This week we worked on the team contract, game proposal, and the slides for the presentation done in class. In the game proposal, we split up the work between everyone and we also had multiple team meetings to brainstorm game ideas as well as to work on the game proposal and slides together. My contributions as the lead game designer included brainstorming ideas for the game, as well as writing down notes and ideas during our meeting.
This was some of the notes that I have written for the meetings. After the brainstorm ideation session was over, I worked together with teammates to write the game proposal document and slides. I mainly wrote the game mechanics and and gameplay, while my teammates focused on other aspects of the game proposal document such as the sketches needed and the timeline. After we finished writing the game proposal document and slides, we all read through the document and slides together to ensure there were no spelling or grammatical errors, as well as making sure that there were no mistakes. I also did some light research on possible videos that can be used as references when programming the game in unity.
Reflection: There were no major issues or problems that came up during this weeks progress. There were very minor scheduling problems that caused the meetings to start slightly later than expected. For following weeks we can improve this by increasing communication between team members and ensuring that we start meetings on time for most effective work. Overall, this week was very smooth and despite it feeling a bit rushed to get our ideas concrete into a game proposal, I think we did very well as a team and splitting up workload. The game, level, and programmers of the team focused on ideation for the scope of the project workload wise as well as game mechanics while the artists of the groups focused on sketching ideation sketches for the game proposal.
This week I mainly worked on the narrative aspect of the game.
The plan is to create a rough narrative for the overall story as well as the levels that will be designed first. This was a rough draft of the narratives before critique from other team members as well as a team meeting to discuss what ideas we will be going forward with. After the critique, my plan is to create more in-depth story regarding the levels and to start on level design.
I also started on some ideation on possible puzzles that will be created. This will be updated and improved upon after we finalize narrative. After all narrative and puzzles are thought of, I will start to ideate and visualize how the levels will be created.
Reflection: There were no major problems for this week. All the team members worked on individual tasks and people that were finished or did not have a set task would help each other out. One thing that could be improved on is time management and scheduling in our personal lives. Personally, I have been very busy with other courses and many of my teammates were also having trouble balancing all our different classes. I think this is just something that many IAT students struggle with.
This week I primarily worked on the GDD as well as refining more of the narratives.
First, I created a general schedule for the team to follow for the following week. This would help us stay on track and to ensure that we all knew what each otehr was doing.
Then, I worked on brainstorming ideas and writing notes for the GDD. After doing the brainstorming and notes for the GDD, as a team we went through all the points and made comments. After this, I went through the comments and made any changes that felt needed.
