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Bill Guschwan
Chicago, Illinois
Welcome, Get Out!
Welcome, Get Out! (https://sim2kid.itch.io/welcome-get-out) is a puzzle game where the cranky narrator really doesn't like you being there. It has 7 different hand-crafted levels with a witty narrator and his sarcastic comments trying to stop you from succeeding. Will you best him? ...learn more
Project status: Published/In Market
Overview / Usage
Welcome, Get Out! was a project made as a capstone at Columbia College Chicago. As such, students are supposed to get a full two semesters to complete their projects. Unfortunately, that didn’t happen for us and we had to finish this project in half the amount of time that other students spent.
Going into the project, we originally had 2 programmers on our team, but due to unexpected circumstances, one had to drop the project leaving us with only one programmer left. Typically this wouldn't be too bad, but with the uniqueness of each level, the work added up quite a bit. Thankfully, we managed to push through that.
Our team’s leader was based in China due to covid kicking everyone off of the campus. As such, we had to adapt new strategies to work with a mismatched time schedule. One such thing we did was make most of our work asynchronous. We didn’t need to spend as much time all together to get stuff done. A second thing we did was point a second in command for when the lead couldn't make it. This happened to work really well for us as a team.
Within our team, we didn’t have all the necessary people to complete the project as well, such as artists as sound designers. As such, we ended up having to reach out to other classmates and friends to help fill in those roles. It was harder to get those parts in since we had a hard time understanding what they needed to complete their work, so there was a lot of back and forth that happened last second.
Methodology / Approach
Everything starts with people, so the first thing we did was figure out how we were going to manage our group dynamic. A solution proposed by our professor, William Guschwan, is to use a Scrum Master to run things when our leader is unavailable. Our team leader was working from China and thus couldn't be continually available to the rest of the group working from the United States, but this method of having a second in command helped get things done.
A second thing we also did was make sure we had a meeting once a week to check our progress and change directions if needed. We would use organization applications like Trello and later GitHub to track what we needed done and make sure someone was assigned it by the end of the meeting. On the side of a leader, it was also important to never go into a meeting without an agenda. Being organized with our tasks and goals is the number one reason why we were able to get this project done in half the time span as our classmates.
When it comes down to technology, our lead programmer (and later, only programmer) laid the framework for the entire project. Everything was built on top of that backbone. Without it, the project would have taken much longer.
One of the things we had to make ourselves is a dialogue tree-like structure for the narrator. We used Unity’s custom asset option to store the data and slowly built up a script that allowed us to access different points of the script. Eventually, the script became more dynamic so that the narrator can respond to events when they happen in whatever order they happened.
Technologies Used
Photoshop
Google Doc
Visual Studio
Unity
Protools
Audacity
Adobe Premium Pro
Trello
GitHub
Repository
https://github.com/sim2kid/Welcome-Get-Out
Other links
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