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!