I think I’m most likely going to spend most of this talking about what went wrong, rather than what went right. I think in general it’s most productive to focus on what went wrong in the case of a project that was ultimately unsuccessful, as it is respectively to focus on the positives of a good project. Our end result is that our team was cut, and while I don’t want to undervalue what we did do right during this process, there’s a lot more to be learned from the parts that need to be improved.

I think our biggest shortcoming is that we started with a vision of a game, not a game. While that can work in some cases, and I believe has worked for the sorts of games whose styles we set out to imitate, we didn’t have the time required to really spend the time coming up with the game that fit the vision, and the iterative process that we did have time for didn’t give us the time to really build a game that used all of its pieces together to fit that vision.

We didn’t design the powers themselves to work together. The style of work that our timeline (and the curriculum) promotes is having a deliverable very early, which meant we had to have the powers implemented before we really had time to sit down and figure out what they should be. This meant that our mentality wasn’t to make powers that worked together, it was to make powers that worked at all. Synergies between them were frankly something of an afterthought in their actual inception, despite the fact that synergy was a major part of our philosophy for the game. Scoping them down and focusing exclusively on the synergies for the entire semester would have I think been the way to improve the core game experience. Rather than building all those upgrades, we could have specifically built in and polished interactions between the powers. The consensus we came to afterwards is that we regardless of synergy, we should have only had one upgrade per power, each polished and perfected to death.

Another thing we did, which, while guided by good intentions ended up bringing us down, was too much planning. The structures that we put in place would have made sense on a game with a lot more people, and a lot more time. Our level pipeline took us almost a month to finalize, and while it did in fact allow us to create our levels very quickly, the net time gained did not offset the process of experimenting with what pipeline we needed. We ended up settling on something that worked very well for us and the process as it stood, but focusing on our end goal, the exact level we needed to showcase to pass the game, and the pipeline needed for that would have been a much better priority given the time that we had. We did all get the chance to work with Unreal level streaming though, which is quite a valuable feature to be familiar with.

Our story, oddly enough, followed a similar track. We spent a great deal of time working out the basis of what had already happened, the grand scheming and politics that led to the downfall of this glorious empire, and almost none of that made it into the game. Again, it’s the sort of work that would have made a lot of sense with an entire narrative team working for a year, but not for a 10 minute game slice with 1 narrative designer. The focus was not the deliverable, and thus the deliverable only showed a tiny piece. We later did try to use the lack of information to our advantage, building intrigue and mystery by withholding it, and while it did work to an extent, we never showed off the parts of the narrative that made us excited.

Frog Snatchers is an excellent example of a game that did the opposite of what we did, and was very successful as a result. The focus of their narrative is that it’s fun to experience, not cohesive and part of a larger story. Every little conversation is exciting to find, and while they don’t really link together in any particularly meaningful way, the appeal is clear, and it’s gotten people excited to see more, or to work on it in my case. Our narrative was background heavy, and no one saw the vast majority of that work. Building a cohesive world and narrative like that was a good experience though, as I learned a lot, and I hope to give Frog Snatchers a little more glue while still keeping what makes it fun.

As far as literally building the levels themselves, I had a lot to learn, as I’d never really done this sort of level design where I create documents for someone else to work off of. I had trouble knowing what information to include, and unfortunately erred on the side of less. The fact that I never put scale on my documents meant that Kai just sort of had to guess, which resulted in a lot of very cramped spaces and oddly placed rooms. Each room made some amount of sense within its own context, but fitting them together was much more of a struggle than it should have been, especially since our pipeline was designed to mitigate that.

One thing that made all of us so confident early on in the process was just how well our team worked together. Our meetings were very productive, we voiced concerns and disputes reasonably, and generally just all got along very well. There was a certain point where that began to break down. Initially, there were so many things to be decided that everyone was giving input on everything, which was genuinely a great way to get consensus across all parts of the game. When there started to be a majority of decisions that didn’t require people’s input to go through, we stopped meeting every week, and people started making those decisions on their own. We trusted a little too much in how cohesive things had been before, not entirely understanding that that cohesion had come from us meeting so frequently and having those opportunities to engage. We did bring it back together (mostly when Kel called us on it), and we sort of realized that what made this game work was communication, and our shared vision of it. The parts of the game that work best are something of a testament to that.

And the parts that work really do work. We made a fantastically immersive space. The rooms layouts, the visuals and the sounds really got people feeling like they were in this building. The enemies are interesting in that parts of them worked so well, and other parts were some of our worst weaknesses. Coming together to make combat mechanics work, and fixing enemy visuals and behavior, was an excellent showcase of our collaboration in generating something that, while not perfect, fulfilled its function and helped us find what was working about them. And a lot of the powers are legitimately fun to use. Different people focused on different ones, and while there was a bit of bloat, there were some real excellent things to be found in there, like using Crash to get onto a balcony, or Anchoring objects to kill an enemy. Better planning on what those were, and sustained communication, really could have made this into the game we wanted it to be.

But I’m a little glad it didn’t. Working on this game was an incredibly helpful and educational experience, but oddly enough, it’s made me realize that it’s not at all what I want out of this. I don’t want to make a gigantic immersive experiential game where the player can do anything and the only limit is their imagination. That scares me. Maybe years down the line when I feel comfortable juggling that many variables I’d try it again, but I’ve realized I’m much happier just working on something small. It’s not as important to me to make a game that’s new. I just want to make a game that’s fun. I think Empirical might’ve been that with better planning, but by the end it was an overextended project with too many pieces to juggle to make any of them work how they needed to.

The first game that I made at Champlain was a cute, dinky little platformer, where you hopped around and stabbed little toys as a wooden soldier. I only got to spend one night building levels, teaching the player to jump and to attack. It was genuinely the most I’ve enjoyed working on a game since getting here. It was simple, I completely understood all the variables involved, and people super enjoyed playing it. I want my work to feel like that again, like something that I own, something simple, that doesn’t make me feel like I’m scrambling just to make it work at all. Leaving Empirical feels like waking up from a dream, like I’ve thought of myself as this person who can work on five things at once and still have them come out making sense. I’m gonna go to Frog Snatchers, I’m gonna make them some kickass platforming levels, and I’m gonna make people care about their characters goddamit. Maybe someday I can be the designer this game would have needed, but now I’ve got an empirical basis for what I want to and can do right now, and I can’t thank this game enough for that.