studio-gameOn

After 2 weeks in our glass fishbowl Day 12 required us to make a complete change - moving into a place of darkness, artificial light and great floors for racing on chairs with wheels. An external group had booked our fishbowl so for the day it was next door in The Block we needed to reside.

There were definitely some advantages, other than said floor for rolling along. Numerous huge projectors were hooked up to the programmers’ and artists’ computers so we were aware of their activities without moving (not that it stopped us abusing the wheely chairs). Also, because of the unusually high ceiling (about 3 storeys tall?) we could hear every whisper in the hall. There was one major problem though - a severe lack of internet ports meaning the day was filled with running between teams with flash drives and sharing what few internet ports we had. Not even the hubs would work.

In the end we’re back in the fishbowl and missing the freedom but with a brand new table and computer setup - the artists somehow managed to get 5 2-person tables for themselves and a nice rearrange in our design section means we all have a nice amount of room. The programmers are also now grouped with our producer Rory.

Now, I haven’t mentioned what actual work was done yesterday but there was quite a bit - finishing up ALL documentation, diagrams, lists and explanations for the for first chapter to the point where no further changes would be made.

And now onto chapter 2…

Alex B

Hi again all,

Today has involved a variety of tasks in design from interface concepts to environment and interactions ideas to incredibly blocky level design. The art team requested 2D level drawings made entirely of blocks so they can pretty it up while still getting all the key dimensions right. It seems we were  making our drawings for them too messy and random, so now it’s being replaced with precise blocky fun.

I worked more on the interface again and pretty much got it decided, before continuing on to conceptualising and working out the basic mechanics of the second ‘movie’ for B-Grade. Here’s a sneak peak: it involves NINJAS! How could it possibly fail?

Gemma went to the Queen St Mall to promote the studio in the GameOn showing there along with B105 radio, and rumours suggest she spent the entire time playing Rock Band and Midnight Club: LA they had set up there.

Well, it’s almost 5pm which means time for most people to leave except for what seems to be growing into a new ritual: UT2004 with Rory, Toby, Liam, Pixel and myself. We have yet to best Rory, who we suspect uses hax. Or at least we like to tell ourselves that.

Alex Baldwin (AJBaldwin)

Today involved much laughing, crying, screaming, and more mud-wrestling. With the imminent arrival of the industry board tomorrow all work was focussed on polishing up the two concepts to maximum shininess (all the moths had fun).

With two concepts, the studio was split down the middle with each half working on one of the concepts (except the programmers, they had a hard enough time getting Flash to do all the stuff us non-coders kept demanding from the program). More pretty art was spat out in rapid succession by the artists and continued to shame our hastily scribbled design diagrams on the whiteboards.

Design documents are now ready for tomorrow and presentations sorted (speakers for Idea 1 are Ian and myself, with Pixel presenting Idea 2). The sad truth is half the work will be lost tomorrow as we can only continue with one concept. There’s a clear leaning towards Idea 1 as it’s more accessible for the player but you never know.

Oh yeah, and we just had to hand in our contracts so we’re locked into the design cage for six weeks. It would be fine except I can very loudly hear Gemma’s mp3 player blasting the Phantom of the Opera theme into her head along with various opera songs and I’m afraid it will drive me insane by the time we escape on February 20th.

Alex Baldwin (AJBaldwin on the forums)