Spring 2014 Week 4

We have been working hard on the Cave level this week. Level design, concept art, and models are all in-progress.

This is a work in progress painting, but the color scheme is finalized. The Cave environment has gone through many color scheme variations. These past few weeks has been a lot of conversations with team mates over color scheme of the cave and the central monster. Such discussion has brought up questions about the props in the background and how they will change between Cave levels. I (Nicole) am also working alongside Brice as he completes a more formal painting of the monster featured here.

In addition to this painting, we have officially started drafting narrative for the game! I am the main writer. Besides in-game dialogue, we plan to have animated cut-scene as an introduction to the game's story. Tamarind, our 2D animator, is working on storyboards for it. Here's a sneak peak:

Spring 2014 Week 3

Hey guys, here's the breakdown for this week!  We have been super busy with getting in contact with our programmers and getting a lot of the bugs fixed for our game, and also the music designers went to PAX, so they didn't meet up with us, but hopefully they will have the reiteration of the new music for us this upcoming week.

Concept Art:
Nicole has started progress on a color scheme for the cave environment that is a reiteration of Brice's color palette.  This will be posted up next week, but it is definitely going towards a blue/green tone which is something we have been looking forward to for our cave.  Brice also has gone in and fleshed out some concept art work which are posted below:

Level Design:
Alex has finished the cave layout on unity, which Olsen and I (Tian) had to give him some feedback on how to improve the level beyond what Olsen had sketched out.  He has also been working on the tutorial level, which is shown below.  For the other beach levels, he has been sketching out some layouts so we will be able to see those in our next week, and have them posted up for the next post.

Programmers:
We talked to AJ this weekend on a Skype chat that really helped follow us up on our cave level.  We gave him the proposal of doing a picking up and trigger mechanic, which he said would be possible.  We were so glad to hear this, because one of the issues is our game lacks complex mechanics, so this was going to allow us to expand a little.

3D Art:
3D models are being modeled by Tian, Olsen, and Dantrell, which we definitely have less assets to model than our last environment.  We will be getting some work checked out this Saturday, so hopefully Tian will get some photos up for this blog and also on facebook for everyone to see.  Tian polished a lot on the two levels for the beach environment, because there were props that were still missing from the unity scene, but they were already uploaded into unity.  Models that are meant to be animated have been sent to Kim, so we have those in progress.

Spring 2014 Week 2

New work this week! Here's the breakdown:

Sound:
Caitlin and Stephen put together a couple iterations of a piece they've been working on for our Beach levels, which can be heard in the link below. This was made specifically for the first level to take off of the jungle theme. We'll be having a unique track for each level, but this will serve as a placeholder for all of the Beach levels until the others are composed.

Explore Loop
Intro to Explore Loop

Concept Art:
Brice came up with the initial environment art concept for the cave environment, as seen below. It focuses mostly on establishing feel and general environment as well as color. Moving forward, he will be working on individual asset concepts and, if he needs it, Nicole and Tian will help him so we can get our modelers moved into this new set of assets.

Marketing:

Jeff started up the Facebook page for Project Dissonance as the first step in our marketing campaign for exposure. In the first day, the page had nearly 100 fans and it continues to grow as we add more content. Nicole has also finished her Kickstarter research, so we may start drafting up our own page as we go along.

Narrative:

Nicole has been busy lately, as she set up the new outline for our narrative and has established the characters' personalities, what they know, what their roles are, and how we're going to get it all across to the player. We'll be focusing more on trauma than anxiety from a narrative perspective so that we can give each level variety in its story and not be restricted so much on what the memories need to be.

Spring 2014 Week 1

Hey readers! This week we came back from Spring Break to break in the new quarter and move on to "Post Production." What this means for Dissonance is, now that we have our pipeline firmly grounded for the content we've been producing, we will continue to be developing more levels and environment art as well as exploring new areas. We will refocus our efforts in the departments of sound and narrative as well as trying to integrate more of what we've already been gathering.

Speaking to that, the group got to formally meet the sound designers/musicians that we were put in contact with by Professor Tseng. Caitlin and Stephen, students at Berklee College of Music in Boston, have been communicating with us since the end of last quarter and we'd been communicating with email, documents, and sharing references for music, but our Saturday meeting was when we got to officially see them face-to-face (through Skype). Welcome to the team!

This next quarter, we are looking at developing a tutorial level, a new level for the Beach set, and creating a new environment set entirely with one or two levels for that. The new environment, based in a cave, will be developed in concept by Brice, with Nicole and Tian on standby for support. Once some work has been prepared, Olsen, Dantrell, and Tian are going in to model our assets. In the meantime, Alex is working on the tutorial level first and moving on to blocking out the first cave level after that. Jeff is working with the sound design people to establish our sound treatment and working on collecting sound effects and will be revisiting the UI after that. Lastly, AJ and Colton, our programmers, are working on fixing up some of the areas that we have already, such as the timer, to try to get them feeling the way we want.

Another focus of the quarter is learning how to market our project, doing our due diligence to figure out appealing to our demographic, researching our competition and market trends based on them, getting the word out, and, most importantly, how to secure capital. Many of us are interested in figuring this part out, but Nicole will be the first to take charge in it by looking into Kickstarter and taking notes on how successful campaigns construct their page, what kind of incentives they give, etc. We'll all be working together in some capacity to get these goals down as soon as we can.