Time flies when you’re having fun! It feels as though UCSC’s Winter Quarter has barely begun, yet GDA’s Mock Studio is already through Sprints 1 & 2 of our development cycle.
Happy New Year—and welcome back!
Here’s a quick review of Dev Log 0 in case you missed it:
In Fall quarter, GDA voted on which game out of 17 member-made game pitches we wanted to spend the rest of the year developing. All of our pitchers produced incredible work and we commend them for their passion and efforts! In the end, GDA settled on a cozy, spooky multiplayer roguelike about two young witches attempting to cure their sick cat. Its title? Well Witches.
The Well Witches team communicates through a dedicated Discord server that’s already garnered more than 200 members since the game won. Using Discord, GitHub, Unity, Google Drive, and our in-person meetings, our team spent the last two sprints—three weeks—getting this game off the ground.
I’m here to talk about how.
SPRINTS 1 & 2: Getting Started
I mentioned the term ‘sprint’ just a bit ago—what’s a sprint?
We use agile development methodology, which is an iterative, incremental series of production cycles called “sprints” that are focused on adaptability and communication. Each sprint is loosely composed of a planning phase, a design & development phase, a test phase, and a deployment phase. Practically speaking, we run through a new set of tasks every sprint.
GDA kicked off our first sprint of Well Witches development early in the new year with a meeting that we call the ‘Developmental Overview.’ We conducted this meeting virtually to milk the benefits of one of our favorite Zoom tools: breakout rooms! Within these, our five studio departments—art, design, programming, sound, and writing—each held high-level conversations hosted by their respective producers about what they wanted to get done over the next few months.
We answered a lot of preliminary questions at this meeting. What were Programming’s top priorities for getting the Unity project up and running? Where did Writing want to start its journey of fleshing out our lovely witches’ lore?
“I, for one, am still waiting for a name—”
Hush.
“Why do I have to hush when I’m one of the main characters? I’m one of the most important beings here!”
And I’m saying that the narrative isn’t ready for you, [Warden]. It’s like you said—you don’t even have a name yet.
… Oh, oh now they’re upset with me. Wow. Anyway…
Each of our departments took a top-down approach and organized their priorities by sprint in a master spreadsheet of our game goals.
Apart from figuring out our rough production timeline, the Dev Overview also served to help familiarize all of our devs with Well Witches beyond what we learned about the game from the initial slide deck. “Everyone’s sort of getting acquainted with the game [at the overview]—all we had to work with was a pitch, but now we’re making design docs; having brainstorms. It’s a lot of settling into what will hopefully become routine,” says Mock Studio Coordinator Ivy Dudzik.
The Dev Overview was critical to giving the mock studio team a collective idea of how to start building this game out of nothing—and began to clarify the kind of communication that we’d require to execute it.
The following week was also spent brainstorming.
“You guys yap a lot.”
… I apologize for [Warden]’s abrupt interruptions. They’ve yet to find their place in all this, you know what I mean?
At this second meeting, GDA held a design-based “Whiteboarding Session” that served to help our dev team flesh out the game pillars of Well Witches. In groups, we discussed fundamental topics like our core loop, the controls, and more. All of our members worked on adding depth to the content that our lovely game leads Madison Li and Lily Chen initially pitched.
In comparison to the Dev Overview, the Whiteboarding Session was focused less on what needed to be done by when and more on deciding specifically what content would make up the game.
We thought long and hard about what we knew of Well Witches and identified immediate problems we needed to address—would this map be a set space or procedurally generated? How would our witches collect the materials they needed to heal their sick cat, Hex? What sorts of NPCs would fit the game’s style? How would the witches engage in combat?
Through those discussions, we compiled our thoughts into design docs that now serve as references for all our tasks and further conversations.
“I’m really excited for how this is turning out,” Design Producer Grace Herman states. “I think that the ideas we’re coming up with… they seem really fun and we really are going outside [of the original pitch] as well.”
All told, two whole weeks were spent on brainstorming and clarification from the initial pitch. A quarter at UCSC is 10 weeks long, and GDA gets two quarters to ship a full game. Why spend so much valuable time on pure conversation?
“Design kinda has to move first before every other department,” Design Producer Robin Medina says. This department in particular kind of serves as a bottleneck for everyone else—they have to put the first foot forward. “Getting everyone together on [the whiteboarding session] not only allowed us to come up with a lot of ideas at once but also kind of let everyone in on the design process a bit.”
Having an indelibly strong core idea of our game written into referenceable style guides and design docs is crucial to GDA’s framework as a volunteer-based dev team.
“The hardest part is just staying updated with every single department and what they’re doing,” Game Lead Lily Chen shares. “Sometimes I’ll have slightly outdated information because I’ll not have realized that, like, the Writing department has changed something, but Design doesn’t know that, and I didn’t know that, but it’s on their docs and I didn’t proactively check it fast enough.”
With the fast-paced nature of development, our initial resources need to be clear-cut from the get go to smooth out our massive team’s communication and also to help onboard anyone who wants to join the development team at any point in the process.
Time is Mock Studio’s currency, and these preliminary meetings are some of our greatest investments.
With our style guides in place, GDA’s dev team dove deep into Sprint 1 to assemble a series of quick, dirty iterations.
Art and writing were focused on exploring concepts and developing style guides for both our visuals and storytelling. Design honed in on the core loop and finalized the design docs the dev team created at the whiteboarding meeting. Programming began development on the boilerplate of Well Witches alongside its crucial systems and prototypes. Sound focused on research and developing a reference library and an asset list for the game’s sound effects and music. Our lovely sound producer Jade Sells even began racking out demos for certain tracks, like our boss theme!
Sprint 1’s overarching goal was to generate ideas, and that came with its ups and downs.
Across the board, returning GDA members seem to agree that we’re making much quicker, more streamlined progress than ever before. “There’s more [advancement] than expected,” Madison remarks.
“Just going into the art channels and just seeing, like, 50 different designs… I’m like ‘whoa,’” says Lily.
On the flipside, keeping everyone on the same page with all the different kinds of work that occur in tandem is regularly GDA’s greatest challenge.
“We’ve had, like, a hundred developers at each meeting so far,” Ivy reports. It’s incredible to see the amount of passion in the room at every meeting, but every member is another mind to keep up to date with things—and a different understanding of Well Witches. Effectively communicating our different concepts of this massive project so that we’re operating under the same creative direction is a difficult practice.
GDA’s commitment to being an open space for any experience level to get their hands on studio work also means regularly devoting time to familiarizing our members with our production pipeline.
“It’s tricky to get people to work together, especially if they’re new to [this kind of] workflow,” art producer Mike McInnes reports.
It’s our pride and pleasure to onboard people who are new to game dev—in fact, that’s largely what GDA exists for. The act of weaving all interested GDA members into Well Witches is a task that officers and producers manage on top of building the game itself though, and this causes some unique production challenges that ask us to slow down the development train just enough for everyone to hop onto it.
There are more acute communication challenges as well that we’re having to navigate as well—little problems here and there that we can’t have foreseen prior to production.
“I was under the impression that people would send their [assets] into the Discord forums we set up,” art producer Brooke Taylor says, presenting one of such communication challenges. “But some have only been posting things into the feedback channels. So sometimes there’s stuff in the forums, sometimes in the feedback channels—it’s a bit redundant to have both things, so we’re thinking of condensing them into one space to post your work.” These little optimizations to our systems are constantly occurring as we make our way through Mock Studio.
At a lower level, “Mock Studio” as a concept is less a standing studio and more of a structure of information from which we raise a studio every year. “We… [annually] recreate the studio on a foundation of, like, institutional memory through the club,” Ivy says, “but it’s like… I wasn’t Mock Studio Coordinator last year, you know. Our production team is entirely different, our members are largely different. I think that’s both the hardest part and the coolest part. We make it our own every year.”
This year doesn’t look like last year, and last year doesn’t look like the year before that. The games we make and the team that makes them are constantly evolving, but one thing remains constant—our love for the craft.
Every day, GDA’s chipping away at the sculpture that’s beginning to take the shape of Well Witches. The team looks forward to updating you again on our progress soon. Till next time, gamers!
Well Wishes,
Well Witches