Market Mayhem

Market Mayhem is an online multiplayer hide-and-seek game, with innovative maps and abilities. Market Mayhem is currently in development by Spartasoft Studio for the fall 2023 semester, to release in Dec. 2023

Spartasoft Studio, Est. 2022, is a game studio student organization at Michigan State University. Spartasoft Studio takes applications prior to each semester, splits the group into discipline teams, and develops a game over the course of a semester. Spartasoft Studio consistently has 60-80 members.

I transitioned into the role of Technical Producer at Spartasoft Studio from my previous position as the Programming Director. As a Technical Producer my primary responsibilities involve overseeing programming and QA, managing project builds and setup, scheduling events and meetings, crafting project timelines with milestones, and collaborating closely with our Content Producer, Mikayla Miklasz, to ensure the continuous progress of our projects.

At the beginning of my role as technical producer in May 2023, I identified obstacles we will face for our fall project. Spartasoft Studio lost a lot of talent and leadership from the graduating class, and likewise we would have added delays with onboarding and getting new leadership comfortable. Additionally, our production time in the fall semester is shrunk from holidays, breaks, and events.

With these setbacks accounted for, I knew we needed to start early. The leadership of Spartasoft Studio made prototypes in the summer to give us a massive head-start by proving a game concept before development. This process consisted of three 2-week segments in which we brainstormed, voted, and developed a prototype in two 1-week sprints. At the end of the three prototypes we picked our favorite: Market Mayhem!

I did gameplay and systems programming for all three prototypes. The most impressive of which being Market Mayhem. I learned and implemented Photon PUN2 into our project, a networking extension for unity. 

At the beginning of my role as technical producer in May 2023, I identified obstacles we will face for our fall project. Spartasoft Studio lost a lot of talent and leadership from the graduating class, and likewise we would have added delays with onboarding and getting new leadership comfortable. Additionally, our production time in the fall semester is shrunk from holidays, breaks, and events.

With these setbacks accounted for, I knew we needed to start early. The leadership of Spartasoft Studio made prototypes in the summer to give us a massive head-start by proving a game concept before development. This process consisted of three 2-week segments in which we brainstormed, voted, and developed a prototype in two 1-week sprints. At the end of the three prototypes we picked our favorite: Market Mayhem!

Developing a networked game is an exceptional challenge, and we knew that Networking had to be tackled first. I made sure that our first milestone was focused on getting our networking framework setup by the end of the first milestone in four weeks.

During the timeline adjustment, I had realized I overlooked MSU's break days, which reduced our development time from 12 to 10 weeks. At the end of our second cycle, we would only have four weeks remaining. We broke these down into two, 2-week cycles. After assessing our timeline, the content producer and I adjusted our development goals for the end of the semester to hit an alpha version of the game rather than a ready to release game. It was around this time that we also introduced the idea of continuing our game for another 12 weeks to leadership.

Our third cycle, also extended upon our second. We pushed to get art implemented into design whiteboxxed levels and to fix some of our networking/gameplay systems. During this time, we were also taking merch orders and running playtests. Our playtesters played on their own time and gave us their feedback which was a critical success.

To finish up our semester and development timeline, our last cycle was two weeks long, to fix or implement as many things as possible. Some notable areas include our games UI, systems and interactions, tweaking our levels, and audio implementation. During this cycle, merch, presentations, launch party, and the trailer were being worked on by myself and the content producer.

Outcomes

Overall, this project started development slow, but as time went on we were able to ramp up our progress. To summarize the most notable areas:

• UI. UI had a slow start. Without much of a game in the beginning and one brand-new designer allocated to UI, it wasn't touched much until after the second milestone. To solve this, Spartasoft Studio's new structure allows us allocate developers to areas as needed. In the future, developers will not be allocated to UI until it is worth it.
• Audio. Our audio team was small and inexperienced, it was expected that they would fall short of our goals. Our crucial soundtracks made it into the game, and roughly 25-33% of SFX were made, 10% implemented. To solve this, I am networking to connect and recruit more sound artists at MSU.
• Network programming. The framework for connecting players took the first half of development to develop. The rest of development was slow and not well communicated. To solve this, the programming team is stressing communication for the future, and we will allocate the most experienced programmers onto our most crucial features.
• Player programming. The player programming team did an exceptional job, and were near finished at the end of the first milestone. As a result, they didn't have pressing tasks later in the project. With Spartasoft Studio's new structure, we can allocate these programmers to work on different areas so that they still have work.
• Environment Art. The environment art team is a great case of steady and consistent development, always on schedule.
• Animations. We had one animator, which was not enough for our project. To solve this, Spartasoft Studio will allocate more artists onto animation as needed.

Unfortunately, we were unable to get the framework ready by the end of the first milestone. This caused a domino effect of delaying our networked mechanics. Networked features could not be properly developed until our framework is complete, so this became our top priority. I knew that we needed to adjust our timeline to ensure that we can continue steady progress. Our next development cycle had a 2 week timeline with the primary goal of completing goals that were not in the last dev cycle, and to get a functional first playable.

Our online director meetings give leadership an hour to correspond about development. We do quick stand-ups for each discipline, ask questions, and go over production notes. As producer, it is my responsibility to facilitate discussion and address concerns in changes that may impact our scope.

Our general meetings consist of a welcome presentation to showcase our updates on development, discipline meetings, pod meetings, and a directors huddle afterwards. Pods are interdisciplinary groups that are working on similar assets such as our UI. Artists, designers, programmers, and sound artists working on UI all meet together during pod meetings to stand-up and ask questions.

Spartasoft Studio has had a QA team for two prior projects, and it was underwhelming. Our QA members didn't have much to contribute to the project until later into the project to playtest. Spartasoft Studio's goal for QA is to onboard and teach underclassmen that didn't get accepted onto one of our main teams. We want to start building a strong community from the ground up, and start to get Spartasoft Studio's future leaders involved early. But most importantly, we wanted to teach our new members to make games to give them an experience to apply to future Spartasoft Studio projects.

What better way is there to teach students how to make games, than by making games? I split the QA team of 16 into four teams of four to develop a prototype of a game concept they designed. The prototypes were then pitched to the entire studio with the goal of one of them being picked for future development. The following images are slides from all four QA game pitches.

My responsibilities for the QA team were to create meeting plans, milestones, keep attendance, and provide them with the tools they need to create a successful prototype.  I led the QA team to successfully create four game prototypes, one of which will be fully developed by Spartasoft Studio in January. 

This summer, game developer clubs from University of Michigan and Eastern Michigan University reached out to us to form the Michigan Student Game Developers' Coalition (MSGDC). MSGDC is a joint-effort organization to get our groups to the GDC Play conference in San Francisco. MSGDC consists of Spartasoft Studio (MSU), WolverineSoft (UoM), and the Game Developers' Guild (EMU).

In order to make our dreams come true, we need to collect thousands of dollars in funding. Each club in MSGDC is required to raise a third of the total cost of the trip and pool it. To do this, all of MSGDC researched and documented funding and scholarship options for each organization's respective Universities. MSGDC created a sponsorship pitch brochure containing our mission following with each organization's individual summary. Finally, the brochure ends with proposed sponsorship tiers that would grant sponsors different benefits. 

MSGDC had agreed to raise certain amounts of funding by set dates in order to track fund progress. It was agreed to do this so that our different clubs had realistic expectations of what we funds we are capable of raising.

Unfortunately, Spartasoft Studio was unable to reach our first funding goal. This results from prioritizing our attention to the success of our members and game. I, on behalf of the leadership of Spartasoft Studio, decided to pull out of the GDC Play trip in November. It had turned out that the rest of MSGDC missed fundraising marks, and the trip was cancelled.

This does not mark the end for MSGDC. I will represent Spartasoft Studio in monthly meetings with MSGDC to discuss future events and plans, and to share our successes and failures to wish the other organizations the best. MSGDC plans to revive the GDC Play trip plans for 2025.

Every semester, the faculty involved in Games and Interactive Media at MSU hold a public showcase to showcase the achievements of classes and projects from that semester. This semester, we were given the opportunity to showcase our accomplishments to the program. I, along with my fellow content producer, went on stage to talk over the slides shown below.

At the end of our development period, we hosted a post-mortem in our presentation at our group meeting to summarize our thoughts from leadership. All Team Directors and Producers identified the strengths and weaknesses of their team to share with the rest of the studio.

After the finals week and the official pre-alpha release of Market Mayhem, I onboarded our new leaders and lead a meeting to summarize our successes and areas that need work. 

The project is still in development, but I have already learned a lot from this project's development.

First, I learned that our summer prototyping was an absolute success. As soon as we started our club, we hit the ground running with development. I'm glad our QA team is prototyping and we will be able to have this head-start again in the spring.

Next, I've learned how difficult of a challenge it is to implement networking into a project of our scale. One of the setbacks was a lack of research on my end at the beginning of the project- I didn't know what Unity extension to use. It's one thing for me to whip up a prototype that's networked in a few days. But to get a studio quality game networked and implemented and able to sustain plenty of users at a time is another thing.

I've learned that our timeline is incredibly important. I created our first milestone too close to our meeting time, and wasn't able to give it the thought it deserved. As a result the expectations for teams varied, our most important features had fair expectations but our not-so-important features had little to no expectations. Team Directors had to come up with tasks without an overall plan. For the next project I will put higher importance on creating a consistent timeline.

Spartasoft studio struggles with inter-disciplinary communication. Needs and updates don't always make their way to the people who need to know, and the introduction of project manager positions is meant to solve this. I will be meeting with the project managers and the content producer separately from studio meetings and leadership meeting, to stay up to date on the workings of the projects.

The content producer and I were meant to meet weekly to address progress. This slowly fell apart, and stopped meeting regularly and communicated asynchronously. This led to us not always being on the same page and possibly have communicated different information. To solve this, I will be meeting with them regularly this next semester.