Final Blog Post

This semester of capstone has definitely been not only the best game development experience I’ve had thus far, but also the best small group experience that I’ve had the honor of being a part of. We started the semester fairly casually, throwing around ideas and themes without the want to tie ourselves down too early to something we might end up tossing out after a couple of tries. The four of us worked really well together, establishing a good system of weekly work meetings on Sunday along with scrum meetings throughout the week to see where everyone was at. There were no problems with communication or anything between us, we all made it to every meeting that we set up and were quite productive at them.

 

The work I focused on in the beginning of the semester was prototyping a concept we called simply “plant adventure game”, which was later changed to Days of Grey. I may have focused a bit too much on this concept in the beginning, but I had a bit of a bias towards it as it was an idea that I had floated around and worked on for a couple of years in small spurts. It fit with our theme of “nature” that we came to during a meeting outside on Aiken Lawn. The prototype I devised was created in Unity which I scripted myself. I knew that programmatically it was pretty shotty, but my hope was that it would be able to display enough of the intent I was going for with the game so that I could work with Chris on devising a smoother rendition of it later.

 

Once we made the switch to Treevolution my work shifted from a more scripting heavy workload to content designing and documenting, as well as some producer work. This is also the time when our teams cohesiveness really started to shine, now being able to focus all of our effort and time into one concept. This isn’t to say that we weren’t working well before, we certainly were, but when we

We continued throughout the semester with a mentality that really looked a lot more like a production cycle unfortunately now that I look back. We worried about what features we wanted in the game and focused too much on how the game needed to feel and work on a finished level. We didn’t spend nearly enough time refining the actual vertical slice, especially the tutorial part.

 

I had fully come to my own terms on why we hadn’t gone forward during break, however once we got back to class aspects of our presentation and other reasons why we didn’t go forward arose and added to that feeling of closure and made it feel much more whole. I had thought that we simply hadn’t prepared the vertical slice enough for the ten minute play sessions that we had, especially with ours since a typical game took roughly fifteen to thirty minutes to actually finish. But what we went over in class revealed was that we also hadn’t truly finished how to explain the game. This was something that we had struggled with the entire semester, so it wasn’t too surprising to hear.

 

I have no regrets from working on this team and this prototype, I still love it now and would like to continue working on it bit by bit if and when I have the chance. But the part I’ll be missing most this next semester during production is the team dynamic we were able to hold up this semester.

Week 13 Dev. Post

So the final week before the final presentation, I continued work on the presentation, but I also needed to work on the tutorial portion of the vertical slice. There was a good amount of work that was needed on the tutorial with some last minute changes we had made, so I worked a few nights with Chris on getting the new content into the tutorial. Later in the week Charles did some work on the presentation and tutorial that I had been working on and got some helpful critiques and feedback on how to make them both better.

Week 12 Dev. Post

With the final presentation in just two weeks I got a head start on our final presentation by editing up our previous presentation to fit the needs of what we need to show for the final. I largely worked on getting together the iterative process, the biggest that was lacking in our previous presentations, by putting all of the concept art from the semester and starting to put together pictures from old builds to show the progress we’ve made.

I also met with Elaine Young to get some help with the target market analysis. She was able to help my progress with the target market and push me in right direction. I was so focused on nailing down a specific age range, but with Elaine’s help I was able to refocus my work into finding what sort of player type we want for the game.

Week 11 Dev. Post

This week we started preparation for challenging stage 2, so I got a start on working on the target market analysis. I wasn’t really sure how to get started, so I talked with one of the producers in our class Patrick to get started. He helped me out by leading me towards some helpful online sources that he sometime uses. I took a loot at the articles and documents he shared with me and those that I was able to dig up on my own to put together a slightly “shotty” document that I wasn’t too sure on how I felt about it. I would definitely need to come back to it, but I was satisfied enough for it to be my first draft.

Chris had also made changes to the AI this week to fit with the new terrain tile system that we had implemented last week, to which I did some testing with to make sure it was working properly and wrinkle out any bugs that I found.

Week 10 Dev. Post

Why? This was the big question that was being thrown around and asked to each of the teams during class this week, a question our team decided to tackle all at once. We had a large meeting where we talked about all of the grand scale things for the game; who you are, why you’re doing what your doing and what this world that the player is in is. After coming to an agreement on what the player and world is Charles got to work on a giant game lore document, outlining everything in the game with both biological and flavorful reasons for how they worked the way they do.

During this time I worked on creating a visual representation of the game lore document, trying to nail down the exact flow of energy and cycle of our unique ecosystem we had created.

Week 9 Dev. Post

I started to take a look into the first audio pass for the game, searching online for button sounds, ambient nature sound and little cartoonish “boinks” for the tree growth and planting trees sounds. I compiled a list of all of the sounds that I found to their corresponding actions in an Excel sheet on our shared Google Drive folder.

During this time, Chris also worked on phasing out the old global climate system that we had and moving it towards the terrain tile system that we planned out during our many meetings this week.

Week 8 Dev. Post

We took a big step back this week and looked at the end-state of the game, dissatisfied that all we could come up with was elimination of the other player. We really wanted to stray away from the typical violence seen in most strategy games, thinking of different goals that we could place upon the player to engage them as much as the competitive nature of working against another player. This also brought about the idea of working in an AI into the game to fulfill the single-player experience that was required of all multiplayer games in senior capstone.

I worked on making sure that the backlogs were nice and full and that all the stories and issues were assigned to people and stayed on top of.

Week 7 Dev. Post

I dove into a lot of design documentation for Treevolution this week to start trying to put together a visual food web / system connectivity diagram. I started off by looking into my textbook from the Environmental Earth Science class I am taking currently, finding a diagram of the life cycle and flow of energy in an ecosystem. Since our game is all about collecting energy and spending that energy of parts of an ecosystem I decided to try and draft my own “gamified” version of the diagram.

I also lead QA sessions of every available day that week, trying to get as much feedback as possible from the testers. We got varying feedback, but it was overwhelming more positive that when we were going with Days of Grey, reassuring us that we had made the right decision with which prototype to go forward with.

Week 6 Dev. Post

This week we made the decision to go with the plant adventure game, which we dubbed Days of Grey, however we quickly about-faced with a change to the tree growing game that we called Treevolution. This rapid decision making was due to our frantic want to stop splitting up the large amount of hours we were putting into the both prototypes so that we could focus on just one and polish that up more for the end of the semester.

The reason we choose Treevolution was that we couldn’t see any real engaging gameplay coming from Days of Grey, having taken it to QA enough and getting for subpar feedback on how the gameplay was coming along. With that we also really liked the development of Treevolution a lot more, seeing a very deep strategy game that could come from it with the emergence of animals and switching the focus from solely trees to an entire ecosystem.

Week 5 Dev. Post

This week I completely focused on making levels with the level editor Chris made for me, trying to get more content for the QA sessions I was leading. I also spent time working with Chris to get the level transitions working with the work I was making in the plant adventure game, as well as additional interactivity with the seeds use on the game world. This allowed for puzzles to make made that connected between different levels, making the game feel much more adventurous as the player could explore and interact with much more than before.

At this point we had mutations that were randomly applied to trees as they were grown in the tree growing game, and it started to take the shape of a strategy game with two players and a damage and health system that took place between turns.

We also had out first Design Advisor meeting with Bemis, having him take a look at both of our prototypes to see what he though of them. Bemis liked the tree growing game more, saying that there was a lot of potential for a simulation like game or to take a more strategy route like Civilization.