For this week’s edition of The Baseline, we’re going to talk about Rebound and its most senior members. We’respecifically going to focus on production and QA, to let you know how we go about creating, and then perfecting all our new features for upcoming projects such as Tennis Manager 2022.
The Senior Team at Rebound
While most videogame studios use either Agile and Waterfall for their project management philosophies, Rebound uses a mix between the two, which works because the core team have known each other for such a long time.
Antoine, whowe’ve mentioned in the past, is the director for marketing, but he is also the overall studio and creative director. Alongside him is Bruno, who we mentioned last week, who specialises in the match/simulation engine and is a senior developer. With them, Gaëlle and Thorvald are senior and lead devs respectively. Finally, there is Simon, who is our project manager, our QA lead, as well as our level designer and UI integrator. All in all, he encompasses the producer role.
The Roadmap for TM21 and TM22
For both editionsof Tennis Manager, the senior team work together to establish a roadmap for the project. After they have done all the pre-production chat, they canthen plot out the various features that are going to be added, and then put those in an order of priority, with a rough estimation of how long it will take to implement them.
Specifically for Tennis Manager 2022, we’re collecting all the feedback we received about the previous game from our player community and reviews we have read. Using that, the senior team can concentrate on the highest priority elements of the game that we didn’t have enough time to address for the previous one, that we can now work to integrating for TM22.
With all the necessary due process that goes into production, there’s always extra time made for the post-production aspect. This is just as important as the main development, because through that the game can be polished and debugged accordingly. That means that, when the game and its new features are finally released, they have been properly optimised, rendered, balanced, and polished! Of course, that is the aim.
The QA Team
While the QA team itself is often small, consisting of Simon and an intern, their role is very important. Their jobs are not restricted simply to the end of the development process, but all throughout, so that the game can be made as stable as possible. The other teams need to have a good “build” that they can work upon, which allows all creative visions and practical work to be done in sync.
It also goes without saying that, by fixing issues and perfecting the features, the senior teams can go on quickly to developing more features and other ideas. It reduces pressure on the team for when production gets to the later stages, by keeping the project stable and functional.
What about the Players?
Of course, Tennis Manager would be half the franchise without its players. As I’m sure our readers all know, we have a Discord group where our devs and their community can chat to one another daily, on just about any topic. Most importantly, it is possible for you to report bugs, send screenshots, and give feedback in any other way.
This gets picked up by our QA team, who try to reproduce each issue themselves. If they can reproduce it, they can locate it in the code, and they can work at fixing it. We have a big database of all recorded bugs, which we keep up to date and as detailed as possible, so that we can get them resolved or removed.
With the players in mind, we make sure that Tennis Manager is also operating efficiently on their computers, without taking up too much operating power. We check that it functions as well as possible on as many different systems as possible.
And that, all in all, is the work of our senior team. They known each other for many years, and Tennis Manager is their collective brainchild, which they work on day by day to improve, enhance, and develop for you, the community.
See you next week --- Jeremy