Setting up the Project
Starting this project back in the first year of my education as a game development student the goal of this project was to get additional experience as a producer and run a full production cycle from concepting to release. Working with students from the BUAS as well as hiring students abroad at other universities (For example our audio and community management departments.). 

Setting up a hierarchy within the team and how work would be communicated back and forth between leads and other team members. Setting up a strong reporting structure since we would all be working remotely and with a very limited amount of hours per week.

Beginning Development
Beginning the concepting phase we looked for USP’s and key defining features for our game, as we settled on souls-like combat in an RPG setting we started to gravitate to creating systems that would make character progression exciting in the form of a substantial amount of player choice and skill requirement in that. A Tetris like minigame to slot your passive bonuses in was one of the results of that.

Progressing further in defining the story of our game I wrote the narrative to in a way to have a comical tone to it, I wanted to create a game that didn’t take itself too seriously while having challenging combat and systems. The different environments and enemies you’d encounter would have to keep challenging the player with new combat mechanics and archetypes, hence I ended up choosing to go with a factions based setup. This way each of the factions would have a certain general type of behavior in combat whilst varying on an individual enemy level.

This came to fruition as we started prototyping our first Sand Chugger enemy (see the concept on the right.), These creatures are heavy and strong and we needed that to be noticed in both their visuals as well as their combat capabilities. My role within this was to provide consistent feedback connecting combat design with the artists to eventually get to a sluggish strong enemy that deals a lot of damage if it does hit the player.

Connecting these variations was a challenging but really enjoyable experience as it allowed me to iterate a multitude of times with designers and artists to get to what I initially envisioned.

Overcoming struggle in Pre-Production
However, due to a lot of the people on the team being students we struggled with members that couldn’t keep their promise on working the five hours a week to consistently push the project forward. This caused people to leave the team and having to recruit and onboard new people, which has to this day slowed down development considerably.

As we had the visuals, systems and, designs nailed down we progressed into pre-production where we used our first tech demo as a proof of concept. This raised team motivation a lot at the time and allowed us to start making content that would reach a presentable state to our audience.

Looking back at the size of our concept and the circumstances with team members leaving due to study priorities we had to rescope and reconcept to be able to complete the project. Re-adjusting our goal to not release on Steam anymore but instead, aim for a Vertical Slice demo where we can show what the intended to be a part of the full experience.

This process required a lot of flexibility and knowledge about the resources that you have left and how you can utilize them best whilst stabilizing the team and raising morale again to look forward once again and continue development.