More Done, More to Do -- Week Ending 2 Feb

No exposition this time. Enjoy the updates!

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Last March of the Dodos

We keep chipping away at our backlog, and it's really beginning to show. Bugs are being fixed, placeholder assets are being replaced with final art, and the team continues to gel well as we push for common goals. If there's anything that's not going as smoothly as it otherwise could, it is the fact that some of our engineers feel like they're floundering without enough specific tasks to work on. Once we get the greenlight from Steam, however, they'll all have plenty to do as we implement the Steam SDK and update the code to achieve all the technical requirements they set forth.

We had a meeting with Amy to discuss our individual goals for the project, what we hope to get out of the development process and the final product, and how we can make our game the best that we can in the next 3 months. We're committed, and we're confident that we can nail it.

As far as specific work for the week is concerned, our new main menu is in, and the transition from the splash screen to the main menu is looking great. The invitation to play is pretty killer now, and we're really excited about how the introductory screens finally set the tone for the ensuing gameplay. Christine did the graphic design work for the visuals, I designed the animations and motion, and Kamron implemented them in the engine.

I created the score multiplier art and icons that will appear as the player knocks Dodos around from trap to trap. I also designed the popup icon that will represent the various achievements as players reach/perform special goals. Based on their expected difficulty, different achievements award the player with different goodies, so their is a different-colored icon for each level of value (bronze to platinum, of course!).

The Leonardo Project

This project has been quite interesting in these pre-production stages. It seems like every meeting throws the game in a new direction, and sometimes it's difficult to perceive actual progress. However, in all of this brainstorming, altering course, and trying new things, we feel like we have finally reached our best design yet. Funny how that works, huh?

Our design process has revolved around a four-pillar approach, the four pillars being Audience, Art/Aesthetic, Tech, and Play. Once we have determined what must be part of those pillars, we can start to weed out excess details and distill the core design down to the bare requirements of each pillar. From there, we can formulate our razor and then begin to build all subsequent ideas and features on the narrowly designed box that is supported by those pillars. The result is a very tailored, precise approach to accomplishing the final goal. Pretty cool, huh? It was all Roger's idea.

As it stands, we are now focusing on a different conversation than we originally intended. Now the game is designed to invoke conversations about digital media "have"s and "have-not"s, and to make people consider what it means to be able to negotiate the rules of a system rather than to have every detail bound and enforced by the digital system itself. Consider traditional board and card games--house rules are commonplace in how these are played. Most modern video games have a handful of options, but the rules are always enforced by the code. If some form of play is not found in or allowed by the code itself, it is not possible. We want to design a game experience that allows the kind of emergent rules that analog games do, while still wrapping the experience up in digital packaging.

We present to our contact from The Leonardo on Monday, and we're excited to get his feedback. Before then, though, research the Magnavox Odyssey (from the 1970s) for an idea of how we played these kinds of games 40 years ago...

As for my personal contributions to the team, I took notes at all our team meetings and shared them with the team via our Google Drive. I also scheduled our meetings, contacted and scheduled next week's appointment with our Leonardo contact, researched art and museum games, and established our project development process using Hansoft (used to be on Kanbanpad.com, but Hansoft is big in the video game industry right now, so I wanted to give us all a chance to become proficient with the software).

Reveal

The largest step forward with Reveal this week was the engineers' grasp of UDK. They made great strides in understanding how to use and manipulate the engine, and their ability to actually get work done increased dramatically. Thank goodness, because that has been the largest hurdle in getting our game where it needs to be for the upcoming competition.

I have been asked to lead the Agile development process, so I set up our project using Hansoft. Again, as per Amy Adkins's advice, I think it will be helpful for all of us to understand how to use these developments process software tools. Next week we'll be constructing our feature backlog and breaking tasks down so we can begin our first official development sprint as well.

Also, we expect to receive feedback from Ubisoft about our design document, so we'll be taking their suggestions into account as we move forward with full production of our prototype.

The Macromancer
Though little has happened over the past couple weeks, we have arranged a team meeting for early next week where we will regroup as a team and evaluate what we can each do with the time we have available over the next few months. We are so close to getting everything playing smoothly on the Ouya, and then we can push on into level design prototypes and fleshing out the core mechanics. With a bit of art, we might just have something cool in the next few weeks...

RuneBattles

Though I've been developing the rules for this analog game for a few years now (on and off), I've recently gotten to laying out the character profile sheets, which double as ability and stat tracking sheets during gameplay. Take a look!

P.S. In the 10 or so rounds of playtesting I've held, there has been a super positive response from the players. Get in touch with me if you would like to try it out!

Elders of the RuneStone: War for Darkhan City
Using GameMaker, I started working on a bare-bones prototype of the core mechanics for this side-scrolling action-platformer...for touch devices! The goal is to make an awesome action game that has precise, intuitive controls via touch interface--something I have rarely found. Did I mention that it's going to be awesome?
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Lots going on, but I love it! As long as I can keep these projects balanced, I expect great results from the next few months. Come back soon!

- Troy