Postmortem

Bizarre Plunger Crusade Postmortem: 

Bizarre Plunger Crusade (BPC) was developed by me and 3 others over the course of about a 3-month period. This was the first original game that any of us had worked on, meaning we completely developed it from conception to completion. I acted as the game’s director, producer, lead programmer, and lead designer, given how small our team was we all had to wear many different hats. The rest of the team consisted of mainly 3D and texture artists, although they did have other responsibilities as well. BPC was made with Unreal Engine 4 (UE4) which helped speed up our development with a lot of its out-of-the-box tools.

Early on while we were still pitching ideas for what to make, the idea was that we would all kind of do everything. I proposed the idea that we focus on our strengths, and I think this led to the final product being as polished as it is. Development went rather smoothly with only some minor hiccups. The team was new to using version control, which was not only a best practice, but was absolutely a necessity do to the fact we were all working remotely because of the Covid-19 pandemic. I took it upon myself to teach the team about version control, and I am glad that I did. At about the 5 week mark, something had happened and the project was no longer launchable, and most of the files went missing. Luckily there was a commit just a few days prior, so there wasn’t to much work lost. What had happened was a team member had some issues uploading their commit and ended up overwriting some key folders the engine needed to boot as well as some asset folders. While not a lot of work was lost, it did set us back by about a day.

As producer, I made it a point to meet with the team multiple time throughout the week to check on progress. We adopted an agile workflow but given we were newer to game development I wanted to give us time to talk to each other for team building as well as troubleshoot any issues as we were working throughout the week. 2 out of the 3 other team members consistently showed up while 1 of those 2 never missed a meeting. The 3^rd rarely made any team meetings which led to design changes down the road, more on that later.

In addition to being a greener team, most of the team was unfamiliar with agile and scrum. The first few meetings had a significant amount of time teaching the team this style of development. In the end I felt confident that the team could keep track of their own progress and set their own sprint speed based on the tasks they needed to complete. However, once in full production, the majority of our meetings started off with us updating our scrum board and spreadsheets. After the 2^nd week of this, I started scheduling that time into the meetings, extending them by about 30 min and just taking on the responsibility of fully managing our scrum and documents. I thought that since we were all “department heads” the team would take on the leadership responsibilities, however I ended up managing the whole project, which in retrospect makes sense, as I was the producer and the team was small.

Our original design for BPC had the player taking control of a plumber called to a house in the middle of the night to deal with a leaky facet. After fixing the facet the house’s lights would go out, revealing that somewhere a toilet was possessed. Being the good-natured plumber you are, your job was to unclog it and exercise the demon. The game’s mechanics consisted of mainly searching the house for keys while triggering events in a specific order, thus revealing more keys. At first we had 6 rooms planned, a kitchen, Dining/Livingroom, 2 bedrooms and 2 bathrooms. However, we had to cut the kitchen bringing our rooms down to 5. This was because one team member consistently failed to meet deliverables and show up to team meetings. Circumstances aside, I recognized this pattern and at about the 7-week mark made the choice to cut the kitchen portion of the game. We did talk about redistributing that team member’s tasks to the rest of the team, but the quality of our project would have suffered due to the added workload. So, to keep a polished game, we cut the whole room. Luckily the game was designed in a way that moving some of the kitchen events to other rooms, didn’t require much effort or re-designing. However, this could have led to some design oversights like not including an exit application option, and some more details with letting the player know what to do.

One issue I kept running into while developing was this weird bug, that unfortunately, I couldn’t find any info about online. At some point, the ray trace would just stop recognizing a collision sphere, and even restarting the computer wouldn’t fix this issue. What made it ever weirder was that if I just ctrl+c, ctrl+v the actor, the new actor would register the collision. This may have been how I was setting up the series of events for the keys. Originally the keys would be invisible with their collision turned off until a trigger turned them back on. This was changing several things at runtime, that may have caused the bug and even for it to persist in the editor. I was overthinking the process. Once I realized this, I kept all the keys visible and collision turned on, but when the level started at frame 1 of the level loading, I saved their locations and then moved them under the map. When it came time for the player to find them, they would move back to their starting position thus eliminating the need to turn their collision and visibility off and on at runtime. A much simpler solution.

One of the biggest achievements for the project, in my opinion, was the inclusion of voice acting and subtitles. It’s something I’m really proud of that we managed to include, and it really adds a lot to the experience. Granted, I don’t think the game would work without it, it’s still a personal highlight of the game.

The game was completed in 2021, however it wasn’t released until 2023. This was because I wanted to add in all the things we ended up cutting. And as I worked on it more and more, I fell to feature creep. As I would build the kitchen out, I would go, “oh wouldn’t It be cool to let the player eat the food in the fridge.” Or “what if after going into one of the rooms, when they leave there is an endless hallway that closes in on you.” I eventually realized at this rate the game would never be “finished” since I was always adding to it. So, I decided to go back to the version we completed in 2021, fix a few bugs, and release that one.

BPC was my first original game that I worked on and I’m very proud of what we accomplished in such a short amount of time for such a novice team.