Week 1 - The Beginning

A lot of my focus this week came from fleshing out the game's concept, managing the team's tasks and the overall direction of the game, and of course actually starting to develop the game.

In our meeting, we all collectively pitched different game concepts that we thought would be really cool to make. I pitched three different concepts; one was a metroidvania/roguelike in which the goal is to make it to the end of a large map in a limited amount of time, while improving yourself after every death. The next was a trippy, very surreal puzzle box dungeon inspired by Zelda, but with puzzles focusing on non-Euclidean geometry and physics (such as hyperbolic spaces, rooms that are bigger on the inside, confusing perspectives, etc.) My last pitch was a detective/murder mystery game with multiple outcomes depending on how the player puts together the clues.

After all the games were pitched, my idea of the metroidvania/roguelike was picked, and we started moving forward with it.

We took the weekend to flesh out the game's core mechanics, gameplay loop, setting, basically everything important needed to begin developing the game. I also took on the role of the Game Director, which means I became in charge of managing the team's tasks, and also giving the final say on all design decisions made in the game.

We set up a Trello, and I filled it with a bunch of tasks we would need to complete down the line, and also started using it to keep track of my own progress. I also assigned each task to each group member according to their role on the team, trying to make sure everyone was doing a fair share of work.

Once all character abilities had been decided on by the team, I started work on creating the Unity project and setting up GitHub. I also integrated GitHub with our Discord server, so we could easily keep track of any commits.

After this, I started to create the player movement. I designed a Finite State Machine using big super-states that contained smaller sub-states, in Miro. This was to keep the code far more organized, and allowed for more flexibility and expansion in the future.

I implemented Unity's new input system so we could dynamically swap between keyboard controls and gamepad controls without having to do any extra programming, which would save us time in the future.

After all this planning was done, I worked on creating the full player controller. Following the finite state machine allowed me to keep track of the logic a lot easier. I based the control feel from Hollow Knight, because we are aiming to have quick, snappy movements that allow for a lot of precision. One major bug came up that took me a few hours to fix, relating to the wall jumping, but I worked through it with Nathan. Eventually, I got all the core movement finished within two days.

The next steps are to implement the combat mechanics for the player, and then (besides player sprites and animations being finished) the player is complete.

I also designed the initial player character sketch which I gave to Matthew and Herman to start working with, as well as gameplay, ability, and navigation sketches to demonstrate the different aspects of gameplay.

These sketches were mostly created for demonstration purposes in the proposal and presentation.

As the game director, I also kept track of the other team's progress. This week I was mainly concerned with the art direction and the player sprites. I left some comments on each iteration of animation and sprite work.

Overall, I am very happy with the team's progress this week. We made a very good start on this game so quickly, and if we keep up the pace we will be able to make significant progress in the coming weeks.

As it was the first week, no major issues arose within the team. Everyone was communicative and responsive, and let everyone know if there were any issues before meetings. Prototyping the player's movement was finished even faster than anticipated. One big thing we did have to look out for was making sure the scope of our game was manageable within the allotted time. There were certain ideas bounced around that we definitely would like to do, such as extra bosses, more enemies, more abilities, etc., however very early on we decided to focus on the core experience of the game so we should be able to finish on time. Another potential issue is our lack of artistic talent on the team, meaning creation of art assets and animations will be worked on for a long time. Our solution for this going forward is to create minimum viable assets and animations that can be created within a day or two, with time for polish left till the end. This is so we can assemble the key components of our game as soon as possible.

Until next time.