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.