studio-gameOn

It is currently 5:10am with 2 full days to go. I have been up since 7am yesterday, overseeing the production during the day, and programming the non-core features at night. I don’t have too much to talk about right now, but one thing I would like to say is- I sure am tired.

I am half way through a huge blog post, but the past week has been ridiculously busy- hopefully I can finish that off tonight.

~Rory

So, today I spent time creating a simple mini-game in the style of Balance Beam games we all know and love. After schooling the other members of my studio at my own game (with a grand score of 2:16 before one of them lashed out in a jealous rage and made me crash) I took a deeper look at integration, menues and scoring, and did a few of my more general producer-like duties.

This week has been incredibly full-on. I came out of last week feeling like we were in a good position, however, after a few days in to this 3rd week I realised I had made a number of critical errors. My first major error was not editing the design documents for each level stringently enough. As much as I tryed to guide people to implementing the features and artwork I thought was of highest priority, unfortunately some of the ambiguous wording in the design documents resulted in people implementing unnecessary features that had been removed or changed, resulting in wasted time and work.

The second issue stemmed from the previously mentioned issue of the first level’s design being lost. This eventuated in the printing and distribution of an un-approved design document for the first level, before it had actually been finished or locked in.

The difficulty comes in from inter-team communication, in that, on the one hand it’s great for everyone to have a cohesive idea of what everyone is doing, and how a particular element should operate- on the other hand, if you have all the team members communicate with all the other teams willy-nilly you inevitably get a series of “chinese whisper” inspired miscommunications, resulting in me finding out someone is implementing something completely differently to how it was originally agreed upon, which, as you may expect, results in both parties getting a little upset if tempers are not kept in check.

Of course, all of these issues are part of the learning experience. The studio now has a more stringent process in place for the locking in of particular level designs such that we should have a more coherent, and cohesive design document in which to distribute among the teams.

Anyways, it’s now time for me to pass out for the weekend in an attempt to recuperate.

… Oh, who am I kidding- tomorrow some of the more dedicated members of the team (read: those who lack any form of life) will be coming in to the studio and continuing to work on the project. Who needs a life, right?

~Rory

So much for my attempt to try and blog more often then once a week.

This last week has been a rollercoaster ride of stress levels, as we come closer and closer to the completion of our first level. We’ve survived being kicked out of space for a day, the cleaners throwing away several crucial level design diagrams (and thus the movement to a digital system), and a vast array of bugs.

Yesterday I spent part of my time working with Colin, one of the programmers,  on tweaking and refining player movement. It is my opinion that a platformer game can live or die on how their character acts and is controlled, so it was important we got them to a level that felt ‘right’.

While this was going on, the other two programmers, Josh and Alex worked on merging 2 days worth of work in which we had no access or the internet, or the SVN.

The design for the second movie is currently being worked on, and in my opinion it might just be even better then the Western movie. Hopefully by the end of this week, or early next week we’ll have a playable demo ready for the public.

~Rory

Well, it’s been a week since my last post- but wow, what a week. Tuesday we continued to brainstorm ideas, developing the idea of a unique platformer in which the player plays through the production of a shoddy, no-budget action film as an underappreciated stunt man. With a solid idea finally coming to the surface, I took no hesitation in getting our talented art department to knock together some fantastic concept art to further inspire our designers.

On Wednesday, we further refined the idea- I got the programmers to continue working on their flash skills, introducing them to the Box2dFlash physics library. The designers also came up with a second idea floating around between a number of different directions until finally settling in as a isometric/top-down turn based strategic battle game. The game, code-named ‘Golem’, followed the story of a young girl with the ability to craft Golem’s from magic clay. Moving away from the common convention of Turn-based battle games, Golem focused on the girls to craft generic clay golems who could then assimilate different terrain features to gain special abilities which are then used for solving puzzles and defeating enemies.

Thursday we continued to refine the prototype, develop concept art for Golem, and continue to define gameplay elements.

Friday was the big day- the meeting with the industry board. As you may be able to guess, I was a little nervous to hear their feedback, how they thought we had progressed, and whether or not they thought either idea had any legs. It was a pleasant surprise to see them really happy with the amount of quality work that had come out of all teams, and the feedback received was extremely useful. I hammered Adrian, Duncan and Marco for technical details when it came to implementing the anim engine, system timing and a few other details.

The board listened to Pixel and Alex pitch each idea, before weighing the pro’s and con’s of each and giving us feedback as to which they’d choose, however, unfortunately we had to choose just one, and the decision eventually came down to what I thought we could complete to a high level in the time allocated. While I really had begun to love the Golem idea, I didn’t want to have to brutalise the idea in order to get it done on time. Stuntman, on the other hand was a more accessible idea that scaled far easier within the timescale, and it was eventually this fact that seperated the two concepts for me.

Now the important second week begins where we become focused on the real work!

~Rory

PS: Hope to blog more often then once a week!

I’d forgive you if you thought I was at least a little nervous.

6 weeks- it sounds like a reasonably long time, but it’s only 30 working days. Only a paltry 720 hours. Sure, between the 16 of us, it expands to a slightly more re-assuring 11520, but that’s working under the assumption that everyone was full-time, and we had no sickness through out the project.

To make a fully featured game in that span is more then a little intimidating, but to tell the truth, after our first day, I’m none to worried. We have an elite, crack squad of passionate young developers, artists and designers who are more then ready to go charging into this project and attack it ferocious with tooth and claw.

So what is my job among this I hear you ask? In a nutshell, I’m responsible for anything game related- ensuring all the individual teams are on the same page, ensuring that all the elements of the game remain pure to the core concept, and ensuring that all elements of the game come together to form a cohesive whole.

The first day was promising, and now that the housekeeping has been taken care of we’re in a good position for a week of rock solid awesomeness.

Wish us luck,

~Rory