Fixing Communication and Teamwork Issues
Throughout reflecting on how we’ve been making the game, we realised how easy it is to miscommunicate ideas and cause confusion by only verbally communicating ideas and not having a universal place to explain the gameplay. Our lecturer advised us to use Confluence, which we now use to write down explanations of the game story and current game mechanics so everyone is on the same page. We also utilised the Whiteboard activity on Discord while in team meetings to allow the team to visualise new ideas and collaborate, with team members given the opportunity to ask questions to clarify the proposed plan. After changing our leadership method to motivation-based, tasks were reallocated to different members based on what better suited their motivations and skills. This helped immensely with team motivation and boosted our productivity in making the game.

An issue we were having with Unreal was not having the ability for two people to work on the project at the same time. After researching, we discovered ‘sub-levels’ (a.k.a. a ‘streaming’ level), which we implemented so one person could work on decorating the level, while another could work on implementing game mechanics, without having commitment issues in GitHub.

Programmers were also working in an old prototype level to allow them to test new mechanics and polish existing mechanics to avoid clashing GitHub commitments. Both the sub-levels and working in an old level allowed our team to work more effectively and be more motivated to work, as we weren’t stressing as much about needing to wait for someone to be finished working on the level before doing our own work.