Invasion Cute Design Document
Project Description
Invasion cute was an the idea I went with in one of my classes. We had to design a game. My initial idea was to have stuffed animal aliens invade the world and turn everything cute. The player would be playing the aliens. This got changes quite a bit over the course of the project. The turning things cute stayed the same but the plot line changed a lot. The next class I took was called Game World Design. This class we had to take the games we previously designed and pitch them. The professor would then narrow it down to half of the original and we would create a game treatment document and pitch again. After the second pitch he would choose one for the entire class to work on. There were only 11 students in the class so this was possible. My game was the one that my professor decided to make. Invasion Cute is a 2D platformer children's game. This is the design document we created over a course of several weeks. Since the original idea was my game I became the team leader. I had been team leader several times before but this class did not work out so well. We were suppose to create a short demo as well as a full design document. The lack of a demo shows how well that went.
The first problem was the group size. Eleven people is a funny number. It is too big to be one group but too small to be split. Also, the skill set was lacking. There was not enough variety and many people did not do close to their share of work. The next problem was time. There was no way to ever meet outside of class. Everyone's schedules clashed. The only time we had was during class time and there was not class time to work on the project. The next major problem was maturity. My game was about being cute and turning things cute. It was a kids game with no violence and no death. I am one of three girls in the program and the only one with a game that could be considered "girly." The rest of the team was not happy that my professor choose my game for them all to work on. They hated it so much the did not give a full effort. This made it hard to get work done because no one wanted to do it. The last problem was my fault. I would give them tasks to do and send them on their way. I would never check these tasks and I assumed they were done. In graduate school I thought people did not act like they were in middle school. I was wrong, I should have managed them better and checked that what I told them to do was done without taking their word for it. This was something I learned at a great cost but I will be sure to check things the next time I have to lead a team.