Mr. Alpaca Games
(Jun 2015 - Feb 2018)
Due to the nature of indie games, most of us in Mr. Alpaca had to take on more than one role. I myself had to take 4 different roles.
Here I talk a bit about everything that I did:
Game Designer
I designed one of the minigames from scratch. This minigame was part of the “King of the Hill” game mode. I had to come up with a mechanic that worked within the constraints of the basic controls and the game mode.
I also worked designing other minigames alongside the other designers.
Finally, I helped with the balancing and making final UX polish for other minigames.
Level designed by me
Programmer
My first task as a programmer was working on the controls of the player characters of the first iteration of the game.
Later, in the second iteration I implemented the minigame I designed. Also, I helped with the UI and some gameplay polish of other minigames.
First iteration of the game
Concept Artist
I created the concept art for many icons and gameplay-related elements in the game.
Another part of the game I made concepts for were the gods. These ended up barely being present in the game, still they can be seen in the world map as statues.
Though a lot of content was cut from the game, it is still possible to see the concepts in my instagram account.
Concept for 2 of the gods
QA
As a QA I worked with two other team members testing the game at the end of the week. We kept track of all the issues we found in the game, from visual and design issues to bugs and missing features.
We also did tests with users. We performed these in our houses with acquaintances, on the university campus and on a couple of conventions. These tests were made mostly to test the players opinion of the game rather than searching for bugs or other issues.
User tests perform during the SOFA convention in Bogota
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This was the first time any of us had worked, not only in games but at all, meaning that we committed a lot of mistakes along the way. Thankfully, the fact that we were working on an almost 0 dollar budget meant none of the issues we faced had serious consequences but did teach us a lot, and also meant that we could take all the time we felt was necessary. We leant how to organize our time and what not to do when planning as well. We had to learn how to work in a team as developers but also as artists and as designers. At the end we managed to finish the game and even though it didn’t end as well as we wished for, we made it against all odds.
A piece of learning that we got and didn't expect was that we all had to fill multiple roles simultaneously. In my case I had to “wear” the hats of a Game Designer, Concept Artist, Developer and QA. This is something I think not enough people are aware of in indie development, even when you have a relatively big team as we had (we were 10 people). Thanks to this I could learn about the struggles each discipline has to overcome and what you can do to make the most out of their work.
The main issues we faced were lack of planning skills and very few available hours for development. About planning, basically we were unaware of the importance of setting deadlines to have a healthy workflow (red flag #1), we would rarely have a suggested period of time to finish a feature or asset. After struggling with the consequences of this I learned to always set a deadline for features. I also learned that it is ok to start planning only a minimal playable prototype but with a set date, and if said date it’s not achieved just re-plan it by using the new information.
The other big issue was the fact that most of us were in the middle of the university for most of the development of the game. This meant we had to maintain flexibility so people could prioritize their education, so we never set a minimum amount of work per week, be it objectives or expected work time. However because of this people often would stop working altogether for weeks or even months without telling anyone else and no one had any authority to tell them to work. This problem was a bit more complicated to fix as no one was being paid meaning no one could demand anything of anyone else, we were only working on good will. First, we should have set an agreement that the whole team should have enforced on one another a minimum of hours to work per week. Also, we should have named someone as a producer to check if we were following the schedule and if there was any problem, talk to the team members to help work on the feature.
One thing I am infinitely grateful about my time in Mr Alpaca was the change it gave me to design a whole minigame by myself and also work alongside the other designers in the other minigames. Working in my own game forced me to see what kind of game loop I should strive for in a short game. I had to make sure the mechanics I was designing fit well with the game controls and obviously I had to constantly check if the game was fun. When working with the other designers in the minigames that had input from us all, I was able to learn how did they made something fun, this allowed me to increase the tools possible for me to make better games.Aslo, it force us to check egos and accept when an idea was good even if it wasn’t our idea.
My time in Mr Alpaca was both some of the most challenging but also most rewarding in my life. Especially by the end of the development, we face a lot of problems but I wouldn't change the experience for anything else.
