Our third week of the semester saw us pitch ideas to our client, receive support from Amazon’s tech support on some of our queries.

The team had been working on several ideas to pitch to our client. Some of the key things we focused on for the pitches was ensuring there were unique ways of interacting with the game, both from the streamer and the audience’s side. We also focused on concepts that would be visually beautiful in terms of aesthetic design. However, the most important thing we focused on was ideas for a virtual world we, as a team, would really like to create. It is important from a production process standpoint to ensure that members on the team are excited about the idea of building something together, and having pitches which focus on team motivation is one way of making that happen.

The client overall liked all our ideas, but was most excited and passionate about one of our concepts in particular. We had a pitch called Castle Monsters, a tower defense game where the streamer plays a monster-type creature and the audience sends waves of enemies towards it. Some of our client’s key design inspirations were games like Clash of Clans, Starcraft, and Warcraft, so he was really keen on exploring this idea further.

We have also been in communication with a member of the Amazon team to help us ramp up on our understanding of Lumberyard. We have been able to put several queries in front of them, and this week we received a lot of helpful guidance due to this process. The Amazon team is also working on the creation of a dedicated forum for our team to share with the Lumberyard developers, to make a quicker flow of communication possible for queries that require quick turnaround.

On the art side, we started making drafts for our branding materials including the logo, poster, team photo, and half-sheet. We explored a wide range of possibilities relating to Lumberyard, Twitch, and Workbench. After carefully analyzing the theme that the team would like to go for this semester, we designed our logos based on “new tool” and “creativity.”

In tech, we got Lumberyard set up on Perforce and were able to successfully push and pull changes from a common source folder of the Lumberyard installation. The process was tedious but was the only fluid way of sharing assets and files between the team.

We also did some basic stress tests on Lumberyard to see how frame rate in Lumberyard can get affected.