Overview: Play as a masked cultist tasked with infiltrating the temples of an opposing force to restore the full power of your deity. Using your fists and divine abilities overcome the intense challenges that lie ahead in this dark Rogue-lite Beat ‘em up.’
vESSYL WILL BE SHOWCASED AT THE nEW yORK sTATE pAVILLION AT gdc! cOME VIEW OUR PRESENTATION ON tHURSDAY THE 20TH AT 2:00!
Vessyl is Coming Calamity Studio's MS Capstone Project
Timeline:
August 2024-May 2025.
Team Size:
5 Core members, 3 external members
Tools used:
Unreal Engine 5, Jira, Perforce, Miro, Dailybot, Ticket Tool Bot
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My work:
As Coming Calamity Studio's Producer, Art Director, and Marketing Lead, I have worked tirelessly to organize, delegate, and create processes to ensure the success of our team and our product. This has included the conducting of sprint planning, retrospectives, playtest reviews, internal and external pitches, 1-on-1's, and general process guidance and creation throughout the project.
Our team communicated both in person and asynchronously, primarily using DailyBot on Discord for daily standups, general updates, and blocker reports. Jira was our main task management tool, with Discord used for review discussions of our under-review Jira tickets. We also kept individual ‘progress channels’ for each core team member. All of these together allowed for the team to have a dynamic and up to date understanding of every aspect of the project being worked on, with an emphasis on that open communication.
During retrospectives and playtest reviews we made any necessary shifts in our processes and sprint focus, using Miro to discuss, categorize, and review. The action items from each retrospective served as our primary process goals for the upcoming sprint. Sprint planning meetings occurred every two weeks, the length of our sprints, and helped us know what is rolling over from the previous sprint, and where we should expect to be at the end of the upcoming one.
We are operating on a point-of-contact system, with each subteam having a designated individual to stay up to date on the subteam’s progress and be able to speak on its state and answer questions about their topic.
We handled big changes with internal pitches. Subteams or individuals would meet and prepare a formal pitch to share with the rest of the team, involving their research, reasoning, and supporting documents, allowing the team to have a shared understanding of an idea before discussing its inclusion. It also ensured that ideas proposed weren’t half-baked, and had some support behind them.
For our version control, we used Perforce. We would start out by syncing to the depot and grabbing the latest state of the project. We would the work on files, saving them locally and checking them out so that they couldn’t be altered by others in the meantime. Then we would push and sync of files to the depot before opening our tickets in our review system.
