Hello!

This week is very much about creation.

Branding

We have made some drafts for our poster and half-sheet, as part of the team branding. Based on the fact our team doesn’t contain a professional artist, we chose to go with simple and clean.

Check out the current draft:

Production

It is clear that we have to deliver a product at the end of the semester. Also, we are a small team with no artist. So, we need to be aware of the scope, and really plan things out well for ourselves.

That’s why we want to make decisions as fast as possible. As the client meeting was set up on Friday, we worked on ideation of the story, characters, world settings and got some sketch ideas before the meeting. After the conversation, we had an additional brainstorming session with only the 4 of us, and nailed down the direction of our story, which we will further develop in the future.

Also, the goal for the game was clarified. After a deep discussion with clients, we understood the goals better, especially with how are they ranked in importance:

>> Attract novice middle school/high school students to play the game
>> Encourage them to learn and solve competition problems while progressing in the game
>> Lead them to the most problems/furthest in the game as we can

So we know that the game is really about how to keep players interested and curious. With this in mind, we are leaning toward making a mysterious/abstract game. But nothing is locked in so far. We will keep thinking!

Tech

Locking on Unity
During our meeting with our clients, we asked them if there were any performance issues in last year’s game. It turned out that there were not many problems, but several users did suffer from low frame rates. They also mentioned that some users were running these games on old devices. Combining these two reasons we believed that it was mainly the heavy graphics workload that caused the game to lag, not because of the engine itself. This was partly why we ended up choosing 2D graphics over 3D art.

The other part of the reason was as mentioned in week 1’s blog: given the workforce we have, we don’t have the privilege to dedicate our first few weeks to learn a new engine. As we are all familiar with developing in Unity, we think that it’s our best choice at the moment.

Shell Overlay in Unity
During the meeting, the topic of integrating the shell into the game was brought up. Our clients weren’t satisfied with last year’s solution, which requires the player to open another tab for the shell. Our clients asked us to explore the possibility of integrating the shell into our game. Using the same technique as the HTML overlay for copy-paste functionality, we successfully integrated the shell into the game as an iframe overlay.

Other things we did in the week:

>> Ideation on team photo
>> Planned things to be done for quarters
>> Prepared scrum board

For the next week, we’re planning to:

>> Figure out our game genre, story, art style and tone
>> Work on a prototype to show our idea
>> Find/make  some concept arts
>> Develop more details for the story
>> Get feedback on branding and iterate

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