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.