1. Kitchen Sink
A game with great art and a brilliant concept: an entity trapped within a computer desperately coerces players via a game-show to keep its servers running, meant to critique the vapid nature of modern marketing and the ills of corporatism in art. Unfortunately the scope needed to be reduced so drastically that the final experience lost all of its engagement. This was in part due to poor leadership; While the game started with 10 developers, it ended up with only a handful.
Lessons Learned: How to better lead a fledgling project.
• Scope: Work with what you've got, match your vision to your resources. To ensure you always gain something from every project, work with an end goal in mind that isn’t “complete the game" (i.e. Learn and practice good code architecture, or develop a perfect game design document).
• Leadership: It is far easier to have someone join your project than to retain them. A high turnover rate is unsurprising given that people are contributing unpaid time and effort in order to realize your vision. The following strategies help combat this. Foster a community, it is important that they enjoy working on the project. To make the project theirs, include them in the creative process (Best case: come up with the concept as a group). Give them an incentive to work on the project (portfolio piece or train them). Let them know how much work it is going to be, but present it as a challenge rather than an obstacle. Slowly increment their responsibilities, but be initially severe in ensuring they are being upheld and don't regress. I used these lessons to grow the Negotiation Mini-game dev. team from 2 to 6.
2. Spring Carnival Booth Game
Our CoCo themed booth came first place in Carnegie Mellon's Spring Carnival Booth competition, with us winning full points in the game category. In 48 hours, we designed a game where players would use a repainted hero guitar controller to take down goons while chasing Ernesto de la Cruz. Sounds awesome right?
Lesson Learned: We didn't take a single photo. Document your work. Click for Github Repo Proof of Victory
How it felt when we won
How it felt when I learned we didn't document anything
3. Sakana
VR fishing experience meant to instill a state of tranquility within players. Nothing wrong with it, just not impressive enough. Was the programmer and level designer.
4. HackCMU
Lesson Learned: It turns out, you ARE allowed to use libraries in Hackathons. Click for Github Repo