Eugene Tam
Game Developer

                After the fruitful experience of my previous game jam, I soon decided to challenge myself and assemble a team from scratch to join a game making competition. The intention of the competition was clear for me, to help these individuals that I think have high potential but just need a little bit of push to make them reach their full capacity. At the same, I am giving myself an opportunity to work with more inexperience developer just like me to understand and experience the more raw state of game development. In order to achieve that, I have given myself two role – Game Designer and Project Lead for this project.

               

                The early part of the designing work goes smoother than I thought as the team was involved and participate in the pre-production phase actively. This is a very vital phase for any game development project as it can help with planting down the game’s core idea and general direction for the team. These key points will be the compass for the team whenever they lose track of their original intention.

               

                 After the first brain storm session, we immediately decided on the genre of the game as it’s important for the programmers to get a general idea of the scale of the game that they are dealing with. We have agree on making a tap tap simulation game as it sounds more casual compare to the other genre such as Platformer or a RPG that we have discuss on.

               

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

                 Hairysium, a hair salon simulation game was the idea that I have come out with, the focus for the game are simple, I have decided to challenge the traditional upgrade curve that are used by most of the management game. Hairysium will focus on gaining knowledge of a certain city to improve their business instead of earning more money to buy better equipment and repeating the same process.

               

               

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

             

              After having the main premise for the game, I have soon develop a set of system to make the knowledge part of the game works. I introduced the operating hour, management style and promotion strategy option into the game. All the cities in the game are programmed to be as similar to its real life counterpart as possible, different time of a day means different type of customer are coming to your salon, different customer will have different preference. With the introduction of the systems, the player now have to focus on understanding how the customer in certain cities works and set up the best time to operate, what management style and promotion to give in order to attract more customer.

               

                Unfortunately, the production phase started slow as the programmer are new to the tools that we are using but soon they are able to turn things around and start developing the game smoothly. There have been several complication throughout the development process that we didn’t anticipated, I have make more improved iteration of the game to help reduce the work load of both programmers and artist without completely throwing away the original basis and intention of the game.

               

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

                With the constant update and changes of the game, I have decide to introduce the patch note system to our team’s work folder. An update patch note includes information about all the changes that I have made for all the document and notation to members so that they know what’s happening. To beware that the system only work if the team are discipline enough to read through the patch note before they did any major work or changes.

               

                We didn’t manage to finish up the game on time but everyone did try their best and have reach the level that I was looking for. I am proud of the team and my design performance but looking forward to more chance to work as a project leader in order to improve my skill on managing the team and personal emotions. Unfortunately, the development of the game soon ended prematurely as no one are in the  team are in the right condition to continue the project.