MasterKey is the capstone game I've been working on at FIEA with a team of 17, currently acting as project manager. In Review is a chance to take a closer look at some of the work I've been doing and share what I've learned.
The 10s Square
To start, lets explain what a "10 second square" is in this context. As it was described to me, it is, "A section of your level that takes 10 seconds of movement to cross". For us on MasterKey, our first 10s square is our Vertical Slice Art Target we recently presented pictured below.
The next question is, what are we going to do with this 10s square? The goal of the exercise is to break down exactly what it takes to make 10 seconds of level, from the earliest concepts to the final touches. With this information, I can now begin making predictions on how much content can be produced in the remaining schedule. In other words, the 10s square is a tool to help define scope.
The Data
Now that I had the area and contents clearly defined I broke down the tasks completed to create it all. I wanted to figure out a few things: how many manhours to create this 10s square, how long is the critical path, and how can it be scaled.
The first step was simply looking through our completed tasks on JIRA and getting the hours worked for each. The total time required for our first 10s square was 129.5 hours of work, with the vast majority being creating new art assets. Thankfully, a lot of these art assets were built to be re-usable so I broke down three categories for 10s squares. The first being a square with full original assets, the second being a square with some new assets (perhaps a set piece), and finally being a section where theres no new art assets, only placing them.
The Scope
Having broken down the 10s square into three scalings, the final step was figuring out what this data means for our scope. Keeping in mind we have a final presentation for MasterKey at the beginning of August, our goal is to have around 13 weeks of production, and leave several weeks for Alpha and Beta fixing. To figure out how fast each 10s square can be made, I looked at the critical path of development, ending up with something like this below.
Looking at the breakdown, for a 10s square with full assets, it takes at a minimum a week and a half. That ends up being pretty unwieldy, so fortunately the majority of our squares will be sections without new assets, taking only 20 hours total. With our team composition we are able to create three of these squares a week, allowing for about 7 minutes of pure movement at a maximum.
I would like to note here that before gathering the data I decided I would interpret these initial numbers with a grain of salt. The main considerations being: some rework will come in (currently looking at 3 additional hours of critical path for full art areas), and the idea that we should be improving our pace as we go and get more comfortable with the process.
In Review
For me, this is a tool that I find really helpful in visualizing how big MasterKey can be. This information will be continually built up with future 10s squares we develop, but it is already helping us plan out our schedule. I'm really interested in comparing the final measurements at the end of the project with these initial ones.