An assignment for university where we designed and developed a AAA game using industry standard workflows and software over a 12 week period. Our team consisted of one designer, three audio designers and two artists. A lack of programmers meant I had to dabble into scripting in Unity in order to build our project, as well as acting as Project Lead and Environmental Sound Lead.
Week 1
Week Commencing Monday 17th January
Week 1 began with brainstorming. We made a Miro board and discussed as a group our potential ideas. We knew we wanted to make something that involved minimal movement mechanics, and after tossing around ideas we eventually settled on a game set in the London Underground.
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For the rest of the week, we decided on everyone's roles and began planning a pitch. Defining the roles allowed us to split our estimated backlog into more specific tasks based around the strengths of everyone in the team. This is conducive to the AAA environment because it allows us to keep track of the project regardless of team size and makes sure the work we do is agile and coherent.
I also began getting field recordings of the underground with a portable recorder.
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To aid with early prototyping of the gameplay, I also produced a basic 3D model of the tube.


Week 2
Week Commencing Monday 24th January
Week 2 mainly consisted of preparing and delivering the pitch to stakeholders, but it also marked the beginning of our weekly sprint meetings and the introduction to industry standard software Jira and Confluence. On there, we placed the Game Design Document and created a project backlog. We are using the Scrum methodology, an agile framework with weekly sprints of work.
On our Thursday sprint meeting, we planned out our individual tasks for the first sprint. Our sprints are a week long, and this one consisted of pre-production tasks. The artists were to work on concept art, the audio team on collecting field recordings and writing the script for the announcer voice. We also began prototyping gameplay in VR, placing the player in my placeholder tube model to get the scale correct.
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Week 3
Week Commencing Monday 31st January
Week 3 was spent working on further getting to grips with the Unity setup. We further set up the integration with our Unity project, mapping the controls and working out how we could edit the pre-existing integration to work in the way we wanted it to.

This involved messing around with VR components in Unity and reading through lots of documentation. Luckily, we had allowed time for this in our meetings.
Week 4
Week Commencing Monday 7th February
In Week 4 we began looking at integrating the Universal Rendering Pipeline into Unity to allow for post-processing and more detailed lighting in our game. I originally tested out the high quality render pipeline but found this added a huge amount of time to the baking process of lighting and we had doubts about how the added strain would affect players. This is because lower frame rates can cause discomfort and sometimes sickness in virtual reality. Therefore we stuck with the standard URP in order to make sure the user experience was as smooth as possible.
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In terms of my environmental audio work, I finally managed to get a long, decent audio recording of an empty train. This was very exciting as I could finally compile all the recordings I got, ready to start the development of soundscapes during gameplay. I organised the sounds into folders and got to work.
Week 5
Week Commencing Monday 14th February
Week 5 was a little bit of a curveball in terms of development, as we switched from a HTC Vive headset to an Oculus Quest 2. This meant that we had to rebuild our movement systems again and switch around the rendering system in order to accommodate for the Android-running Oculus.
Thanks to our agile Scrum methodology, we were able to shift around the sprints and work out the best way to respond to this issue without too much of a set back in terms of work.
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Week 6
Week Commencing Monday 21st February
In our Sprint Meeting, we discussed what we wanted to do for the next sprint, as it fell over our reading week. Due to the storm the weekend before that caused disruption for much of the previous sprint, not many of the proposed tasks were completed this week. As project lead, I made the ultimate decision to stick the weekly sprints rather than extend the previous one. Therefore, we created a slightly larger sprint that would take place over the entire end of this week and the next one.
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We were able to do this thanks to our methodology allowing for sprints of varying sizes, and as well as Jira being very flexible in how schedules could be altered to account for roadblocks and unexpected events.
Week 7
Week Commencing Monday 28th February


I spent the reading week taking the audio recordings and beginning to produce them into seamless soundscapes for the game. This involved mixing and matching recordings, pulling parts out that could work as fake-out jumpscares in the game and making a seamless loop that doesn't become repetitive or annoying.
I found some of the sounds were unusable due to clipping or too much background noise of the crowded underground, but had just enough to be able to complete my task in a way that could be adapted through middleware without feeling too repetitive.
Week 8
Week Commencing Monday 7th March
Week 8 was a huge step-up in terms of productivity towards the game. During a meeting on Monday, we reviewed the Jira board graphs and discovered that we were running somewhat behind schedule in terms of gameplay function and asset development. Therefore, we agreed that we would pull out all the stops to have a playable build by the weekend, ready to showcase at an event and playtest during Game Society in Week 9. On Monday, I also rewrote the entire train/platform movement script in order to allow both trains to move in a seamless loop, including when the player is onboard.
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The rest of the week was spent fiddling with the ambient audio I had sourced in order to create a soundscape that could be controlled in FMOD. I set up the system in FMOD so the different sounds could be triggered over the base ambience at various times, based on parameters.
We also had our voice actress come in on the Friday to finally start the process of giving our announcer a voice. Voice acting was something we were really excited to tackle as a simulated AAA company, as we would be able to spend much more effort and time on it due to the option for more complex localisation and with more budget for sourcing talent.





Week 9
Week Commencing Monday 14th March
An exciting week for the project; we got the opportunity to do some playtesting at a large scale UCAS Discovery event! This meant we had a steady flow of students trying out our game. As it was quite an informal environment, we got their genuine first response to our prototype environment and gameplay. I have written up the results of this playtesting on a page in our Confluence.


In our remaining time on campus this week, Miguel and I began editing the voice acting work into categories and playing with the effects that we could add to it. I also continued work implementing the soundscapes (which were now set up in FMOD) into Unity.
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At the end of the week, we began preparing for another two days of UCAS events and started programming in the script for spawning and de-spawning shadow beings.
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Another thing to note is that, during the sprint meeting for this week, I spoke to the art team and requested that we receive all remaining 3D models by the end of the sprint and updated the sprint tracker on Jira accordingly.
Week 10
Week Commencing Monday 21st March
This week began with another UCAS event, so even more chance for play-testing. Our position at this event was slightly quieter, so we found it was much easier for players to hear the sounds present in the game. I discussed the findings of this in our Confluence documentation.
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We also began tweaking certain aspects of the game in order to improve it based on the feedback we had gathered at these events, most notably fleshing out the environment a bit more as players' first instinct was to not board the train but instead explore the station behind them.
Week 11
Week Commencing Monday 28th March
This week we started properly fleshing out the extra parts of the station, adding actual areas that mess with players' perception with reality. This included a corridor that seems to stretch for a long time, only to have you come out the way you entered. It also included an escalator that throws you into the void.
We also implemented some tutorial posters to help players' learn the controls and to help prevent discomfort from the VR experience.



Week 12
Week Commencing Monday 4th April
This week, as our makeshift post-production week, was spent polishing the game and implementing the few things that had yet to be put into the game. I gave the team the soft deadline of having the final build by Friday, in order to spend the weekend preparing for release and to produce the final bits of supporting work for the assignment.
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Thanks to the play-testing in the weeks prior, we could utilise our agile methodology to improve the game based on that feedback. I believe this benefited the final build greatly as we could tweak our sprints to include time to work on things that players struggled with during testing. This is incredibly important in a AAA environment as we would want to maintain customer loyalty and engagement as a big company, so responding to their needs is paramount.
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We finally implemented a pause menu and solved some bugs with the audio, further fleshing out the convolution reverb on the voice acting and therefore making them sound a lot more realistic in the environment.
Week 13 (Final Reflection)
Week Commencing Monday 11th April
I found this project to be very interesting, particularly due to the AAA workflows that we followed. I believe these workflows had their strengths and weaknesses, in how they suited our team and work methods. The increased structure of the more complex project management software definitely helped increase our productivity and cohesion as a team, as did defining more specific roles. Furthermore, the weekly sprints helped keep us updated on everybody else's' progress and current tasks.
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However, this more organised approach did lead to some problems further down the line. At some points certain team members became harder to reach and touch base with, which made my job overseeing everything as project lead quite difficult. This also meant that there are entire parts of the game that unfortunately did not make it into the game in time for the build that we have submitted for the assignment, including the adaptive soundtrack that was planned to build in intensity as the game ramped up its horror elements.
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All in all, I believe this project gave me a deeper understanding of the workflows and how agile methodologies like 'Scrum' allow bigger teams to constantly work on new iterations of a product in a constant cycle of testing and developing.