Jimmy Swanick | Week 1: Stranded in the Infinite Design Meetings Dimension

WEEKLY NARRATIVE

This first week was primarily a time for talking about our failures from previous term and reassessing our plans for game. It’s inevitable for a project like this (especially a game) (especially a student game) to be designed one way in the beginning and end up vastly different, while most of the goals we set turn out to be unwise, or impractical. And so with all that we learned we couldn’t do, and all we learned that we should have done, we resolved paint our target somewhere new, and took this first week to decide where that was.

It’s hard enough to enough to untangle the mess of ideas and plans already, and now there are so many voices -- that for the first time as students it has become truly necessary to devote time to organization. Most of us have never been a part of a team this big, nor in charge of it. (neither or in school nor in internships) We’re learning quickly to compartmentalize, clearly define roles, and meet in small groups to make decisions. I enjoy these, and I’m excited about our potential as we learn to turn our large, unwieldy team into a focused force.

Nineteen people have a lot of ideas about that.

We lost the name! What’s his name? REMemberance is not a great name!

CONTENT WITH HOURS

• Post Mortem/ Critique Meeting (4 hours)
• We gathered the whole team to discuss the failures of the design from the previous term, discuss roles, and talk in low detail about our ideas for improving.
• I did a long write up / assessment of our game's weaknesses in terms of storytelling and characterization along with multiple outlined examples of story beats and opportunities to blend those with aesthetic and mechanics, which I shared at the Story Meeting (3 hours)
• Story Meeting (4 hours)
• Those of us that wanted to help shape the story met up to trade ideas for finally integrating our story with the gameplay, and make sure this game could be emotionally effective and interesting.
• I’ve also spent a bunch of time this week learning to rig and animate, as this has been one of the biggest challenges for our scope in this project, and I have a great deal of interest in developing code for in-game aesthetics that this would support. This has included consulting a bunch with a friend of mine who’s a professional animator as well as an animation professor, specifically concerning our challenges with this game (4 hours)
• We’re also having a several meetings later today, especially including our Level Design meeting (which is starting to shape up to a mechanics meeting) and our Programming Meeting, where we’ll try our best to unravel our spaghetti code.

WORKFLOW EXAMPLES

This is where you put pictures or embed whatever you want to for a more visual representation of whatever you said above.

POSITIVE OUTCOMES

• We’re focused on involving story and characterization in our mechanics, at last.
• Our bandwidth for programming and animation is nearly doubling. 
• We have people on our team now who are willing to devote themselves to team management, communication, and documentation, which is a huge relief.

NEGATIVE OUTCOMES

• Our bandwidth for programming and animation is nearly doubling… which is very hard to orchestrate
• Our scope is growing and flying away 
• Now that we’re back in design phase, people are getting excited about ideas they might not realize are far out of scope

NEXT TASKS

In the next few days, the biggest challenge will be forming a practical roadmap for the programming and art teams to facilitate our new ideas. I’m certain we’ll have to scale back scope. 

TOTAL HOURS LOGGED THIS WEEK: 15  hours

TAGS

#{Jimmy Swanick}

#{Week 1}

#{Controlled Panic}

#{Design}

#{Story}

#{Programming}

#{PPJ}