Medium, meet Tinkertainment!
Hi, my name is Mario Rodriguez. I am the Producer at Tinkertainment, a team of 18 graduate student game developers at the SMU Guildhall. In the coming weeks, we will begin posting blogs written directly by our developers. We want to give our followers an inside look at our some of the development methodologies, thoughts and fun activities we had during the production of our (and Guildhall’s) first VR game, Mouse Playhouse. So without further ado, here’s an introduction to our team, Tinkertainment.
Our team breakdown was 6 level designers, 5 artists, 4 programmers, 1 game designer, 1 usability producer and 1 producer.
Each discipline included one lead. This person was in charge of approving assets and made sure that each developer followed their specific pipelines while maintaining the vision of the game as approved by the game designer.
Each developer is in their second year at the Guildhall. Therefore, we have each gained insightful experience in game development. As part of the first year at Guildhall, we have all developed mobile tablet games and a networked-multiplayer Capture the Flag, First Person Shooter. For our last year, we are creating our biggest game yet. No restrictions means it is up to us to create any type of game we desire. After much thought, we came up with Mouse Playhouse.
For Mouse Playhouse, we followed a more traditional game development cycle. This includes going through pre-production, production and post-production phases. From June to early-August, we developed several prototypes as part of our pre-production cycle. Each prototype was presented in front of the whole cohort and a panel of professors that gave us feedback on how to improve for the next milestone. This process repeated until the end of our summer term. After a 3 week summer break, we came back to develop our third and final prototype to further solidify our idea for the game. After Prototype 3, we transitioned into the production phase. This is when we have milestones such as Proof of Concept Technology, Proof of Concept Gameplay and 1st Playable. At Guildhall, these milestones are accelerated and only take anywhere between 1–3 weeks.
We completed the production phase on December 12, 2017 and cannot wait to release the game soon. As with all video games, good things come to those who wait but we promise not to make you wait too long before we show you more on Mouse Playhouse.
Until next time, keep on tinkering!
