Luis P. Melgar
(502) 4645--0480
Ninja Go - Android Game (Unity)
My role in a 2 person team
Ninja Go is a game that came together with the collaboration of 3 people. One was in charge of the art side, one was in charge of the technical side and a third helped with the music. I was the art guy, but we shared the role of designer between 2 of us (Art and Programming) which made up the main team. Some of the things I was in charge of were:
​
-
Game Design
-
Concept Art
-
Characters
-
Environment
-
Lighting
-
Shaders and Materials
-
UI/UX
​
Collaborating during a pandemic
Even though the concept of Ninja Go came to be before the pandemic hit, the actual start of production began during it. This meant no more in-person meetings and doing everything digitally. Thankfully, it wasn't a big hurdle since both my partner and I had already grown accustomed to working from home for our main jobs (Ninja Go was made during our free time). We did however organize ourselves accordingly in order to be productive and advance with our tasks accordingly. So how did we do this? Well, we did several things:
​
-
Set up weekly scrums to go over design and talk about the work for the week
-
Use a task manager to help organize our work (We used Meister Task for this)
-
Set up a repository where we would each branch out depending on our tasks in order to keep things organized in our builds
-
Set milestones where we would merge our work and test the build to find any bugs or errors
Working this way helped us out a lot. Especially if we had to step away for a bit due to work from our main jobs (Which always took priority), because we could come back and check where we left off and continue working on what was needed. But the key thing during the whole development was communication. We made sure to always let each other know if anything came up and schedule meetings if we felt it was needed in order to get something fixed. If we wouldn't have had good communication, it would have been a mess.
Compromise for the good of the game
As with any creative project, people are going to have different opinions on what things should be done and how they should be made as well. When you are working on a 2 person team, it can be tough to make design decisions when you each have opposing ideas. Thankfully we both had enough confidence in each other to express our ideas, explain our reasoning behind them and listen to what the other person had to say as well. While it wasn't always easy, we always thought about what was best for the game and found a way to compromise in a way that would make the game better. One example of this was regarding the game's difficulty. While one person felt that automating the whole system would work best in order for things to feel more unpredictable and random, another wanted to have more control over how things would change at varying levels. Two completely different approaches. So after going over our reasoning for each method, we ended up with something that was a mixture of both. While I won't go into details of how the system exactly works, I will say that we set defined stats for enemies that would spawn based on difficulty level. The difficulty would be changed based on the player's skill which would, in turn, decide what enemies to spawn. This system came due to two different ideas melding together.
Difficulty Charts
These charts show how we defined the enemies' stats and the possible randomization that could occur with each increase in difficulty.
Final thoughts
Ninja Go was a good learning experience overall. I learned new ways to organize myself and how to work with others on a build. I learned more about repositories and how these can help not only in keeping backups of previous builds but also help organize your work, ESPECIALLY when working on a game with someone else. I learned to let go as well (Previous work was either a solo project or freelance work) focusing only on my tasks and trusting that the other person would do their tasks in the same way. And I have a better appreciation of how ideas can change, evolve and iterate when working with others, turning into things that you might not have come up with on your own.
In the end, I feel we made something fun and reminiscent of older mobile games that weren't too convoluted and focused more on creating a fun experience for your phone.
