest objective system, and bug fixing, I thoroughly enjoyed myself and felt that the work I contributed to the project was valuable and a good showcase of how far I have come as a narrative designer.
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