For this week, we had so many changes that went into our game design, narration, and also art style.

One of the big things was our game mechanics was too generic, so Alex decided to establish that there will be two items that the player can collect.  The first one is the light shards that is basically health, which will brighten the light around the player.  The second one is the memory shards that have a narrative and also game play purpose.  The memories that you collect are going to open up the different levels, so this gives the player more replay value in order to move on.  They will have to travel back to pick up the memories that they have missed out.  This fits a lot to our lesson learned for the game.  Our concept is "keep moving on" and in order to move on, you have to solve the problems in order to continue.

Results of our playtest for Friday:
Even though our playable was a little broken, our art style was well appreciated!  We were able to get contact information and also resumes/portfolios from two graduate animation students!  They both have similar styles to what we are looking for within their portfolio.

Dissonance Pitch Presentation!

We also established that our character's purpose is to bring hope to the different memories that he is collecting.  Even though we had a narration that explained who the character was, we didn't really establish why the player was playing him, and what was his purpose in this game, because we went through so much changing with our game idea.  So much change goes on that I realized it really goes back to our first core idea before we added in all this complicated junk that we over scoped on with the game mechanics.  Scrum wise, our meetings have been really heavy on game design ideas and also level design.  Art flow has been really good, even though we had to make plenty of changes to the pipeline and also the final results of the tests.  I think it is overall good to have that change early, rather than just continuing with the first choice that was offered, because the importance of the project because less and less personal if that continues.

Things that we need to work on:

1. BE MORE ASSERTIVE!  I cannot fathom how many times I have to ask someone, or beg for critique, because this leads to group effort to get the results that are the same.
2. FLOW CHARTS!  Even though Alex is more for level design, Game Design has been an overall mash of all the group member's ideas.  Even though the game started off being Alex's main core idea, it has gone through so much to fit each of our identity to it.
3. WE NEED TO WORK SMARTER!  Everyone should be researching.  The more knowledge and understanding of what we are working on makes it a less questionable process.  Take advantage of the web, rather than sit and just focus on the tools that were only learned in class.  Game Design is all about cheating, so why not do it as much as you can.
4. WORKING TOGETHER!  I understand everyone has a very odd schedule, and can't meet up as much, but for next quarter, we need to really set down dates that we will meet up and work for 3 hours together.  If this has to be something between the specific jobs, like artists meet up with artists, then it is fine.
5. FILL OUT GDD AS WE MAKE CHANGES!  Again, we basically lack a Game designer and Programmer, so we don't have as much time to go into the GDD and make changes as we go.  We have like 3 people working on the GDD.  It is best we have one person to stick to the changes and make the changes, because 3 people might type in different results than what the core game designer thought of.

Week 8 Progress

This week was more of a scramble to fix our game design document and also level design for our game.  Because we are directing our game more towards narrative and art, we had to establish more on the narrative.  Alex went and typed up a narrative which is what he is using now to create a completed level design.  We ended up having our character,two enemies, and an environment piece finished modeled out so we can texture them.  This week is our week of cleaning up anything that needs to be established so we can move on and finally block out the correct things.  It has been a struggle because everyone has a different idea that we bring to the table, but it never ends up becoming established physically.

The good news is that we were able to get a premade unity 2.5D package working, so we won't have to worry about the programming too much.  We realized that this really brought us down a couple of week's worth of work, because Alex could have worked on level design, but he instead had to focus on programming.  We are now approaching our strengths in this group, which is art and level design.  It is interesting how limits can make us focus more on what we do best.  I believe that was one of the things that started making this group feel so disoriented.  We all were really trying to take on 2 jobs, which isn't necessary if we just scoped the game down to fit with what we can do rather than just bashing our head with what we can't do.  I feel like this project brings in personality from everyone in the group rather than just the game designer or the concept artist.  Every team meeting, everyone sits down and actually goes over as a group with what ends up needing to be changed to fit with the theme of anxiety.  Concept art is still being rolled out while the block outs are handed out to the 3d artists.  I am atleast glad that our main models are done modeling so we can actually start establishing physical stuff to our game.

During this week, we established a mock up environment prop and also an enemy creature that we modeled and textured for future references.  We have a tree that is growing on an eye and also a ground enemy.  The reason behind this is because our level,which focuses on anxiety, has eyes watching over the player to make them feel like they are being watched as they play throughout the level.

New change to our main character's look were made because half the team felt like the main concept we had was too weak.  Here we established a better look with personality that fits with what Shim, the main character does in the memories that he is trying to fix.

Change right now is good.  It has changed our game idea a bit, but the core theme of anxiety is still displayed.  Because of change, we aren't crippled, so that way we can move on rather than feeling weighed down.

I will update on this upcoming week's progress soon!

Week 7 Progress

For this week, we tried to establish our playtest which means we needed playable mechanics for the class to play.  Because of our lacking with a real programmer, we were able to get our character mechanics down, but we were unfortunately not able to implement some of the main puzzle modules.  Because of this, we are deciding to scope down the project to becoming an art game rather than a game hard set on puzzle solving.  This way the group can focus more on the art.  As a little reminder, we are consisted of 7 people in the group, and we are very art heavy.  We have about 5 people in the group that focuses on either Concept or 3D art.  This means that we should take advantage with our strength and focus more on an art game.  This became the result of our playtest experience with the class.

Here is what the group visually displayed to the class about how the coreplayable worked:

As far as scrums go, we have as a group decided on the color scheme, and also ways to establish more paper aesthetics into the models.  We are doing pretty well with the models, and will be starting on the textures for the character, an enemy, and a prop, this upcoming week!  We have been getting our scrums to go a lot quicker now so we can split up and do work that needs to be done after the meeting.

Week 6 Project Dissonance Progress

With the help of Nicole, we have finally corrected our backlog to be in a less confusing and of course readable state!  Everyone is on the right path now with the google drive directories all shared correctly, and everyone being able to access each of the folders.  This week has consisted of a lot of team meetings to establish level design, going over the art style and fleshing out the approach for each of the assets.  Programming wise, we have our moving mechanics and tether working for the main character established into unity.

The way our programmer, Alex, approached implementing mechanics onto unity was by establishing them on processing first, and then integrating them onto unity once it was working on processing.  This does slow us down a bit, but it beats actually slamming our heads into Unity and trying to do something we just don't even know how to start off.  This is what we get for not having an actual programmer on the team.  Originally, Alex was our level designer, but because of the amount of work load with programming that he has received, we had to give our level design role to Jeff so he could have more work to do other than finding sound design clips.

Alex went ahead and created some puzzle modules that we could add onto the level, which really helped with giving the environment artist visuals for what the puzzles would look like.  Jeff went and tried to actually create a level using the modules.  The team looked over it and critiqued that it needed a better movement flow rather than just puzzle after puzzle, which could bog down the player.

Our character and enemy concepts are almost done so they can be modeled and textured for us to turn in for the end of the quarter.

Environment concept wise, I (Tian) created a reference board of many origami and different papercraft references so the team could look back at this to remember that they aren't just drawing regular drawings, but have to establish a new look to their drawings so that the 3D artists could model off their references correctly.

A lot of our inspirations come from paper fox, but we wanted to take it a little farther and actually create more paper creases for the blocky models in the background that couldn't be made into being a full on origami.

Our 3D artists were given the job to start doing modular tests to figure out how well the units and scale worked through the modeling process.  Olsen helped out with a lot of the tech spec sheet specifications, and did research on the polycounts for the level so we wouldn't go overboard with some of our assets.  I wanted to see the weaknesses and strengths of the 3D Artist to see who was going to be assigned certain roles in the asset creation spreadsheet.  This way I wouldn't assign assets to someone who had a harder time understanding how to model complex models.  This also allowed us to see how we could approach modular design on our decorations and also our platforms, which is going to help a lot during the concept art approach.

We have a pipeline for modeling an asset ready on google drive, but as the process was being established out, we realized that we are going to need 3 different pipelines for modeling an asset, and also texturing.  This is because of our platform camera view, we have 3 different spaces, foreground, mid-ground, and background.  Because of this, details for each space of props are going to be modeled differently and will have their special identities that will make it cohesive.  We have the small prop done, now we need 2 more, mid-ground, and background.

Week 5 Progress

After finally reorganizing the backlog and sprint document, I think seeing the progress of our work has been greatly increased. As an overview for the programming part of the project, Alex has been working on the tether codes on Processing in order to get help from Mr. Altman. As of our last scrum meeting, he said that he is done with the processing stage and is now including the code into unity. Since he is our only programmer right now, it has been a great challenge for us to establish a lot of the Game Design Document, but Nicole has been gracious enough to go in and fill some of the gaps for the rest of the group members by typing into the Game Design Document. We have our tech spread sheet, asset list, and also a pipeline guideline up, but they are still missing some documentation, so that needs to be updated by me (Tian). Because of our established asset list, our concept artists can go in and start working on drawing details out for each of the assets according to their level of priority. Again we would like to work and keep working, but we also need to take into consideration of what needs to be done for week 7 and then also for week 10 which is the end of the quarter. Our creature concepts are almost done! Our main character who is an Ozark (race) has 3 stages of corruption, so one of our concept artists went in and did concept art for the character. We have another concept artist who is working on the creature designs and is taking the boss design from the other concept artist and doing it in her style since it fits the environment better. Our Sound Artist has been sharing with us during our class meetings some interesting sound effects that he has been collecting for his library, so we will have sound for our game! We are currently on backlog #2, which I have established a lot of our goals to be prioritized on getting the mechanics working on unity since we need them for playtesting on week 7. Our level designer is also our programmer, so they are packed with work currently and we are trying out best to help that person out. Level modules were created so the group could see what kind of puzzles are being added into the game, while also the level designer has gone in and did a whole packet research on what other platformers have done to see what is successful and what is not. We have established a bunch of ideas to one core idea, so now it is a lot of just labor work on our side to get things fleshed out for preparation for our 2nd quarter. We have 2 other modelers including me. They have been doing a bunch of research to help with modular asset building and also optimization, which is really important with keeping a low polycount on unity, so it wouldn't cram up the game with too much memory. I have given them the task to do test modular pieces for the actual platforms since they are super important to the scale and structure of the level. I will post a progress for this upcoming week! Stay tuned!

Our First Scrum Meeting!

After a couple of weeks of establishing what we really wanted to do for Dissonance's game play.... we realized the scale of our game was just too broad for the given time that we have to implement the coding. A lot of the changes started to come up when I (Tian) started overlook the product backlog that Nicole helped me start on. For this project we are doing a agile approach which will help the programmer start establishing prototypes while the artists continue working on concept art/assets at the same time. Previously, the way all of the group members were used to was waterfall. This process had issues where the artists would kind of have to wait for the programmers to establish what they wanted in the game, then do art, and finally testing. So the good thing about agile will be that we can test the game for issues and if it is fun while creating assets for the main features used in the protypes. This way we won't come to issues at the end of the pipeline and realize that our game doesn't work too well.. For each of the features of our game from character movement, character abilities, level design, enemies, character looks, and mood/narrative, we had to include sprints. Our first meeting went like this: We went to the SCAD Game room and Tony Tseng, our professor told us to write down on white board what we needed to do for each of our core features in the game. I wrote down what we needed to sprint for each category of feature, and also include a member who will be assigned to each sprint and an estimated hour of how long it would take to finish it.

I will continue to post new information about our next scrum meetings and also the work that we go over throughout the meetings!