This week, Amazon created a dedicated forum for us, we had a client meeting to get buy-in on key plans for the semester, created three character concepts for the Streamer’s character, had a call with an expert on Twitch audience scale, and began our first active sprint of the semester.

We have been in communication with Amazon over the last couple of weeks for setting up a dedicated forum for our team on the Lumberyard forums. The support we have been receiving from Amazon has been helpful in this early stage, specifically in terms of getting basic technical questions answered. Now moving forward, since we have a dedicated forum, we will be able to communicate our questions directly to the Lumberyard engineers.

Our client meeting this week focused on mapping out our project deliverables for the semester. As a team, we agreed that we will be focused on creating a 5-10 minute vertical slice of our game, a short story overview video of the game, and technical documentation. By thinking about end deliverables for the team, we are able to keep scope at the forefront, and help us plan towards these eventual goals. We also received great advice from our client for the kind of plan we should be adopting as the semester moves on. Since this is a technical team, we will be primarily focused on answering design and technical questions of our game through the iterative approach of prototyping, playtesting, and analysis of playtest data.

We also had a call with Juan Flores this week on Twitch audience scale. As the semester progresses, one of the facets of our game we have to decide are the number of audience members our vertical slice can accomodate in a manner that allows the game to remain fun and intuitive for all those who are participating. By talking with Juan, we were able to get further insight into the kinds of channels that exist, the types of audience each channel attracts, the kind of personalities streamers have, and many other aspects of Twitch gameplay.

We also began preparing for our quarters presentation. Quarters is a short presentation which our team has to give to various faculty from the ETC next week, and is a great chance to gain some valuable feedback early on in the semester, to help us shape our game as we move on.

We also began our first weekly sprint of the semester. Team members were assigned tasks, estimates were scheduled, and the team began to move forward on initial development. The primary goals of our first sprint was to begin exploring our technical and artistic understanding of items that would eventually be useful in our project in the long run.

This week was a busy week for the art side. We created three concept sketches for the streamer character, Kenhai. Each design has its own unique lore, body shape, and combat style. While our client liked all of them, we agreed on the need to playtest before finalizing the design.

We also created an environment concept by combining 3D rendering and illustration, which helped us efficiently on generating a visual style of our game. During this process, we created several low-poly models in Maya, and then applied materials and rendered them into a cityscape in Substance Painter. Then we passed the 3D rendered image into Photoshop, and added more details by illustrating and photobashing.

For branding materials, based on feedbacks from faculties and advisors, we made several rounds of iterations, and finalized our design for all branding materials including logo, poster, team photo and half-sheets. The Workbench logo plays heavily on the concept of tools and connectivity. The gears themselves also bring forward the idea of cooperation and moving forward, both which are themes that are an integral part of our team.

On the tech side this week, we created a Twitch prototype to test basic audience interaction. We set up a Twitch stream where the viewers can type in a color name and that leads to generation of a cube of that color in the game. This prototype helped us set up a pipeline for streamer-viewer in-game interactions.