Back In My Day was created as a submission for the 2022 Ubisoft Game Lab competition. A 10 week intercollegiate competition where different colleges  nominate two teams to create a game based on the year's theme. Each team is able to talk through their production process with Ubisoft Employee mentors that give industry feedback on our development. My team, Les Ananas, created Back In My Day in response to the theme "The Student XP." We decided to poke fun at the type hyperbolic anecdotes our parents and grandparents would tell about their time getting to school when they were children.

Each of the ten weeks (or sprints) had our team face different challenges. The early production process saw our team feverishly hunting for game concepts that we felt both played to our team's strengths. After using our mentor's feedback, we landed on what became Back In My Day. We immediately went into developing prototypes for each of the game's core systems; movement, combat, and item management. We used these prototypes as a team to inform us about what aspects of the game would work best for the game concept and began merging together the different parts of the game. Once we had a functioning prototype with the core elements of our game, we began going through rounds of QA feedback to refine these core systems as the development of the rest of the game's systems was underway. With this project being a networked multiplayer game, many considerations had to be made with regard to how much work we could put on our team's network programmer. We had to be aware of delineations between our single-player build and our networked build as features were slowly brought over from one to the other.