Week 2 - Taking Shape

This week, most of my progress was centered around organizing other areas of game design and beginning level design.

Game Design

In terms of Game Design, I worked on setting up parts of the GDD and a Balance Sheet for the team. The GDD will help us structure our design notes, while the Balance Sheet will help with tuning the player's interactions with enemies and the environment.

I also began to design enemies and their attack patterns with Nathan, based on similar games we've played. To that end, I also spent part of this week playing through the early chapters of Rabi-Ribi, a niche bullet hell metroidvania, to gain inspiration for enemy and level designs.

Figure 1. Image of Player's Balance Sheet, detailing different attributes of the player's moves.

Figure 2. Image of content currently in the GDD, detailing areas within the level and enemies in each area.

Level Design

Also this week, we began work on level design. We began by outlining the general areas of the map and what Abilities we want players to gain for them, before designing new enemies to introduce for each area and their attack patterns.

We also settled on using a module system to better collaborate on level design, and began to sketch out a few for the Tower Base, our starting area.

Figure 3. Image of modules currently drawn out for LD.

Art

This week, as I spent most of my time on Level and Game Design, I only managed to complete the Grounded Spin Attack animation this week. However, now that Matthew has made some progress on movement animations, I can begin to work on aerial animations.

Figure 4. Image of player's Grounded Spin Attack.

Reflection

On reflection, this week, a lot of my progress on art was gated by Matthew's work on movement animations, which led to us falling slightly behind on art. In addition, I don't feel like we made as much progress as we wanted to in Level Design due to a variety of personal factors.

As such, moving forward into next week, these two will my main focus.

- Complete aerial animations

- Complete Starting Area Level Design

That's it for this week!