Support Experience -- Week Ending 21 Jan

This week has been full of learning experiences--some harder to swallow than others. First off, my thesis game design pitch was not one of the seven picked to move forward into prototyping. I refined the idea over several iterations until the concept was something I was really happy with, paper prototyped it to get a feel for layout and visual experience, and put nearly twenty hours into the documentation. The end result: nothing. Shot down. Canned. Left behind in a period of restructuring. Well, that's how it felt for a few minutes, anyway.

I quickly realized the opportunities this opened up for me. In my opinion, the idea is still a great concept and design, and now I have the option of developing it without the legal issues of fifteen other people being involved in the process. I can iterate on it to my heart's content until it's at a level of quality that I want, regardless of the schedules and deadlines of others. And I have the opportunity to work on another fantastic project that holds great promise; Last March of the Dodos is going to be a blast, and I'm honored to be involved in the development of Kamron Egan's concept.

Regardless of who originally came up with the concept, the thesis games belong to all of us, and I'm dedicated to producing the best thesis project our team can develop. As a member of a team, I've learned to support the group and the decisions that we make together. This is an amazing opportunity, and I'm stoked to be a part of it.

Besides, as it turns out, I've had a chance to do a fair bit of design on our game already, which was the point of my pitching an original concept in the first place. I couldn't be happier.

Here's what I did this week:

- Organized pre-production meetings with the team to get everyone on the same page
- Sat down with individual team members to create our release (well, prototype release) backlog and figure out the labor investments required for each task
- Created the Scrum document and divided the tasks into sprints for our future month of development
- Completed further Unity tutorials so that I can assist in managing the tools if other team members run into snags with the engine
- Designed in-game traps and tools (here's the fun stuff)
- Designed level layouts, including game spaces, challenges, solutions, and playground-esque elements

The game is already feeling like it will be tons of fun to play, and I'm excited to be a part of it. During the next week, I plan on playing some similar games to help inspire more trap and level design ideas (design work), as well as creating a sticky-note task checkout system that I've previously had positive results with (production work). I'll let you know how it all goes!

- Troy