Pre-production devlog
This is the post mortem log of the pre-production stage of development; marking our first milestone of development. To provide information regarding the development of Bludgeons & Flagons, the team of WILDBORNE GAMES is working with agile methodologies and utilizing the tools of Atlassian. Our team subsequently heavily uses software such as: Jira, confluence, slack, etc.; as the whole team has a professional disposition towards the success and development of our project and we're passionate about our game getting in the hands of players as soon as possible.
Our pre-production process as a team started with each member coming up with a possible project idea, then as a team we picked the two strongest sounding ideas. And then we went off and prepared pitches for both of these ideas and presented them internally; then we voted on which pitch we wanted to move forward with and greenlight development. After this, our pre-production officially started and we begun our first Kanban sprint. For clarification, the team at WILDBORNE GAMES uses the Atlassian tool of Jira to sort out our tasks as a team. We utilize the method of Kanban and track our work using two week sprints intervals. These sprints are structured via millstones of development, for example the end of pre-production marks a milestone, then the end of main development of the game marks another milestone, etc.
Due to the fact that the team WILDBORNE GAMES is split between individuals from Leamington and Glasgow, we preform weekly checkup calls between both half of the team. These calls help establish what the current working agenda is for each team member (guided by Jira tasks) and limits the hold of potential miscommunication. As miscommunication can be a major disadvantage to indie teams such as us, we aim to limit this risk as much as possible and take necessary steps to avoid it where possible. The team behind the moniker WILDBORNE GAMES takes potential risks to the project seriously and such we aim for a streamlined development process.
To delve deeper into our pre-production processes. The software known as MIRO became a big piece of how we approached with handling idea generation and mind mapping features. MIRO is a software that allows multiple members of a team collaborate in a shared virtual space and subsequently work on ideas together at the same time. MIRO allows the team to quickly and effectively share ideas and to keep the rest of the team informed on the status of JIRA tasks via visual information and resources; such as screenshots of work in progress pieces of work.
Now that the pre-production milestone of development is complete for Bludgeons & Flagons is officially complete, the team can move onto working towards the production milestone of the project. This will last four weeks in total, which is the equivalent of two Jira sprints. This phase of development is where the majority of work on the project will commence. The artists residing at WILDBORNE games will start on finishing orographic sketches and move onto modeling their proposed characters, which will soon enough ready be imported to the project so players can try out these well designed fighters. The programmers will work on building up the core programming of the UE project file and start designing gameplay mechanics, that players will be able to engage with intuitively and of course have a rewarding fighting game experience.
Development logs such as this will be posted to our Itch as soon as we complete a milestone in our development (Pre-production complete =, production complete, etc.) or if the team at WILDBORNE games has something else important to share with players, such as a theoretical pivot in game direction that would better fit within our project scope.
'Brawling to win bragging rights'