Week 3 – Final Lap for Greenlight

This week consisted of mopping up the design, narrative focus as well as final art direction for the game. There’s a lot of work yet to do, but we sorted out a lot during class. The feedback that we talked about in class largely consisted of making sure that the glyx was entirely necessary as well as some narrowing down of the varies planet art scope wise.

My plate for the week consisted of the creation of visual design documentation as well as continued work on the initial part of the level. I’ll be moving from my paper sketches and Illustrator documents and into the game to start testing of them and implementation into the game. For Greenlight I’m aiming to get some of the level concept pictures to get an idea on the sort of assets that would be needed for constructing the level design consistently throughout the games development.

I will also be working with Chris on starting to prototype out the collectible behaviors into the game. I don’t foresee this being too much trouble, however I haven’t discussed with Chris yet at what his estimate on how long it might take. I’m excited to work with Chris again, we’ve worked on design and content tools a lot before and I haven’t worked side-by-side with him since last semester.

Week 2 – Pumping it for Greenlight!

This week we continued our progress into preparing for Greenlight, showing off a bunch of cool stuff at the weekly entire team meeting on Sunday. We now have a more refined swinging feeling with the stretchy arm mechanic, as well as a nice juicy addition to the game with the students following you in a line as you collect them throughout the level. They were some small additions, but they really display how just a little bit of that juicy flavor can really spice up a game and make it just feel smoother.

For me this week consisted of more detailed and focused sketches of the intro level where the player learns how to use the stretchy arm as well as an intro to the glyx and how it will behave in the game. I’m going to be making some new layouts to get some concept pictures from the artists to start tweaking around layouts to get an idea for what can be used in each of the three major environments that we decided upon working on now; space/clouds, Mars/Sun planet and a desert.

Going forwards I’m also going to be working on the VDD for the collectible behaviors to differentiate and display the possible and planned different states and actions of collectibles in the game. As soon as I get some more refined designs on the levels I’m going to bring them into the game space and start getting them tested at first. I’m planning on getting some un-official testing to make sure that the layouts are ready for bringing them to the QA lab, which I will do after most of the designs are decent to me.

Week 1 – Getting Back into the Swing of Things

So week one has been pretty relaxed, had class on Thursday and set up our meeting for Sunday to all get acclimated into the project and start assigning roles and tasks to people. I’m really excited to jump into the level design of Professor Stretch , and hopefully work with Chris again who will be creating helpful tools to use in engine. I’ve been playing the executable to get myself comfortable with the movement of the game and how the level design has been done thus far in the game.

I’m really pumped to get underway with the project, especially getting into feature groups and having to report to Carlos and Will about our progress. Just having such a giant team is really fun to me, it feels a lot more real and serious with the need to break into smaller groups and convening with our work once a week. It’s also nice that both the two games and two teams are so different in what they have set for their intent as well as platform and scope to what they want to accomplish. It’s going to be really fun to see us both push our games to the best that they can be and I’m excited to get going!