I feel like September is a month where things start and sh*t goes into motion. Maybe it’s because it’s the academic start of the year. Anyway.
The first week of this month we had a house which looks fit for an Alchemic Genius. Tom did everything for this base, from block-out to sculpting and then texturing. It looks pretty damn good doesn’t it? Tom learnt all his 3D skills from scratch, self-taught, in his free time. Pretty. F*cking. Cool.
For the start of this month, we needed to tackle 2. Narrative and 3. Marketing in our tasks from July. So Narrative… Well we got a script writer to review our script, as well as our one-page narrative and our narrative spreadsheets. The result: our narrative is weak; the world is not fleshed out and overall it was completely confusing.
So, after much deliberation come late September, we’ve agreed to handover the whole of the narrative to our script writer. She’s written for comic bigshots such as 2000AD and we think she can really help fix our script issues - which have been pointed out before by the likes of 11-bit Studios.
With this in lock-down, it was time to focus on our staffing issues. We set up interviews for the successful candidates which spanned over two weeks. For the Social Media role, it was pretty straight forward, standard interview set up.
For the 3D Artist role, it was a little trickier. Most of our applicants had little experience in creating assets for games, had any pieces in their portfolio which had stylised items as we did, or had experience creating fully fleshed environments. That’s not to say there wasn’t anyone who had talent or anyone who couldn’t achieve our look, it’s more about us and what we can risk. If we’re spending our investment (which as you all know, once it goes it goes) then we need to feel secure in the person we’re hiring, we need to feel almost certain that they can achieve our style with ease and we need to proof that they’re able to create things such as LODs.
So, we asked for all successful candidates to submit an Asset Test. This test proved super useful, it really helped us get an idea on candidates and their abilities - it was even more interesting to see their take on our style. That being said, out of the 15 or so candidates, only 3 made it to the interview stage, and unfortunately, we did not hire from this.
One thing about the asset test is it shows up technical skills and know-how quite well. We really needed to feel secure and at ease with whoever takes the reins for Grove, we didn’t feel this unfortunately, so it’s back to the drawing board on that one.
We did, however, discover a woman called Lauren Moses. Lauren is a social media, marketing, swing-dancing, gaming whiz who’s joining the herd and taking on the huge challenge in getting our game out there. Luckily, she loves a challenge.
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