General help with project structure and planning

Hi everyone,

I've been tasked with planning and building a new project from scratch with the help of a talented team. I have some part time programmers at my disposal as well as a full time client developer and server-side developer.

The game has a fairly large scale and a very short time to build it (7 months). I can briefly describe that it will be in 2D (for Android/IOS Platforms) and contain the following:
Downloadable content
Assetbundles
Achievements
Daily rewards/quests
In app purchases
Loot
Crafting
Market
Character Customisation
Inventory
Online profile and player storage

We're going with gamesparks to store player profiles, asset bundles and general player data.

Anyone got any general advice on what to do/ what to avoid ? I want to be able to plan it in a way that gives me room to add / subtract features / content dynamically.


Thanks

 

I'll start with "Good Luck".

It definitely sounds possible with a team of engineers. Without more details, I'd say you should have a basic vertical slice of the entire product, going through all of the systems you just mentioned within 2-3 months, and that's cutting it close. You'll need the last 2-3 months for polish, testing, and bug fixing. You really have to be careful with your scope. The systems you mention can be built, but what about the content that is going to be available? How many achievements/rewards/quests? Characters? Items in the inventory? What will be crafted? How many combinations of those? What content is downloadable? How long will all that take to author? Even if it's intended as an asset, you'll still need a reasonable amount of content to prove that it actually works.

 

Thanks! I'll be needing it.

There will be character customisation in the form of a male and female, with cosmetics for each in the form of clothing / faces / hair.

The scope unfortunately is out of my hands, and judging from the prototype, is doable if we cut our path to the basic vertical slice as cleanly as possible (coding only the necessities and building for scalability).

Achievements / Daily rewards and quests : 50~
Inventory items : 75~
You can craft other crafting materials or cosmetics for character.
Downloadable content will come in the form of new content updates(using same code, just different visuals, such as environment/ characters)

The art i'm told will be created in time and coming up to the final date.

The last thing really, and probably one of the most difficult things i can't really get my head around at the moment is building some sort of tool for the designers to be able to update the games content and add things like items/crafting/market items without a client update. If i use cloud code on gamesparks, i can sort of see how i can dynamically add content and have the player receive it on their end the next time they boot up. Am i thinking about this part the right way?

 

So, this sounds scary. The content should be ready and locked 2 months prior to release, if not earlier. That doesn't mean that the content is final. It just means that they actually exist as files and metadata, and the artists can polish the assets in the last few months before release.

Um, sounds good to me? Definitely not my specialty, but it sounds like something you can do as initial tests. Best thing to do is evaluate these solutions, and then present those solutions to your client. Because there will be pros and cons to each solution. Best if your specialist engineers can do the evaluation of this. This would probably a good topic to start on its own.

 

This sounds like a great idea. I'll be sure to put it into test and try and get some feedback here asap.

The artists tell me they don't really want to work on the same repository, basically have two repos: one for art assets and one for code / client. I guess i can retrieve their work easily anyway, and implement into client, but is this a good idea?

 

Hard to say. Ideally, you'd have a configuration management (CM) team that manages builds of your game, but that sounds like a lot of infrastructure that you don't have the luxury of. One of those things where you have to weigh between up front cost vs. slower process throughout the entire dev cycle. What a build would be is all your code and assets that's actually executable at any time during development. Ramble ramble, right? What I mean by this is, usually, your art assets go through processes like exporting to the proper directory in the Assets tree such that it's game-ready. This process can be automated. Which means, all of your data can be automatically built. With an autobuild solution in place, you can easily point this autobuilder to look at the art repo, and build it to your local machine. Or, you can even set it up to make full automatic builds of the entire game. Again, this sounds like a lot of infrastructure that you don't have the luxury to build, so you'll have to compromise one way or another. If I were in charge, yeah, I'd have separate repos, and build some Python scripts to build/copy art assets to the right paths for my local build.

 

You're right about a lack of luxury in this project. It is fairly lean and we'll have to cut the fat as we go along, avoiding big infrastructure that could add unnecessary complexity although i've never really heard of this method, i'll definitely keep it in mind and research it further to see whether it is any possibility down the line.

This sounds like a fantastic idea and simple to boot. Thanks for all your help, your advice has been awesome.

 

Hi again Knickerbocker,
It’s great to see you actively discussing GameSparks in these forums. If you’d like accurate answers with a faster response time, you can always visit our forum pages or take advantage of our ticketing system, where a completely dedicated and highly trained technical team are ready and waiting for your questions.
The GameSparks forum consists of a highly active community and is always looking to help new and/or struggling users and can be located here: https://support.gamesparks.net/discussions/forums/1000077208
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Look forward to hearing from you.
Best Regards Patrick.