A Mad Journey Minigolf: The beginnings

Hi there!

I am Ulises, lead programmer and design assistant of CBS. I’m going to talk you about the first steps we made in our game “A Mad Journey Minigolf”.

We began having some meetings between all the team members related to design (well, we are a small company, so everyone took part). And we decided how we want the game, at first it had 4 characters and 3 worlds, each one with 8 minigolf circuits, we realized soon that this work load was going to be too much for our first work.

We sketched each level, detailing how it was going to be played, and here we made our first errors:

1. On one side, we did not define any ambient for the levels and this meant we had not any reusable element, also we left all this work to the 3D artist, who also had to model the characters, skin them and make their animations (and we have only one 3D/2D artist!)

You see differents ambients? No reusable elements

2. On the other side, we did not make any PROTOTYPE to test it… Instead of that, we made all the circuits with high resolution textures, all the scenary placed in the scenes, well, the levels were beautiful and then we realized every change we would want to make was going to be very expensive, and we needed to make lots of changes because some of the ideas were not so good when we played and tested them.

Instead of trying gameplay with a prototype of this level and the playable elements (Crazy Flowers here), we made the high quality version and when we played the level, we would have liked to make some more changes than we could do.

So for the first 10 levels we had 10 differents ambients, 10 different gameplay elements such as Bouncy Mushrooms, sweet sticky Honey or Crazy Flowers that spin and spin, but we had no Classic Minigolf gamestyle, almost no corners, almost no technichal shots. Ok, the game was more or less funny, but it lacked something.

We tried an organization change, we decided not to just think in scrum terms but apply adapted scrum to us, and it worked much much better, but that will be another post!

See you Space Cowboy!

ulo