About the Project

I found the Together Alone team after browsing the r/gameDevClassifieds subreddit over winter break 2018. They were a small team then, about 5 developers just getting started on making an Earthbound inspired JRPG, with no playable game yet. Within a week of joining the team I had created our MVP. Following that, I spent the next few months working in Game Maker Studio to slowly expand out the feature set, as I was the only programmer working on the team. Eventually, as I began to move away from using GMS2, my Contributions to the team began to wane, and so prodcution slowed. Eventually though, I convinced the team to switch over to the Unity game engine, and with that change, we began working on recreating a lot of the look and feel of the world, as I began to rework the User Interface to fit a new late 90's aesthetic

What Went Right

• Quickly developed an MVP
• Quickly iterated on core systems
• Modular code allowed for easy expansion of feature sets
• Newer UI Design gave the game a stand out look
• Working off of Earthbound's design answered many design decisions

What Could Be Improved

• No payment and no school credit incentives made it difficult to get devs to work on the project
• Switching engines mid-development meant starting over and set development back
• Working entirely remotely meant having to work around different timezones
• Using Trello for task management worked well at first, but as more developers began using it, it became cluttered and unorganized

Lessons Learned

• Decide on your engine early, and stick with it
• Find ways to incentivize hobbyist developers, and screen for developers who aren't self driven
• Think carefully before deciding to join a team. I was the only programmer working on Together Alone, meaning development stopped if I stopped working
• Don't be afraid to teach artists and designers how to use your engine. A lot of my time would have been saved working on Together Alone if I had taken the time to teach other team members how to use Game Maker and later Unity.