It was another productive week, though it was occasionally difficult to maintain focus and motivation. You see, SoulCalibur V came out on Tuesday, and I've spent a fair bit of time in its character creation mode. I've always been excited about creating models of characters that I've designed or that I am a fan of and then being able to use them in the games I love. I've done this dozens of times in the several SoulCalibur iterations, ModNation Racers, RPGs, and other fighting games with color customization. There's just something about creation and expressive play (thanks, Ernest Adams) that allows me to really get lost in a game and feel like I've contributed heavily to my own play experience.
Back to school and projects, I've been able to contribute plenty of design to various projects this week. An exciting update on my game design side, we have moved into official pre-production on CHROMA CLASH, the game I originally designed as a pitch for a thesis game. Though we're not doing it officially in the MGS, two other guys have formed a team with me to work on outside games, and this is the first one we're going to try our hand at developing. It's exciting to see other people catch the excitement about a project that I designed, so I'm stoked to see it become something at least a little more substantial than a pipe dream.
As far as Last March of the Dodos is concerned, I've also acted as the main trap and level designer so far. My ideas for what the effect of the different traps should be have been well received by the team, and my diagrams and explanations of how they factor into specific level designs have been met with equal enthusiasm. The exact forms and aesthetics those traps eventually end up with is still in the air, but the function is the most important thing for this prototype.
Other specific tasks I've completed this week are as follows:
- Found, created, and collected sound effects for the game
- Followed up with the music producer about the state of our potential game music
- Held meetings as necessary to make sure everyone was still on the same page about our core designs and aesthetic approaches
- Sent bi-daily updates to the team about the state of the various elements of the project
- Nailed down and posted on my own computer (more sticky notes, woo!) 5 specific roles that I should been focusing on as a producer -- Producers: Essential Glue For Any Project or Useless Bags of Meat?
- Convened a lunch meeting to restructure our schedule of sprints
- Updated the developer blog
- Researched and put together a collection of Dodo artwork, history, facts, and pop culture appearances for reference and inspiration
- Helped the engineers fix occasional bugs in code syntax and algorithms
- Outlined algorithms for the functions of various traps in the game
I think we're all fairly well on schedule, but we need something impressive and playable a few days early because Microsoft is coming to visit our studio. If everything runs smoothly for the next 3 days, we'll be in great shape, but we don't have any time to lose. Here's to hoping everything goes according to plan!
- Troy
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