Heya, Xing here.
With the holiday season approaching and the year coming to a close, we wrapped up our three month extended game project: We Are Fantastic Architects: The Were Glitch Project. You can play the demo [here].
It was an awesome project to lead and I’m stoked our friends and family were able to play it at our Demo Party and BBQ. We got some amazing feedback on the demo and were able to apply that to the rest of the game, finishing it up in December alongside Ye Xu, a project by our friend Brian Park.
[WAFA the game is based on a cartoon series pitch Bridget and I made for the Nick Shorts Program initially. While it was rejected, the idea was something we deeply resonated with; a bunch of creatives working and living together, trying to make it out in the world. I pitched it as a game for our fourth project and the rest is history.]
Some retrospective on the game itself; WAFA was the first game that we attempted that had the makings of a traditional, story driven rpg. From our previous projects and learning about how to best utilize our skills and talents, I tried my best to manage the team so that everyone had something to do at all times. It worked out for the most part with the art team (Zori, Nelson, Erin, and I) having enough backgrounds to work on and the design and story team (Bridget, Theo, and I) working together to make sure we knew what we needed from Art.
However with game development being game development, the process took much longer than anticipated. As the project took place over the course of the summer, scheduling everyone was a nightmare. Even trying to find a date that worked with everyone on the team for the BBQ was a hassle, as our studio director Bridget can attest to. We made it work and in a mad scramble in the last two weeks, we (mostly Theo) managed to put together a playable demo and showed it off at our BBQ.
When Fall came, we decided to continue working on WAFA alongside a second project, Ye Xu, an animated music video. It was a challenge to balance two projects at once, especially when our development team is quite small. The work fell on mostly Theo and Bridget’s plates and as for me, as an artist, my time was divided between the two projects.
Working with a musician was an interesting challenge. While it was not Broom Cupboard’s first time hiring a composer, it was my first time communicating extensively with one for the sake of a project. The guy who arranged the pieces you hear in WAFA was Michael Vallejo. He is a chip tune artist from Seattle and his work can be found [here].
In my feedback and direction notes to Michael on the pieces he arranged, I frankensteined together my foggy recollection of music terminology and did the textual approximation of gesturing wildly to indicate something I wanted. Michael still picked up what I meant and delivered exactly what I was asking. Overall, a great guy to work with!
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While the game is only 2/7 of the way done, it is in a place I am pretty happy with. Big ups to Bridget and Theo for taking the project to completion. Now that it’s January 2019, we as a studio are collectively moving on to our next project, Feathers and Teeth, doing animation work for a stageplay!
