It's been 6 months since I graduated from university in AUSTRALIA in games development. It's been 8 months since I last did work on the capstone project and yet, I'm still scarred by the experience.
The project saw me team up with 4 other individuals in hopes of creating our very first FUN and PLAYABLE video game. We had 8 months of development time to conceptualise and produce our idea. There were great moments but there were also downright trashy moments too, and it really shattered everyone's morale. Every aspect of development was unorganised and chaotic, but it was a learning experience. Hopefully, I'll go into more detail about this chapter of my tertiary education another time but for now let's continue. The 'finished' product was far from polished and I know personally it was a terrible game. To even call it a game was an overstatement. It just wasn't fun.
The team then decided to continue working on the game after we had all graduated. The only problem was...we didn't. I'm sure everyone was burnt out from the 8 months of stress and wanted some downtime to relax. This went on for a very long time until I proposed a new direction for the development of the game with an old teammate. We had sketched some ideas and worked on some concepts but ultimately, still no signs of actual work. Fast forward a few months and here I am, in the same position but with a different person. This person was a great friend from high school and we were both looking to improve our own skills and to build something fun so we decided to tackle this head on.
Instead of developing something new, I suggested we'd take the original game I had worked on and rework it into something entirely new. We agreed and we proceeded. We wrote down all the new additions and reworks we wanted the game to have and also set up a repository to keep track of our project files.
I think this time might be it. I think we can make this crappy turn based strategy game into something enjoyable and something we'd be proud to tell people we worked on.
Be sure to follow to keep updated on the development of this rework. I'll be sure to write in more detail about the game in the future.