Postmortem on a Student Project

Gamasutra continues to expand their coverage of student game design programs, with a postmortem on the student project Insignia. A group of six students spent most of a year working on an RPG/RTS hybrid using the d20 license from Wizards of the Coast. From the entertaining writeup: "The process of pitching our idea was highly informative and gave us an industry perspective, insight and positive feedback from the judges. The pressure of competition also helped really focus the team's efforts rather than the more nebulous approach of most student projects."

Comments

Lessons Learned!

[rewinn]

From The Article: > It would have been easy to get lost in the development process and let production slip away from us if we hadn't addressed our priorities at the very beginning and throughout the academic year. So for every production decision we made, we asked 'is this going to get us higher marks at the end of the year?' and if the answer to that question was 'no' then we didn't focus on it.

It sounds like the learned the most important lesson in any large project!

> We ran into institutional barriers within the University, with the IT department loathe to install certain software and vehemently opposed to giving us access rights to install it ourselves. We often found that they did a bad job and did not test the software they installed, leaving us to wait for a week or two before they would come down and try to fix the problems.

And ... the second most important lesson too!

Re:I think you left out a goal.

[brkello]

umm, maybe they didn't have to state the obvious.

Re:Nebulous eh?

[Surt]

Most of what makes 'game industry' games good, when they are good, are the massive amounts of content that go into them. And there's no way to get around having a team of 50 people sitting around for 2 or 3 years making content.

Re:So they failed...

[Surt]

The industry isn't lacking creativity at all. The publishers are. There are literally hundreds of cool minigames sitting around at dev houses gathering dust for 2 reasons:

1) neither the dev house management nor the publisher will risk their reputation publishing an unpolished game.
2) the publishers won't risk their money funding the polish on a new game design.

Re:Nebulous eh?

[Surt]

This is somewhat true. The problem is that for most people, games like loderunner and tetris get boring quickly. Once you've played through once, what else is there to do? That's where big project games differ: playing through the once is a long process with a lot of content. The mainstream gameplayer just doesn't enjoy these simple games anymore, they mostly seem to want to play a story. That's why WOW is a huge success at $25 to buy plus $10/month, while tons of freely available downloadable innovative indie games are not.