This week has been incredibly busy. Our programmers are hard at work digging into Lumberyard and figuring out how it works, while our artists are finishing up team branding and are switching to concept art as we start getting more in-depth into our concepts and ideas. Having gotten the project to a stable production pipeline, Tony and I have been focusing more on design work this week. We’ve been putting together ideas, and particularly examining the different ways that streamers and audience members construct their relationships to each other. An ideal design should allow for multiple kinds of streamer personas to thrive within the game. The team’s goals for this week revolved preparing for an in-person client visit.
For the meeting with our Amazon representative, we’ve prepared three game pitches we can give to him. Currently, the ideas are focused around three games: a surfing/boating game where viewers control the environment and obstacles; a dungeon-building game where the streamer gets to build out an environment, and the viewers get to play through it; and a game where the streamer is an adventurer trying to return home, but the fickle ancient gods (audience members) bestow blessings and inflict curses on the player to affect the difficulty of him getting through the world.
Weekly Tasks:
Artists
This week our artists have been wrapping up with branding and the requirements the school gives projects to complete. Things like the logo, poster, half-sheet, and room theming have been taking up space on their plates. The tasks that have been moving this week are:
– Concept Art – Ancient Hero idea (Complete)
– Poster Composition (Complete)
– Poster Logo: Arrangement, Layout Final Draft (Complete)
– Concept Art – Surfer/Jet Ski (Complete, For Review)
– Lumberyard Tutorial (in progress)
– Concept Art – Dungeon Master
– Half Sheet: Front and Back Final (in progress)
– Faculty Walk-around Prep (in progress)
Designers
Design is in full swing now, we’re breaking down ideas, coming up with thoughts, throwing them at a whiteboard and seeing what sticks. From last week, we’ve been improving on and hashing out more of the ideas we’ve had and letting the team think through them as a group. Here’s a few tasks that have been moving this week:
– Brainstorm #2 (complete)
– Twitch Exploration (in progress)
– Pitch PowerPoint (upcoming)
– Deck of Lenses (late)
Producers
Production has been having a pretty quiet week. By quiet, I mean nothing has caught on fire, and things appear to be on schedule as we approach our first major milestone next week of having a “Stable Dev Environment.” We’re currently evaluating some production tools (such as our Scrum board) to figure out if and how we can make adjustments to it moving forward. The interesting part for us is that so much can change quickly during a project semester and we are responsible for helping to navigate those adjustments. So coming soon we might be changing a few practices to better help the team as we move into our next major milestone. Tasks for production this past week have been light. The usual responding to emails, facilitating communication with clients, and handling the day-to-day things that pop up have been more of the tasks that we’ve focused on this week. The tasks on the board for us are:
– Website for Week 4 (in progress, but you’ll be reading the completed version)
– Vacuum the room/clean for client meeting (in progress)
Programmers
Saving the best for last, our programmers continue to put forth amazing effort as they focus on learning a new game engine. More often than not, they are sitting on their computers, head’s buried in some menu on one screen and a tutorial or forum on another screen. Seemingly only coming up for air and coffee. Programming has had another busy week of tasks:
– Materials System, Textures, Basic Shaders (completed)
– Entity, Components, Slice, Gem, Prefabs (complete)
– AI System [Raycasts, Navmesh, Behavior Tree] (in progress)
– Use Entity, Components, Slice, Gem, and Prefab in Code (in progress)
– Write Basic Scripts (for review)
– Research Twitch Parameters (complete)
Some of the questions that have come up and made it onto the #JustProgrammerThings list are:
– Character import from Maya is not as streamlined [Need to import skeleton, skin, etc separately] (AAA engine workflow things?)
– Alternative way to code AI without XML
– Should we encapsulate everything into a Gem? What are the disadvantages?