Castan

Available On: Steam Released: May 2022 Role: Producer

Explore an open post-apocalyptic city, delving into buildings and businesses where mutated creatures run rampant, few survivors still operate in reclaimed buildings. Working to pay the mafia will be no easy task, as diving into the dangerous contaminated World to make a profit is a death sentence.

In our original production plan, we had planned to produce two distinct areas, however after scope analysis we realised this was likely outside of our available scope. This scope analysis involved breaking down our high level plan into epics and broad user stories, then utilising story points and our team’s expected sprint velocity to see if it was realistic. This allowed us to rescope the project early, preventing the team ending up in the position where we would have had to abandon a half finished level just before release due to running out of time.

This project underwent several large redesigns, and the initial concept and prototype was actually a 3D platformer where you played as a dog escorting a small child through a similar, overgrown post-apocalyptic world. We decided to pivot away from this after producing a prototype as we found it wasn’t fun, and after fleshing it out more in this time the team were not enthusiastic about the concept. After an internal pitch, the team decided to pivot into what would eventually become Castan, which was a far more ambitious project.

Throughout the project I pushed for both a reduction in scope and increased user testing, but there was resistance to both of these from key members of the team. I believe this directly lead to there being a large number of last minute fixes that were only revealed through extensive playtesting in the final weeks of development. While I had ran small playtesting sessions previously, this was the first significant playtesting that had been done on the project, and revealed bugs, exploits, and problems with environment navigation and user feedback. The primary argument against earlier testing was that testing could not be done without a completed environment, so I believe had should have reduced the size of the environment further, focusing for example on a single block rather than the entire area. This would have allowed us to do significant user testing much earlier in the project with a complete vertical slice, and would have resulted in a much more polished, fun, and generally better game. While this was suggested it was refused as a course of action. It is possible that I could have been clearer with my communication of the idea, and could have placed increased emphasis on its benefits, but I believe I did the best I was able to in the situation. In the end, I decided not to continue to push for this course of action as I could see it would not be adopted, and further insistence would have only deteriorated working relationships. To borrow a phrase, ‘A dead Scrum Master Producer is no use to anybody’.

As well as my usual production duties, I also helped with other tasks where needed - testing mechanics, helping to fix bugs or plan systems, and doing internal and external playtesting and QA passes checking optimisation and general quality. This briefly extended to getting into Substance Painter to add degradation and weathering to the textures for existing assets in order to help them fit our environment better, even if I mostly just wanted an excuse to try out the software.

Overall, this was by far the most ambitious project I have worked on so far, especially in the 6 month time frame. While I am proud of what the team produced and have a lot of praise for them, I do think there are definitely improvements that could have been made to both the game and our development process.