Meetings Galore -- Week Ending 9 Feb

Though I've certainly noticed before, this week hit me particularly hard with the stark reality that being a designer and producer of video games involves a lot of meetings, especially in the early stages of planning development. Actually, in all stages. But that's the point right? Communication is imperative to team-based projects, and talking as a group face-to-face is often the best means of ensuring everyone's responses are timely, relevant, and universally understood. Of course, this is not to discount the value of email, chats, etc., but I hope you can see where I'm coming from (*from where I'm coming?).

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Last March of the Dodos

Progress continues for Dodos. With every passing day of work we add better art, clean up bugs, and refine the usability and playability of our game. We've updated textures, implemented more attractive menu screens and navigation, and more.

Part of this week's time was spent in a meeting receiving feedback from Amy, our faculty/industry producer. She sees great potential and fun thus far in the experience, but she also certainly had plenty of suggestions for us to consider and work on. Luckily, many of her critiques are already being addressed in the tasks we're currently undertaking, but we'll be addressing her comments as we build our next few sprints. It's all great stuff, so we'd love to take care of as many of her points as possible as we head into about final few months of development.

As for what I've done with the team this week,  I have worked with Jesse and Derek to determine the coolest and most interesting set of achievements that we can implement. I've been play testing the levels to find cool new ways to experience them, and the achievements will be based on those emergent styles of play. I've also continued working closely with Chris (our UI artist) and Kamron to ensure that the menu system is as cool, clear, and streamlined as possible. It's all turning out great, so I'm excited to see where we'll be by this time next week!

The Leonardo Project

It was a great week of work for the Leo project. We met with Alex on Monday to present our new concept to him, and he really dug it. He then offered his suggestions for how to tailor the concept to a more museum-minded experience, and we've been able to incubate and develop those ideas into a design that we think will be really cool--and quite interesting.

We're going for an experience that invokes the old-school style of video games, wherein players still had to negotiate the rules and the play agreement, since only certain mechanics and procedures were actually programmed and dictated by the software (think of the Magnavox Odyssey). Combined with that, we give certain privileges to players with smart devices, such as being able to switch on the enforcement of rules and mechanics and swap the overlays/background images under/over which the games are played.

In addition to continued research on successful museum games and art games, we finally set up and began our first official development sprint. I determined the backlog based on our design notes earlier in the week, and then I led the charge in the team meeting in which we determined user story priority, estimated time to build those stories, and set up the tasks for our sprint.

Reveal

Like the Leonardo game, our Reveal team organized our first official development sprint this week. Considering the feedback on our design doc from Ubisoft, I sat down with the engineers, and we prioritized, estimated, and assigned tasks to get our most critical user stories functioning this week.

As reported by our awesome engineers, we've got the EmberWave (flashlight-esque beam, used for combat and some exploration) and the Pulse mechanics running, so we should be able to start playtesting and designing levels and challenges specifically tailored to what we've got.

As I manage the project and process, I'll also be helping with those level designs, building whitebox scenarios in UDK with Andrew and Jason. I hope to have some telling images or video to display next week!

The Macromancer
I'm sensing a pattern here, but this team also reconvened this week to organize our process in Hansoft and start developing from a newly determined backlog. It's cool to see how determined everyone is, even as a completely voluntary project that we are just building because we want to make this game. We still have a goal to release on the Ouya in mid-April, even if it's more of a concept demo/vertical slice than a full game.
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Though I have not even had time to play the occasional video game for weeks because of everything that's going on (well, except for my daily round of social You Don't Know Jack), work has been incredibly fulfilling. I love being part of these teams that create awesome games day-in and day-out.

- Troy