Figuring Out the Designer's Role -- Week Ending 31 Mar

This was another busy week, but it was productive and fulfilling. I'm particularly happy with how Last March of the Dodos is coming along. The team is really pulling together, working hard to do their part to make this a successful group effort. A lot of progress has been made, particularly in the engineering, and the alpha release is definitely taking its intended shape.

As the designer, I've had a lot of opportunity for group direction as well as one-on-one conversations with every team member. I've had to continue developing and solidifying the bigger picture of how each game aspect complements the others, and I've put many hours into refining dozens of game mechanics--both in their low-level mathematical relationships and in their high-level implementation into the overall design.

I finally finished storyboarding how all of our alpha-release traps can chain together, and I emailed my diagrams along with descriptions to the team. Hopefully this will be a source of confidence in what our game can be, as well as a motivational display of effort.

In other project news, I've been creating level designs for Chroma Clash using Google Sketchup. I hope to use this experience as a springboard to learn Maya for more complex, detailed level designs and character models.

I've also started developing another personal project based on Elders of the RuneStone, an independent comic book that I've had professional association with for years. It's a classic-style side-scrolling action-platformer, wherein the player can swap between a collection of characters in real-time to have access to their different abilities as necessary. My primary focus for now is the engineering. I imagine that I'll run into many roadblocks along the way because of my minimal engineering expertise and experience, but it's been very fulfilling, and it's gone relatively smoothly so far.

Here's what I did this week:

- Conducted sprint reviews with Jesse, and particularly the art team
- Reviewed art assets and made suggestions and requests where necessary
- Created art-only sprints to plan for every asset every step of the way
- Updated the team and personal blogs
- Created remaining trap-chain storyboards and emailed them to the group
- Worked one-on-one with each team member to nail down and communicate the design specifics of the individual facets of the game that they were working on
- Defined and communicated several trap effects and their bigger role in the game framework
- Created level designs in Google Sketchup for Chroma Clash
- Engineered several mechanics in the RuneStone platformer  

And that's it for this week!

- Troy