WEEKLY NARRATIVE
So instead of designing floorplans this week because we have a lock on level design, I decided to fix up the website a bit. Now on the home page it displays our trailer so everyone can see our game in action. Also on the documentation page I updated it with all of our scrums and sell presentations for winter term.
I was very busy with other classes this week and other final projects, so I was a little too swamped to work on the game itself, but I at least contributed something!
CONTENT WITH HOURS
- Website updates (2 hours)
- Post Mortem / PPJ (1 hour)
WORKFLOW EXAMPLES
Updated scrum page
POSITIVE OUTCOMES
- A better documented website, plus trailer
NEGATIVE OUTCOMES
- There were some VFX that I wanted to test out on the game this week, but I never got the chance to work on it
POST MORTEM
Looking back on this term I started off putting in 20 hour work weeks and have slowly put less and less work as time went on. The reason for this is because at the beginning it was a big undertaking to implement a blog on the website and learning the Google Blogger API. This job included implementing a tagging system, a way of displaying pages by id, and lazy loading images and posts as you scroll down.
Not to mention in terms of level design we put way too much time into thinking of ways to innovate our game without actually doing it. We would have 5 hour meetings practically on a daily basis arguing over what should or shouldn't be in the game. In the end once we finally locked down what mechanics we want, the direction we want, and the general layout of the hospital, everything became a lot easier.
In the latter half of the term I only had to put in 5-10 hour work weeks because I only had to make level designs and coordinate with the modelers and programmers to implement them in the game.
THREE THINGS THAT WENT RIGHT:
1. The blog! It works! I've never done anything like this before, so implementing a blog felt like a nice personal achievement. It's not the prettiest thing, but it works!
2. Level designs with verticality and diagonals. Switching from our tile set we had last term opened the doors to a lot more intricate and complex levels. Very fun and educational to play around with. Definitely learn the do's and don't's of level design and how to approach future projects scope wise.
3. Learned how to speak of level design more critically. At first its fun to make big random spaces or rectilinear spaces without a clear challenge or thematic meaning. Design, in my opinion, is very underrated in terms of work load. It's not about getting functionality to work or create an asset beautifully, but its about communicating an idea as intuitively as possible.
THREE THINGS THAT WENT WRONG:
1. Accidentally did Waterfall development instead of Agile. As a designer it feels intuitive to plan out the big picture of a game so that every area and idea can be linked together thematically. However, in practice as we learned, that takes way too much time and blocks everyone else from developing. Instead I think it's better to prototype as soon as possible, get builds out as soon as possible, and build off from the base you have. It's important to be as iterative and modular as possible so that no development of the game can break once one mechanic isn't working.
2. Very hard to stay in scope. I ended up creating a level design last week that was one week too late to be modeled and developed into an actual level. As designers it's easy to think of out of scope mechanics and challenges and level designs, but it's hard to cut corners tastefully and effectively.
3. This term outside of school I took it upon myself to learn how shaders and VFX work in Unity and OpenGL and really wanted to implement something of my own into the game, but I just never got around to it. The workflow of going into Perforce and changing things felt kind of daunting, and I was also just busy with other classes. I would still really like to mess around with it in the next week, though!
NEXT TASKS
Next week I plan on being involved in whatever the team needs me to be. For example I might be implementing assets in the scene, or throwing in VFX, or messing around with lighting.
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