Hello!
My name is Sam and I am a game design student at Winchester School of Art, a University of Southampton campus.
This week, I have started a module called Game Development, where I review a game design document made from a student during the last semester and, using that, I will work in a team to make a vertical slice, a small portion of a game that is much more polished than a prototype and is generally used to display the game to publishers or investors.
But first, my background: I am primarily a programmer, and I have worked with Unity to make a lot of jam games and some school projects.
I was introduced to the project on Monday, where I was told what would happen with the project, and what I would need to submit. At this point I also looked for a project to work on, I narrowed down the search to genres I liked and would be interested in working on. This led me to 2 favorite games, Esi’s and Parker’s GDDs.
On Thursday, I had a tech session where Ross introduced the class to Source Control and GitHub. I knew how to use both already, but I helped out 2 other students with learning the software, cloning a Git project and pushing.
The project started coming together in the afternoon, when I was given a team to work with and a corresponding game. The game I was tasked with working on is a game called Kinetic Panic by Parker English. At this point, I started to look at Parker’s GDD page in more detail, now that I know that I would be working on this game for the next couple of months.
Parker mentioned in one of his blogs that the game took inspiration from another game called Marble Blast Ultra. He said that the game was no longer available but there was another, open sourced version called OpenMBU. I decided to download this version to get an idea of the type of movement that I’ll be working with for this game.
At this point, we were all handed roles. I was given the “Technical Designer”, and we all agreed on what parts of the game to work on. I agreed to do the game’s movement, rotation and jumping. We also discussed who would create the audio for the game, and what we came up with was that 3 of the team members (me, Esi and Guy) would create the audio when the game’s nearer to completion.
I met up with most of the team the following day, in the afternoon, where we agreed on the software package to use for the group weekly blog (WordPress), and each person’s tasks for the following week.
This is what I need to do for the following week:
– Setup the Unity project, and the corresponding GitHub project.
I am in the process of setting this up, as of writing I am installing the corresponding Unity version that the university computers use, and then I’ll go from there with setting up a GitHub repository.
– Create basic movement, including jumping and rotation.
This is the most difficult of my tasks to do, since I’ll involve creating new scripts, tweaking and refining things so that the movement feels right, and is also easy and feels good to use.
Along that, I will continue to read Parker’s GDD and play games that are similar to the game that I am going to make, I asked Parker and he said that along with what he put in the blog, I could also look at a game called Marble It Up!, which is what I will do.
By the end of next week, I should have a rough prototype of the player character to show here.