One of our main areas of focus this week was the creation of Gold Spikes. As a development team, we believe it is really important to create Gold Spikes early in the semester. In fact, this was an idea that was originally put forth by our client in our first weekly meeting.
Why Gold Spikes? There can be a variety of reasons for the creation of Gold Spikes on any dev team, but for us it was as integral as the creation of an actual game itself. Since we will be working with new systems and softwares in the form of Lumberyard, Amazon’s Game Engine, and Twitch, as a form of deeper audience interaction with Twitch-integrated systems. Getting to grips with these systems was important for us, precisely because the previous team, Project Sawmill, had a large time sink in ramping up on these systems and engines.
It was also crucial to set a quick, one week turnaround for the variety of tasks in our Gold Spikes. By coming up with a systematic plan amongst our team of 7, we could start initial planning of pipeline with these Gold Spikes as well, for the long weeks that will inevitably be approaching us as the semester progresses.
Our team is comprised of three Programmers, three Artists, and a Producer who also works as the Sound Designer on the team. There are also Leads for each discipline, as chosen between the team and our project advisors. The Lead Engineer and Lead Artist work together with the Producer to schedule out task estimates, plan out weekly sprints, and tracking the high level milestones of the team. So, the Gold Spike served as an initial step for the Leadership team to dive further into their roles.
Testing out basic systems, running through engine set-up and ramp up on importing assets, shaders, and understanding Twitch integration are just some of the things that the team wanted to tackle as part of their Gold Spike goals. You can read more about them below.
On the art side, we set up a series of simple tasks to quickly familiarize ourselves with Lumberyard:
- Importing Models/Textures
- Importing Animation/Rig
- Assigning Materials
- Lighting/Fog
- Terrain Editor and Paint Terrain Textures
On the tech side of things, we included some basic interactions and mechanics for the Gold Spike that can help us get started with the development process. We picked up tasks from a breadth of topics to explore the capabilities and limitations of the game engine. These include:
- Basic character movements and animations through user input
- Integration with Twitch to send and receive messages
- A simple UI element
- Adding sound (Ambient/FX)
- A basic custom shader