Starting on a low. Ending on a high.
This week we began fearing how far behind we were and how much we really needed to get a move on. Working in my day job full-time whilst studying has really taken its toll on me especially and has resulted in me handing in my notice to my employer to focus more on my studies. This is great news in the long run, although the downside is that I still must work my notice period which equates to four weeks. I am fearful that I will fall far behind the rest of my peers, but I will do my utmost to perform to the best of my ability despite this as I do not want to let them down.
As stated in the last blog post, our team’s ideation was getting way out of hand, and we were now at the point of over-scoping. In retrospect, it seems to me that the issue was that ideation conducted by team members weren’t complimenting the initial idea, instead, ideas were being devised as their own entities and separate to what we already had. To simplify and solidify a final concept I felt I had no choice but to remove the numerical aspects of the ideas. Idea one, two, and three (bear in mind that some of these ideas had multiple parts) were to be considered under a single umbrella of ideas.
I devised a ranking system in a document I amply named Miro Board Simplified, this ranking system consisted of choices.
Green: all agree to go ahead with the idea. Yellow: cautious of proceeding with the idea. And red: it is not going to happen. Obviously, I couldn’t decide which ideas were staying and which were going on my lonesome as they are not all my ideas. Instead, when the meeting came, we discussed every single idea in detail and colour coded them as stated above. What came of this decision was our final concept, which for good measure, I also simplified our decision in another document so that absolutely everyone in our team completely understood our objectives.
In essence, what was devised here can be directly translated into the Game Design Document and can be used to refer to in the event of team members diverging too far from the path.
The idea that was liked the most was that of Georgi’s newest idea in which it revolved around changing game object’s materials and in turn affecting the world around you. This is now our hook for the game in which most of our decision making will stem from. In addition to this, our theme of sustainability has more depth to it and relates directly to human interference with the natural state of the world and the consequences of these actions.
I found it prevalent to include additional sections to the team charter: a section for availability which is to be updated weekly, as well as a section containing contact details of each team member, to increase connectivity and thus functionality of our team. Everyone has not been as available as they would like to be in recent weeks and there is not much that can be done regarding this, but including this information is most certainly a step in the right direction in terms of productivity as we will know when team members are available without having to ask and if members are not online on Discord (2021) then we can still reach them if it is urgent.
Georgi implemented a character controller prefab that could be copied and pasted to each individual level for testing on the fly, now there just must be levels to use it in. I made a start grey boxing the hub level as this is something we know we want as the central location of our game. To save time regarding level design in Unity, I decided it would be best to use prefabs instead of Probuilder as Probuilder can be quite tedious at the best of times and I must catch up! The prefabs I have decided to use are that of Blockout (Unity Asset Store, 2019). These prefabs consist of a series of 3D assets that suit the forgotten temple aesthetic and will act as building blocks for a pyramid within the temple of which also contains the Tree of Life.
Next, we had to name the game. I made the case for Construct (Cambridge Dictionary, 2021), which seemed to win favour with everyone, but only after explaining why I wanted the game to be called this. My trail of thought was along the lines of the area being forbidden and those who were in the temple before being unheard, but also that it is a sort of different dimension in which normal physics do not apply. The name Construct came to me as it was simply a synonym of dimension, however it is also another word for building, making, fabricating, creating, reconstructing, conception, and thought. The temple would not explicitly be called Construct, rather it is a construct of those who came to the area previously.
Now that our idea is finally cemented, we need to keep our Kanban board updated on Trello and make sure to continuously refer to it as tasks are completed so that we do not lose our footing when developing the prototype and designing the pitch.
References
2021. Unity. San Francisco: Unity Technologies
Cambridge Dictionary. 2021. construct. [online] Available at: <https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/construct> [Accessed 19 August 2021].
Discord. 2021. Discord | Your Place to Talk and Hang Out. [online] Available at: https://discord.com/ [Accessed 6 June 2021].
Trello.com. 2021. Trello. [online] Available at: <https://trello.com/> [Accessed 19 August 2021].
Unity Asset Store. 2019. Blockout | Level Design | Unity Asset Store. [online] Available at: <https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/tools/level-design/blockout-100388> [Accessed 19 August 2021].