Autopocalypse
Team Size: 6
Development: January 2009-April 2009
Primary Role: Producer
Secondary Role: Designer
Autopocalypse is a racing game, designed primarily to be played multiplayer, designed in TGEA 1.7.1, set in the near future after a devastating war that has claimed most of the surface’s infrastructure. The game features four different vehicles, each with different capabilities. Scattered throughout the racetracks are switches that, when driven, create walls, jumps, and bumps that can create advantageous changes to players that are capable of capitalizing on the changes to the tracks, based on their vehicle’s own strengths and weaknesses. Vehicles vary in speed, turning ability, and weight, which affects how they can handle bumps and their acceleration.
As producer, my primary responsibilities were as followed:
- Communicating to the rest of the group what their overall jobs would be, as well as individual tasks they were assigned to
- Keeping track of the project’s overall progress and constantly comparing it to how much time we have, making executive decisions as were required
- Keeping all group members in contact with each other by acting as an intermediary when necessary
- Organizing group members’ tasks in a visual way that is easy to understand
- Utilizing subversion tools to ensure that group members were on task, aware of what their responsibilities were, up to date on everyone else’s progress, and could share work and test builds of the game at any given point
As a designer, my responsibilities were:
- Placing where the spawned obstacles on the track would appear and creating the placeholder models to test them
- Figuring out how best to balance the vehicles while still making them unique experiences to drive
This was both my first time acting as producer and the largest group I had, at the time, worked on. As such, this was a tremendous learning opportunity for me because the entire situation was one I hadn’t experienced yet. Going into this project we were already pretty certain that we wanted to make a racing game, as the artists and one of the designers in particular was very excited about the prospect of that idea.
What became clear somewhat quickly, however, was that our project was out of scope. It took us longer than we had hoped to get some of the basics of our project working, particularly building the cars and importing them in a way that would work in TGEA, which meant that we were looking at things we would need to cut. When faced with this decision, I had to balance whether to cut the third race track or the multiple vehicles. Since having more than one vehicle was such an integral part of our project’s vision, the choice seemed clear that it would be better to remove the third track and really nail down the first two.
In order to communicate, the group utilized an Unfuddle account supplied by the school that, when coupled with Tortoise SVN, would allow group members to work on separate pieces of the project simultaneously, save their changes to the project, and instantly let other members on different machines to access the new work. In the past, we had used Secure FTP, which, though it gave us a similar foundation as Unfuddle and Tortoise SVN, lacked the same level of organization and ease of communication.
