Slow and Steady Wins the Race… I hope.
This week was a continuation of the last in that we were still ideating and trying ever so desperately to cement a solid foundation of what the game is to be. Even though I was trying to step away ever so slightly from narrative design for now so that I can spend more time in developing my skills in Unity (2021) it seems as if our project will be somewhat reliant on narrative regardless. If we were focusing purely on accessibility and automation, there might not have to be narrative elements. Although, now that we are wanting to include sustainability as our central theme it seems like it has become a necessity yet again. Environmentalism or sustainability seems like a common theme I keep going back to recently when coming up with story, etc. it must be with everything that is going on with the environment today and how I have been warning many people for years that humanity’s actions will result in cataclysm if not resolved soon. From the outset it seems like a lot of us in this cohort feel the same way which I feel is influencing their creative decisions also. It does make me think whether we are adding to a market that will soon become oversaturated with games that possess a similar theme. From a business point of few, it might not seem as appealing some time down the line, but with a lot of us possessing such activistic mindsets, who can blame us for wanting to spread awareness?
As we were seeking a way to burst out of the ideation stage, we found ourselves ideating beyond our original limitations and my original idea. I think mainly due to how much time we have. We made it clear to one another that ideating must be done outside of meetings individualistically to speed up the process. Even though I had a vague idea in the beginning, in retrospect, it could have been more solid to properly propel us through development.
The result was that of a Miro board with an insane number of ideas and no project trajectory (Miro, 2021). Still. It was better than what we had before. Fortunately, with Miro you can leave notes about other’s ideas or try and get more information from them without resorting to filling up the thread in Discord. At this state, what we decided on was that the game would take place in a sort of desolate, abandoned temple and that we would be creating a first-person puzzle adventure game.
Georgi set up the GitHub repository (2021) in which he recommended we use branch-based workflow in which we work on something in a separate branch, execute features there, and then create a pull request, once checked, it will be merged into the main branch. For example, I will be working in the level-design branch. A Game Design Document has also been devised thanks to a template created by Benjamin Stanley (Stanley, 2015) but until we can solidify an idea, it may be difficult to fill it in right now. Giovanni has now been assigned as our team supervisor and thankfully so, as I fear that we are in dire need of direction if we are to progress more quickly.
References
2021. Unity. San Francisco: Unity Technologies
Discord. 2021. Discord | Your Place to Talk and Hang Out. [online] Available at: https://discord.com/ [Accessed 6 June 2021].
GitHub. 2021. GitHub: Where the world builds software. [online] Available at: <https://github.com/> [Accessed 19 August 2021].Miro. 2021.
Miro. 2021. | Online Whiteboard for Virtual Collaboration. [online] Available at: https://miro.com [Accessed 6 June 2021].
Stanley, B., 2015. Game Design Document Template. [online] Google Docs. Available at: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1axeeBWp683LPU8gCBQQqmquHMYHuG3uhNTN0LjSJBKk/edit#heading=h.9z2dsbsoc8hm [Accessed 13 June 2021].