In week 1, I was introduced to the game I would be making and my team for the semester. I was luckily chosen to pick the one I wanted to work on the most, that being ‘Oh Rats’ by Esi Amoah. I had chosen this GDD as the visual style was charming to me and the concept seemed very possible to deliver within the timeframe with a dedicated team. I was put with Hugo, Jize, Indiana and Ziyi, and given the title of Technical Designer, which also means I have the responsibility of reporting back to Sophie and Vanissa on the status of the project.
On Thursday we started reading the GDD and breaking down the essential features that would need to be implemented. From there we broke them down further into tasks that could then be added to our roadmap for upcoming sprints. In doing this we also had to determine what should be included in the vertical slice and what features should be cut to make the project feasible. For example, some key changes we made for the vertical slice that we had to run by Esi were:
- Making the house’s respect level a singular value instead of individual for each human occupant. We also may not include the human personality type system as coding multiple human behaviours could be complex.
- Treating food and currency as the same value instead of separate systems. This could mean going out to collect food could aid progression through the game, for example unlocking new areas of the house.
- Only having two branches for each ability upgrade. We may also not include the ability levelling mechanic at all depending on time and whether it feels necessary in our vertical slice.
We then moved all of the necessary features and their tasks into a Figma page so we could use it as a collaborative online space to share ideas using sticky notes.
For tracking the progress of our team and assigning tasks I opted to use GitHub’s Project feature as it has all the necessary features to track the tasks and then add them to a roadmap with sprints.
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