Welcome to DAU! A Gamelab Postmortem

Welcome to DAU! was the game my team and I worked on for Gamelab at FIEA. We developed the game in direct collaboration with members of the Defense Acquisition University in Ft. Belvoir, VA. I was the project lead and sole producer on the 8-person team and it was my first time collaborating with a governmental organization.

Gamelab is a class at FIEA that partners groups of students with non-gaming organizations to use the tools of the game development trade for a different purpose. For DAU, they wanted a new and interactive way to address onboarding. They also wished for this prototype to have open-ended expandability to other departments at DAU for training. It was a project that was brought to us at an interesting time during our graduate education: many students were also busy with their capstone games, as well as being buried under their own class projects. Not to mention the COVID-19 pandemic, which sent us all into remote work.

The project concluded with a warm reception to DAU, and I’m quite proud of all the work the team put in; now that some time has passed, I’ve gotten some perspective on how I could’ve done better. Thus, this is more of a postmortem of my own contributions and how they relate with others.

What Went Right

Overall, I feel I did quite well in my role as project lead. It was my responsibility to ensure responsibilities was clear and communication was flowing. From week one, I was setting up initial meetings for the team to talk ideas, starting conversations with Alicia Sanchez – our Subject Matter Expert – and plugging the team in to Unity and Slack. Level Designers began researching the campus, Artists were working on a mood board and ASG, and programmers began talking about the kind of system and how to implement it following DAU’s original pitch. The conception of the experience – a 3D visual novel styled after 80s Renaissance Disney films – was a idea collectively agreed upon by the entire team.

I also felt I did well in maintaining scope and minimizing risk. Entering the project, I immediately recognized that my team’s other commitments were going to pack their schedules tight. Thus, it was important that I keep the team scoped appropriately. This included the decision to work with a simplistic movement style and environmental aesthetic, and to cut certain features and assets that became more and more risky as the project continued.

Communication with DAU also went well. I was the liaison between the team and Alicia Sanchez, Serious Games Czar at DAU and our point-of-contact. I’d present updates, talk about the project’s progress, and open the floor for a conversation between the entire team and Alicia. When receiving feedback by her, we’d have a dialogue as an entire team for how to implement what DAU needs without compromising scope.

What Went Wrong

One of the biggest mistakes I made as a project lead was not enforcing any sort of documentation for the internal systems of the project. The game itself utilizes a conversation system that is fed in data via a JSON file. None of the systems – including movement, NPC interaction, and conversations had any kind of documentation whatsoever. From the beginning of the project, I felt the project and team itself were small enough not to warrant needing to make an entire Confluence space or even a shared folder on Google Drive.

I learned that having documentation and maintaining it contributes to clear communication for designers and programmers who need to implement these concepts. As a producer, I could’ve done better in creating that documentation and expectations ahead of time, so that there weren’t so many near end-of-project asks and various edge-cases in the code to patch up before ship.

What I Would Change

When I think about what to change, the lack of documentation and guidance on the more granular details from members of the team is something I would’ve done a better job of facilitating from day one, versus later down the road. The team had a shared concept and idea of what we were aiming for and what we wanted, but the lack of foresight into the technical issues (and the documentation that outlined the expectations) ended up causing a few late nights for members of the team that could’ve been mitigated.

I also would’ve pushed for more investigation and understanding into the limitations of WebGL in Unity. While the web player held up quite well for us mostly, we ran into performance issues toward the end of the project that could’ve been mitigated with knowledge of the player and target spec testing.

In the end, the project turned out well. We were met to a warm reception, both at FIEA and DAU. At the project’s conclusion, we presented to senior staff of DAU, including Frank Kelley – Vice President of DAU and Angie Carsten – Director of HR at DAU. Both were included as primary characters in the game. Alicia said the project had “Met her expectations and then gone beyond”. Mr. Kelley proclaimed, “You’ve made the campus look just as we all know it. You’ve made my office look clean, and myself appear 20 years younger!”