February 18 – 21, 2014
In this truncated week, much of our effort went towards preparing for and delivering our Quarters presentation. With our remaining hours, we looked to improve our prototype and production cycle ahead.
During our presentation, we explained the goal our client had tasked us with—developing a golfing game for connected TVs—the genesis of our work, a sample of our game so far, and a plan for going forward. The alumnus of our program and Electronic Arts employees attending the 15-minute talk and Q&A session seemed to respond well. This was thanks in large part to our advisors, who had offered strong words of advice on a rough version of our presentation the Friday prior.
Our presentation delivered, we went back to improving our prototype. We also looked at how we could take the lessons we learned from building our sample level into production. We focused on both how to best use limited resources and how to design levels that made our “MC Escher meets golf” idea easier to understand quickly.
To this end, we developed a potential pipeline for our designer and environmental artists that minimized idle resources. We looked at how we might design levels based on modular environmental pieces. Instead of building hundreds of unique islands over the course of the semester, we considered how sixteen basic shapes might snap together to make anything.
We also began sketching out first levels that might teach basic gameplay. Inspired by a video praising the level design in Mega Man X, we sought to make levels that didn’t require lengthy textual or video tutorials, but taught the players indirectly how to use each gameplay element. To help the players orient themselves (something critical in a world where walls turn into floors), our animator began creating “fly-by” cameras that could be called on to offer perspective.
In the week ahead, we’ll move from pre-production into production. We’ll build our first level designed to be placed in game and improve on the core features we assembled for our prototype. Within two weeks, we hope to have our first fully-playable, just in time for Alpha.
Interested in watching our presentation? Watch it and three other presentations from Silicon Valley teams here.