6 — Pre-Release and Showcase. Pre-Release — 11/22/19
By: Grace Liu
Tags: Collaboration, Game Development, Game Design, Art, Parents

Closing Thoughts

After a semester’s worth of hard work, I believe the project was a challenging and successful experience. I took upon a more ambitious project than I had intended for in the beginning. Each Channel game asked for the player’s full attention and elicited a unique yet cohesive response. As my first time as a producer, I felt that I overall did a decent job managing not just a team, but 3 teams, while investigating the complex topic of parent-child relationships. I think people were excited to see a game address this theme, especially as an artgame that went off the rails of a standard industry experience. I am excited myself to continue working on merging art and games and creating a special space to allow another perspective of visualizing and commenting on complicated topics.

I realized that to be a good producer you had to constantly look ahead and have consistent communication with your team, otherwise the project (and the team) can easily get lost in the lack of direction. I’m glad to have come to weekly meetings 30 minutes earlier to discuss with GCS officers and other team leads about progress and issues. It kept me on top of things. Although we ended up not using Trello to keep track of tasks, I think having flexibility in individual team schedules, whiteboard visualizations, and in-person checks made up for task management. Some areas I could have improved on was having more interaction among the 3 teams (i.e., having 15 minutes every weekly meeting to do progress checks and ask for help from one another). With everyone being so focused on their own game, we ended up not discussing as much about a cohesive vision for Channel besides the idea of final file integration.

As a team member, I felt accomplished in being able to get artwork on time to my team, but I cannot ignore the fact that it could have been better in terms of quality and schedule. The Door team and I had a creative block in the early stages of production, leaving the narrative to be hastily realized towards the latter checkpoints. This in turn delayed other production work. Nevertheless, I believe it was another invaluable experience, especially since I had to contribute as both a member and an producer.

As an artist, I felt happy to see people genuinely interested in creating an interactive experience that worked to analyze a subject deeper than a traditional industry objective. We all had strong feelings about our parents and thus, experiences and ideas we wanted to express. By pitching Channel to GCS, I was able to provide that specific opportunity to encourage a group of people to discuss and contribute towards a creative work about a sensitive topic. Although Channel had some immersive and artistic lapses that prevented a complete creative illumination for the audience, I still feel proud of my team and myself to have come a long way from bare bones to 3 interactive experiences.

And finally, as a child creating a work about parents, I feel somewhat empowered. I found a small community of people who were interested in the same thing and as a group of children we came together, discussed, and made a work in response to our personal parental experiences and societal instances of parenting. I feel nervous about showing my own parents this work, but I believe it would be an important next step in further my project and my understanding of my relationship with my parents.

To end this neatly, I’d like to thank my fellow team members for joining me on my quest to make Channel possible. I’d like to thank Peter Sheehan for advising me on documentation and other constructive elements. I’d like to thank Professor Golan Levin for introducing me to other creative students and keeping me accountable to my project. I’d like to thank all of those who have played and will play Channel in the future. Without the player, there is no game, and without the parents, there is no child. Thank you parents for making us possible.