I never knew you could halt the spread of Communism with a charcoal grill.

I've just put the second game I've published on my page. It's not the second-ever game I've made, mind you; it's probably more like my fourth or fifth so far. Like several other games I've made recently, this was made for a project in my game development course over a 2-week period with a randomly-assigned team of five people.

Warhamburger: Veggietide (yes, I know it's incredibly creative) was developed in the Unity 2018 engine by myself, Alex Weisenbach, Carl Maulfair, Nick Smith, and Min Park. In it, you play as a charcoal grill-based "mecha" robot that is responsible for defending a caricature of a McCarthy-ist "All-American" neighborhood against an invasion by giant communist vegetables. The subject and theming were a response to the writing prompt "I never knew you could do that with a charcoal grill," taken from the Tumblr blog Writing Prompts That Don't Suck.

One of the issues with randomly assigned teams, especially when the role composition of the course (the number of programmers, writers, artists, audio techs, etc.) isn't regulated, is that you might not always have someone trained in every essential role on your team. Keep in mind that I think this isn't necessarily a bad thing. It makes projects more difficult, but it also forces you to think outside your current skillset and branch out, as well as "walk a day in someone else's shoes" to understand the responsibilities, expectations, and stress of someone else's role on your team.

My team ran into this issue on this project. When we first met, we realized that we were four programmers and a writer. This project was the first one that was assigned in a 3D engine, and none of us really knew how to do 3D art for a game. My teammate Carl and I turned out to have the most experience in it (we'd both taken the same incredibly basic and wholly unhelpful Art for Interactive Media class the semester before) and so we volunteered to take on the task of doing art, in addition to our original roles (myself as writer/narrative designer and Carl as a programmer). 

We ran into a lot of issues with modelling (mostly my lack of skill in it), but we adapted by having Carl take over modelling, rigging, and animating while removing his programming duties and leaving me with the responsibility of texturing the models. While we adopted this strategy rather quickly, further snags in the art pipeline and issues with rigging and animation led to an incredibly stressful night of crunching before the project was due, and we still came out of it with several broken or missing animations and a four-day streak with no sleep.

Overall, despite the issues that the game had at its completion and still has today, I'm still proud of the work we put into it, even if the finished product wasn't everything we wanted. I'm happy with the narrative design and theming work I did on it, even though pretty much all of my actual writing (voice lines, etc.) didn't actually end up being finished due to art pipeline issues and re-prioritization. My texturing work, while rather rudimentary (I made all the houses out of metal just because I really liked the way Substance Painter's metal materials looked and functioned), is yet another thing I'm proud of. Even though it's not incredibly polished or exceptional, it was my first time trying to do texturing work for a game, and (having never done 3D art for a real project before) it helped me to really understand the constraints and stresses of team artists, knowledge that I am certainly going to take into consideration when working with artists on future projects.

All in all, even though the game turned out a bit buggy and unpolished, I still consider Warhamburger: Veggietide to be an overall success. Despite the quality of the finished product, the skills and lessons I learned during production will prove invaluable to me in the future as I work on more games.