What happened over the break and what that means for the team
How remote work is going and how it has impacted the game
State of the game at the end of Production milestone
So it turns out that I had misunderstood some of the details about these blogs, so a few planned entries dedicated to project updates have been removed in favor of a broader range of topics.
As you can already tell, this post will be about how me and the rest of the team have been handling the switch to remote work after getting out of Montreal. But before I can talk about that, a quick recap is in order:
Toward the end of our spring break, things in China were getting worse and cases started to pop up all over the world. The main campus was to be closed after an extra week of break and the staff were trying to figure out what to do with those abroad. Were also got a break extension, and my family were talking about me coming home - which I did not want to do, because the time difference would very likely wreak havoc with the work pace of the project.
A few days later we were informed that the study abroad programs were terminated and we had to go home as soon as we could.
Time difference it is then.
Don't get me wrong - being home with my family is great, but the 6-hour difference I have with my team means that if I was to work on the project in the morning, it would be the middle of the night for them and I won't hear back from them about anything until at least 2-3pm. This was mostly fine during the first few weeks, which I spent on rebuilding the game's combat system on a separate branch, so I did not have to touch anything that might be worked on by another team member. Additionally, and this is still somewhat true to this day, there are only 2-4 people who are touching the project in any regular way. All 3 of our artists are busy working on the game's art, which has been the main thing dragging behind schedule and the third programmer is partially waiting for them and having technical issues at the same time.
The biggest thing that is bothering me about remote work is that our producer's less-than-ideal attitude and organisational skills have resulted in a severe drop in communication within the team. We had some spotty meeting attendances in the past, but it's on a whole other level now - to the point where we don't really even have meetings anymore, but people just drop a few lines in Discord on how they are doing and what they are working on and that's it - meeting's over. This week, we had our Alpha due, and while the core of the game -combat system, movement, AI and levels - has been pretty mush finished, there wasn't a lot of art in the game, specifically the characters were still not in. Given that fact, we (and by that I mean mostly me) are reorienting our priorities somewhat: since I am all but finished with my primary and secondary tasks, I will be taking over VFX for the game - so the artist can focus on the characters, animations and whatever else they still have left to do - as well as trying to fix some of the leftover bugs that have the biggest impact on the game.
Despite the fact that we are still lagging behind, only 2 people and the producer showed up to a meeting yesterday, where I presented what I had done with the VFX and the tutorial level. As far as I am aware, no explanation was provided, or asked for by our producer, who has all but stopped being proactive about checking in on the team.
I want stress the fact that, with the exception of textures and characters, the game is as close to being complete as I can get it to be, so short of bullying people into crunching to get their work done, there is nothing that I can do.