This project had a lot shorter development time the one I worked on last for the last GGC (It was called GGA back then). 9 Weeks all in all, which might sound like a lot on the paper, but it really isn't when you're working on it.
It started of as a digital project but we quickly realized that if we wanted the game to be as good as we wanted it to be we would have to stop wasting time on wrestling with software and make a boardgame so that we could focus all our time on perfecting the mechanics.
Carnage's high concept: Carnage is the name of an incredibly dangerous spectator sport in our setting that takes place in the near future. The players will all play the part the part of participants in this race.
Our project's vison is as follows:
Reward: To develop a a tolerance working under serious time constraints
Ability: To learn how to be able to respect and hold important deadlines.
Challenge: To develop and present Carnage as a highly polished and well balanced game in time for GGC.
Strategy: Rather than work through a very rigid development plan we decided that everyone takes responsibility for their own work, put their head down and get stuff done ASAP. That will give us time to tackle eventual problems that might come our way.
My role in Carnage's development was as producer and factotum. In addition to working on the presentations we had to make my my main job was to make sure that we had a nice booth during the exhibition. This meant that I had to search high and low for a good variety of items that would bring the booth to life and fit with the gritty feel of Carnage we decided that it would be best if it could be made to look like a scrapyard.
So I got some old car seats and had them be made into chairs for the visitors (these were highly appreciated) and set us up with some warning cones and a huge rusty barrel for the decor. The end result was aesthetically pleasing without being to much of a distraction.
In regards to the booth I'd also like to mention that the walls of our booth was made out of Abzolium's from last year.
I talk about that a bit in this blog post.
Looking back I am very pleased with the project as a whole. We managed to reach out to people we wanted to on a personal level and on a professional level we got a lot of people interested in our game. I've been hearing nice things said about the game on podcasts and it's even been mentioned on Game-journalism sites such as Loading.se!
I touched upon that subject lightly during my last post
I've been working with producing before I started studying at Gotland University as I majored in drama during high school and helped producing plays there. I also worked as a producer last year when my group created Priates VS Royalists for the GGA convention. If there is something I've learned during my work with Carnage it is stress management. It looked bleak for us several times during development but we put our heads down and pulled through.
My work leaves few physical traces (no code snippets or art features for instance) but my work can be seen throughout the project in things like the presentations and the inventory for our booth for instance. The rest was purely administrative work.
The best practice for me was undoubtedly working with the printers other and companies and developing my people skills. We managed to get a lot of material for free, as I touched upon here.
I would recommend future game students to work on their communication as it can make or break any project. It helps if you're in a small group but even then there can be trouble if you don't work closely together. We did just that and I attribute much of our success to it.
