Game Project 1: 3/12-2018

Project Name: Experimented (Not yet decided)

Hello!

Today I got to speak with the principle of the school. He said that a student of a musical shool not far from here could join one of our projects in PSQ. Only two of the groups wanted a sound designer on their team though, so we decided it through chance. In the end, we were the ones who won, effectively adding a team member to our group. He will be the sound designer and musical composer of our team, even though he cannot always be on place here at the school since he still takes his own lessons on his own school.

Already a few hours before he got introduced to our team, he had already made music samples for us to listen to. We were undeniably impressed. We knew we had gotten a valuable ally.

We had our regular stand-up meeting with all of our members present. We designers started to noticed that we and our programmers started to get fewer things to do as we grow more and more dependent on art assets the further we get. For now, we have to quickly polish the assets we have (reduce topology) and get them into Tengine to stress test them before we make any bigger changes and see if the game can run without any problems. Otherwise we will have to seek council from Josef, the art teacher to helps us set up portals (something the artists have not yet learned) , which will help improve performance inconsiderate of how asset heavy or big the game will be. This is paramount for playtesting which is part of the reason it is so important.

While we wait though, one of our programmers is working on a program which we designers can use when we playtest. By using this program we will be able to change every important variable that affects gameplay without tempering with any code or hindering the programmers while they work. This will be a very important tool for playtesting and is said to be done tomorrow before lunch.

Personally I mostly spent the day communicating with my whole team (artists, programmers, designers) about important decisions and changes to the game. For example how the leaning movement works and how the flashlight will grow in size with the programmers, or how the game will actually look like when finished with the artists. Also about the game as a whole, what mechanics we can do without and if there is anything that can be cut away to allow room for something more important. I think we have good communication in our team, but apparently can sometimes be a little sloppy, as some misses out on important information at times. That is why I also tend to walk from person to person to give feedback on their work and make sure everyone is contributing to the game we are in the middle of making without straying away from it.

Other than that, I updated some points in the GDD, updated the Trello board and made sure everybody else did too. I only did minimal amounts of concrete work, like writing and level design, and instead focused mostly on management and communication, as that felt much more important.

That is all I had to share for now, take care!

// Samuel