Solanis

Team: 9 Members | Time Period: 14 Weeks

Skills and Tools Demonstrated : Unreal Engine 5, Blueprints, Houdini, HLSL, Scrum, Agile, Git, Jira, Confluence

Description

Solanis is an exploration-focused movement game, where the engaging and exciting world, art, and story are fully supported by the deeply fun moment-to-moment experience of flying. Players will travel between land zones, each with their own unique characters and challenges, in order to recover pieces of the moon to increase their own power and unlock the ability to save the world.

Background

Solanis is the penultimate achievement of my capstone expereience at Champlain College. This was a project made by a group of 9 of all different disciplines throughout 1 semester of our senior year in preparation for our greenlight process. Thankfully, we have been greenlit for another semester which should give us ample time to bring our vision to life.

What I Learned

Play to your team's strengths: People are talented individuals. However, you have to give them enough space to thrive and show that talent. Making sure your whole team has buy-in on the project and can work on individually fulfilling pieces of the project will help set your project up for success.
A Clear Vision is better than a Bad Vision: Especially in a small team environment, making sure your team is fully on the same page about the game you are making is extremely important. Even if the individuals are not involved in that specific section of development (eg: an animator and a level designer working on player animation), it is still important to make sure every aspect of the game is properly within your team's vision. Having a proper product owner (thank you Milo) can help mitigate these risks but it is a good lesson to learn.
Burnout is a killer: Take. Your. Breaks. Do not sink your entire life into a product/project. I have a dedicated day each week where I didn't touch the project at all. It is important in keeping a good work-life balance, but also for keeping passion in the project that you are working in.