This past Friday concluded our third sprint on Sheep Protector, to great satisfaction for both us as developers and our peers as playtesters.
Game/Team Progress
Our game is progressing at a satisfactory pace, however, it feels a bit slower than we would have liked. Our direction as a whole remains intact from our initial high concept and proposal, which we’re particularly proud of; it felt as though the majority of our progress during this sprint was simply refining our concept, something that’s always good to see. In terms of actual progress, we got quite a lot done: all of the bugs we noticed during our MVI playtest were fixed and more core mechanics were successfully implemented, so that we were able to get good feedback on their actual play during the latest playtest.
Apart from project organization and creating our development blog, my primary role in this project was designing and implementing UI, which involved designing the layout of menus, modals, and loading screens.
“A good artist copies, a great artist steals” is a quote famously attributed to Pablo Picasso. Whether or not he actually said this is up to historical record, but the point of this oft-repeated quote is how artists, and any other creative for that matter, should interact with the works of other artists and creatives. A good, run-of-the-mill creative superficially mimics the results of others’ work, while a great creative will take into account the foundation underneath that polished result and apply the process to their own, building up an experience from the ground up.
👷Work
To form our weekly rhythm we decided to meet Wednesdays and Sundays.
Using our in person Wednesday sessions as more of a work day.
For our Sunday block we decided to be online where it would serve as a sync up meeting and talk about what we have all been working on.
Then we would plan out the week and meet the following Wednesday to get more work done before recapping again.
🏁Finalizations
After our previous meeting of ranking the pitches and deciding on the “Sheep Protector”, we spent time talking about core gameplay.
Talking about which aspects we wanted to have and in which parts each person would be able to do the work for.
Ensuring we kept our scope small while gaging each other’s abilities to get done certain aspects of the game.
After game play talks we were able to get our github pages live and post intros and dev logs.
🏷️Roles
In order to split up work and start working on the project in terms of development, we needed
to know each other’s specializations in order to assign tasks properly. By identifying our strengths
and weaknesses it would allow our overall group efficiency in completing tasks. While we have
three developers/programmers, our primary specializations included asset implementation, level design, map creation, system
and mechanical design, and a programmer with general knowledge of a bunch of different aspects of design.
🏃♂️The Run Down
We have now created a baseline for how we are going to create the game we want to make. Establishing a
meeting schedule and roles we created structure and responsibilities for the team. Our next steps are to go in depth in game play, mechanics, and design.