Project: Outland — Postmortem

Zachary Croslow
Aug 24, 2017 · 3 min read

This is a postmortem on the Audio driven game “Project Outland” which was a project centralized around the audio track given to us. We needed to adhere to the artists design and create a game that both completed their design choice and the accompanying music.

As team lead on this project, it was important to immediately get everyone's roles, duties and responsibilities set and ready from the get go. Our team was larger than the rest and so roles and responsibility were stretched pretty thinly, which led to an unfortunate case of indifference and lack of motivation to complete the project.

Our audio artist pitched the idea of having the player move through a 3d ope world were they could control the flow of music while also being in awe of the shifting colors and projections of flora on an alien world.

We started off well enough, the documentation was settled early on, though some doc’s were left alone for a while before being picked up and worked on. I assigned each of us a specific document to flesh out but in hindsight I should’ve assign it to one person after we had all sat down and gathered ideas. This lack of hindsight ted to team members disregarding their tasks die to a lack of understanding on what the elements of our game actually was.

Once we had the documents down, we enlisted the aid of animation collaborators to create the alien flora assets. We manged to find a taker fairly quickly which was a welcomed change of luck. But shortly after this, 3 additional animators jumped on board to assist our first taker. Although I’m glad that we had such high interest in our game, it was a little worrisome to have so many people working on a single task. But my original animator assured me he’d lead them in the right direction.

I had two programmers assist us with the project but they seemed to be a little resilient and apathetic at first. They had another project that was more of a priority to them then ours and it seemed like having to work on our games was an unwanted burden to them. Never the less, i introduced them to the project and gave them their tasks.

As the weeks went by, it began to be apparent that not a lot of progress was being made. Most of the work now rested on the collaborators delivery and they had all seemed to become silent. After a few attempts at commutation, it seemed that they hadn't even begun working. In hindsight, I should've organised weekly meetups with these groups and ask to be shown progress. I completely understand that other students have other priorities but I still felt let down by the end products they delivered.

Although this project didn't turn out as i had hoped, I’m still pleased with the end result. It doesn't look as visually stunning as I had envisioned but functionality wise it turned out exactly as i had planned. The plants spawn with multiple variants and they animate in a rhythmic pattern. The game was green lit and approved by the audio student so I suppose you could call that a success.


This project has taught me a lot about leadership, trust, organisation and working in such a large team. These are all respectively valuable skills for a designer to have because it sets me up for a greater understanding of commitment, scheduling, communication and responsibility.

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