Monday, October 14, 2013

Design, Communication and Faculty

So anyone who has read my blog posts from the end of last semester knows that we made a lot of dramatic design decisions with the game in rapid succession, without really settling on the best and without really having time to implement any of them.  We got more or less got to an alpha build over the summer, largely thanks to Cody and Sherly, but as soon as school started and everyone was back to have an opinion on design we seemed to lose focus once again.

Our biggest problem is probably communication, because if you were to actually track what the engineers have been building over the last 6 weeks you'll see we've more or less been on a similar track this whole time.  We've have a couple weeks where we tried new things to see if they were fun, but for the most part we've been working toward the same goal this whole time, while discussing potential designs a little too loudly, that were never meant to be officially implemented ideas.

In addition to that, the art side of of our team has fallen behind due to lack of communicating our needs.  With both of those combined, every member of the team had a different idea of what the game was supposed to be, which became painfully obvious when it came time to present to the faculty last week.

With the lack of art assets and direction so close to our IGF submission deadline, everyone was worried.  In retrospect, I think the problem seemed a lot bigger than it was, but it finally got us to sit down and plan out exactly what we want the game to be before and after IGF.  After a couple hours of design discussion we decided to change how a few features worked, which makes the game feel more comprehensive as an experience and is just more fun to play.  Ironically, its quite a bit more like the original prototype than it has been since May.

On top of that we have outsourced a bit of art, put Zeph in charge of the in house artists and seem to have a bit of a content pipeline going.  Of course, fall break just hit, which put a bit of a snag in our new found groove, but all the engineers are still meeting twice this week to implement a bunch of the mundane but necessary things such as fancy menus and building an installer (which I'll write about next, because it's proving to be quite the ordeal.)

Things should hopefully be going a bit more smoothly from here on out... we shall see!

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