Summer Blog: Bears With Guns

Over the summer, I took part in an Open Development class. This class was an Advanced Seminar where 15 students were allowed to work on anything that they wanted for the Summer. Some students worked on DND campaigns. Some students worked on writing projects. Other students, including me, formed teams and worked on making full prototypes by the end of the summer.

During class, we all put our ideas down on a Jamboard, and everyone got to choose what they wanted to work on. My idea was a game called Bears With Guns. The idea was simple, bears are trying to steal honey from a giant bee hive. However, these aren’t regular bears, they have GUNS.

I found a group of people that wanted to work on the game, and we got to work immediately… or at least, we hoped to. We had a couple initial problems. First, among this class of 15 people, there was only 1 artist. This artist was not on our team. Second, there were 8 games being worked on and my team had 7 people. This meant that everybody on the team except for our sound designer and myself were working on other games. While they were reluctant to leave, we decided as a team to let our producer, who was working on 4 other games, leave the team so that he wouldn’t stretch himself too thin.

At this point, we were a team with 4 designers (a level designer, a UI designer, a sound designer, and a systems/narrative designer) and 2 programmers. I contacted an artist that I had worked with during Production 2 and got her to join the team, but the lack of a producer was still evident. I had worked with other designers on a team twice before this, but never had I worked with this many designers, and never have I been the lead designer. In addition to being the lead designer, systems designer, and narrative designer, I also had to be the producer. This gave me another problem to solve: scheduling meetings. I had no previous experience being a producer, and the very concept of making a meeting agenda, sticking to it, and making sure everyone else sticks to it foreign to me. However, this wasn’t the main issue. The main issue was that I had a teammate living in Scotland, and the rest of my teammates lived across America. I was working with time zones ranging from PDT to GMT. If that wasn’t enough, I also had to consider that it was the Summer and people have jobs and other commitments on top of the other games that they’re working on.

Upon opening google calendar and discussing meetings with my team, I found out that we had some extreme schedule conflicts. One of the other designers had to work all morning until the mid-afternoon everyday except Wednesday, and another designer worked from mid-afternoon to late at night 5 days a week. This left me a very small window to work with, and in addition to what everyone else’s schedule looked like, I realized that full team meetings just weren’t realistic. What I did instead was schedule 5-6 meetings a week, all of which I went to. These meetings included Sprint Planning on either Friday or Monday (class met on Thursday, so that was also when our 2-week sprints ended), a designer meeting in the early afternoon on Wednesday that would also include our artist, who was in Scotland, as frequently as possible, a meeting that night to let the programmers know what we discussed during the designer meeting, a work meeting on Thursday, and a meeting with our artist on Saturday or Sunday to get her caught up on what was discussed that week and discuss what we need from her, since she couldn’t attend many of the other meetings.

After figuring out our meetings, we got to work and mostly did well. Obviously not having any experience as a producer made some of the meetings a little rough, but we made it work. Bears With Guns turned into a couch co-op twin stick/stealth shooter. I wasn’t able to get all of the narrative aspects into the game that I wished I had, as the narrative had to take a backseat so we could refine the gameplay loop and weapon/enemy balance, but I’m still happy with the final product. You can download Bears With Guns using the link below!