Group Presentation

The presentation was super successful despite the full team not being present. Everyone delivered their slides succinctly! Well done, team.
At the end, we were asked two questions from the rest of the cohort:

• Would you consider working on this game concept further, outside of the assignment context?
• Is the artwork featured going to be the finalised version/style?

Our response:

• Yes, we believe this game concept has a lot more to offer then we have planned to produce for it. There are so many mechanics and narrative design choices that could be further expanded on.
• With the exeption of the UI because of its recent addition, the art direction has been established and influenced primarly by the character art and its polished, bold graphic style.

Meeting

With Gabi finishing the essential character art, Rosie completing the background for the survivor camp, Joe’s updated mechanic scripts and Anna’s UI assets, it was time to think about putting everything together.

Tasks:

• Joe
  • Continued experimentation with creating a tutorial scene
  • Implementation of sound
• Rosie
  • Resource camp assets
    • Scavenger camp
    • Food camp
    • Research camp
    • Technician camp
    • Security camp
• Gabi
  • Character card portraits
    • Lily
    • Arnold
    • Patricia
    • Ingrid
• Anna
  • Implementation of working UI and assets
• Yiran
  • Continued work on sound design
    • Dialogue scenes background music

Monday 3rd March – Art & Programming

Feedback from Game Designer and Programmer Louis (guest speaker):

• Provide gratification and justification:
  • Make players care about numbers and reward them for doing actions using fun animations and sounds etc.
  • Consider adding a small mechanic to increase player enjoyment, giving them something to do when they may have to wait.
  • Smooth and streamline actions – instead of slow and tedious ‘drag and drop’ mechanic, consider implementing a double click.
• Suggested research games:
  • Foundation – a cosy management game where you can follow characters around the world and see what they get up to outside of management.
  • Papers Please – a strong narrative conveyed with minimal things being said, creating a distinct atmosphere.

After lunch, the team sat down to discuss plans for the next playtest in week 9. This meant working on the feedback given from the previous playtest and expanding on it. We looked at what was most important and what could be prioritised in the next 3 weeks, especially with week 7 being reading week. Yiran wasn’t with us for this meeting but all points will be shared.

What do we want for week 9? (highest priority to lowest)

• Instructions/tutorial – user clarity
• Established UI
  • UI sounds
• Refine drag & drop mechanic
• Weekly requirements to include all resources
• Week continuation. Player survives week 1 and can move on to week 2.

3-Week Plan: (Updated since Monday*)

Week 6	Monday	Tuesday	Wednesday	Thursday	Friday	Saturday
	Sprint Planning   UI redesign meeting	Design tutorial storyboard – Anna		Finish Ingrid concept art – Gabi		UI unity grey box – Joe
Week 7 – formative feedback	Monday	Tuesday	Wednesday	Thursday	Friday	Saturday
	Click to hold, click to drop mechanic – Joe   Fix character placeholder mechanic – Joe	Survivor camp BG – Rosie		Updated resource tracker script – Joe *	Finish Ingrid character art – Gabi
Week 8	Monday	Tuesday	Wednesday	Thursday	Friday	Saturday
	UI sounds – Yiran	Start resource camp buildings – Rosie UI art assets – Anna *		GROUP PRESENTATION	Dialogue scene music – Yiran	Implement art for UI – Anna*
Week 9	Monday	Tuesday	Wednesday	Thursday	Friday	Saturday
	Write up plan for playtest – Anna/Rosie	Complete resource camps – Rosie Implement camp assests – Anna	Implement tutorial – Joe	PLAYTEST 2 Collect results

Thursday 6th March – Changes

Sophie and Vanissa came around to check up on our team before reading week started to see where we were at and how we feel, the overall consensus is that everyone was fairly confident with the except of a few concerns over a potential lack of tasks within roles in the near future – me (Anna) feeling as though I hit a roadblock with my role as a World Designer and no longer having anything to produce in that regard, and Gabi the Character Artist noting that after she finishes the concept art and the final character for it, she also would seemingly have not much to do.

The solution was to split up some of Joe’s workload between the programming and the UI to give him space to focus on the mechanics, we came to the agreement that we would use Joe’s wireframe of a new UI and that I would design the art for it. Everything can be blocked out in Unity as a placeholder and then replaced with the art. To take the character art further, Gabi was suggested to create expression sheets for the characters. This would be especially useful during the dialogue scenes to make the characters feel dynamic and alive. With alterations made the 3-week plan, we will continue ahead with it as agreed.

Thursday 27th Feb

When Thursday came we were ready for our playtest. Joe had finished updating the game, I (Rosie) created the bug report sheet and Anna wrote up some questions for the survey. Yiran had also made some music for the survivor camp gameplay, which we weren’t expecting to have at this stage but were very happy to receive.

We used Joe’s Macbook to playtest on, making him in charge of setting up the game for each play tester. Anna opened the Bug report sheet and a table to write notes in on her laptop, monitoring the play testers and writing down any comments or bugs. She also had a QR code for the survey, which we asked each play tester to complete once they had finished. I timed each playtest and we made notes on how quickly they passed through the dialogue section, and how long it took them to either fail or succeed.

To test our set up, we decided to conduct a playtest on some teammates first. We originally used Itch.io, but faced severe scaling issues so moved to Unity, which worked much better. After the fourth playtest, our first playtest with a course mate, we realised that play testers had no idea how to actually play the game. To combat this, Sophie advised us to write down some simple instructions which ended up helping – slightly.

Playtest notes:

Notable findings:

• Players died mostly to lack of Arms than to starvation
  • this means most players understood that they needed to keep their survivors alive with food but did not understand that they needed to also gather resources by the end of the week.
• Bug with checking food needs to be fixed
• Transparency of placeholder sprites – UI needs to be more clear
• Goal of the game is unclear to some players, even with instructions

Average time taken to finish playing: 4min 25s

Bug report sheet:

Survey feedback:

Some extra comments from play testers and teammates:

1. Playtesters attempt to drag empty slots instead of character sprites.
2. When you fail, should you reset back at the camp or at the dialogue scene? – The camp.
3. The progression requirement should relate to the dialogue scene Fallout-like terminal log telling you what to do.
4. Ask adam about queen of the hill.
5. Scraps should make tech and arms.
6. Check peoples raspberri pi projects on youtube.

Our conclusion:

Our first playtest was successful, informative and exhausting. We realised pretty quickly that our main issues were lack of tutorial and UI clarity. But now we know what we need to focus our attention on next, and without having outsiders play the prototype we may not have realised this. We also received some great feedback that gave us new ideas of how to resolve some of the issues in our prototype.

Monday 24th Feb

Everybody seems is getting on with their tasks and we’re feeling prepared for the playtest on Thursday. Programming and artwork so far are keeping to task with little to no problems, all being uploaded to the correct areas and ready for implementation. We have even found room to start working on sound earlier than we had anticipated! Some mechanics/gameplay aspects are to be tweaked and the UI work is currently at a standstill, but this doesn’t so far appear to be putting stress on the other aspects of the game.

Joe and I (Anna) had a lengthy discussion about gameplay issues he found with the prototype, particularly with the management part of the game and how uneventful it is. It didn’t feel fun and was repititive. We debated and brainstormed different ways we could drive player motivation. Adding a risk factor seemed to be the best course of action to encourage players to strategically gather specific resources that otherwise felt useless to until later on in the demo (tech, bio). To do this we thought about introducing a “weekly requirements” list of materials thats players need to have gathered by the end of the game week. This would be separate from the current progression button that serves to drive the narrative.

Branching off from the weekly requirements we discussed NPC happiness/satisfaction and how gathering certain materials might lower or raise that aspect, this would also allow for replayability as players could restart the game to focus on a different NPC than they did last time. It was interesting but complex. We will come back to this after the playtest.

We knew that we had to stress the importance of food gathering for survival and so decided that we should implement a daily food reduction mechanic, enhancing the idea that the survivors are real people that need nourishment and are under the player’s leadership – their survival depends on you as the leader. This is what we are prioritising at the moment for the playtest.

This week’s tasks until playtest are as follow:

• Joe –  refining management gameplay
  • Implementing daily food reduction mechanic
  • Balance resource production of each day depending on surivor skill
  • Balance progression requirement based on resource production
• Rosie – continuation of background assets
  • Final survival camp background
  • Dialogue scene background
• Gabi – continuation of character assets
  • Finish Arnold character art
  • Begin concept art research on Ingrid
• Anna – research and assist teammates
  • Refine playtest structure
  • Help Joe refine mechanics and gameplay
    • Look at existing 2D resource management games (bonus points if they crossover with the story-based genre)
  • Assist Yiran with any of the dialogue writing as needed
• Yiran – dialogue and sound
  • Use feedback from meeting with Anna to redraft first scene
  • Continuation on survivor camp background music

(Dont forget to document work!!)

I’ll remind team members to keep on track of their own personal blog posts to ensure no one gets stressed out by the extra load of documentation, it’s better to do things as we go then leave it until last minute.

Monday 17th Feb

During the weekend, Yiran was able to hand in her deliverables (dialogue scripts) which Anna would review over the next few days.

Joe informed us that the bugs from last week were fixed and there were no more scaling issues. The bio resource had been implemented into the prototype despite it only becoming useful later on in the vertical slice, we decided to keep it for now as we were only focusing on refining the mechanics.

Upon being reminded about the playtest coming up next Thursday, we outlined that we needed the first narrative progression level in order to have a playable game to test. Joe said he would prioritise building the dialogue scene with the reviewed script and then work on the progression mechanic, doing it this way means we can balance resource production too. We are essentially creating a vertical slice of the vertical slice. Rosie feels worried she wouldn’t have the necessary assets by the playtest, she was reassured that it would be okay.

This weeks tasks:

• Joe –  continuation of work regarding the dialogue unity scene
  • create progression requirement
  • linking the dialogue scene back to the survival camp scene
• Rosie – continuation of basic assets and background
  • survival camp background
  • dialogue scene background
  • creating/refining resource assets (will be finished today)
• Gabi – continuation of basic assets
  • Arnold concept art
• Anna – continuation of world building and structuring playtest session
  • review the remaining scenes sent by Yiran
  • create Arnold character profile for Gabi
  • outline playtest structure
• Yiran – review feedback on dialogue
  • come to next meeting to discuss changes and edits

Thursday 20th Feb – Accessibility

This meeting aimed to discuss the accessibility of our game, using the accessibility guidelines we categorised needs for consideration as well as the likelihood that they can be implemented.

Accessibility Requirement	Consideration	Possibility of Adding to Game at This Stage
Motor	– map controls to different controllers – allow touchscreen gameplay	Low-Mid
Cognitive	– avoid flickering images and flashes – allow players to progress at their own pace – simple clear language – easily readable font size	High
Speech	– ensure there is no speech input	High (and done)
Hearing	– clear subtitles – no essential information should be conveyed through sound – voiced speech/text-to-speech – volume controls (music, sound, speech)	High
Vision	– high contrast between text and UI – no essential information conveyed by fixed colours alone – interactive elements large and well-spaced	High

Although these considerations should have been made during the design process in the earlier weeks, it is still very possible to include these considerations. Our technical designer was not present at this meeting but I will make sure that all information and considerations discussed today will be passed on.

From Monday’s lecture Anna was able to prepare the gameplay structure of the upcoming playtest and research questions for QA and user testing, which can be found here. Many of the tasks mentioned in the last meeting have also been completed and we are on track for the playtest.

Monday 10th Feb

The start of week 3 focused on soft skills for game designers: providing feedback, mediating discussions & resolving conflicts. Today we are one member short but everything will be posted on our communication channel so that they can get caught up. Another important thing to consider is asking how well do we know our team? Considering our work style, preferences, strengths, struggles and more importantly – acknowledging efforts and giving praise when praise is due.

There were some nice overlaps in all quads so that’s certainly great news.

Upon seeing eachother we shared what we had done over the weekend; a couple of us were able to complete work faster than anticipated and were now ahead of the roadmap (not a bad thing, just means we may need to adjust our timeframes a little). This meeting was particularly to catch up on the prototype and how the mechanics were coming along, drag and drop was functioning as intended but there were bugs with scaling, which Joe had ensured would be an easy fix.

We created a backlog of individual tasks to do for the week and that will be our goal.

Thursday 13th Feb

We now have some finished assets ready from the character artist (Gabi) that everyone was very happy with, meaning she could now move onto the next character design. The environment artist (Rosie) was also able to produce versions of resource icons that would soon be ready to be uploaded to the assets folder to be implemented. Joe had been met with some more scaling bugs with the prototype but again reassured us that it would be worked on during the weekend. He let us know that although he knew technical help was there if he needed it, he rather do it independently. Anna had documented the deliberate design choices for the vertical slice in terms of mechanics and gameplay.

Yiran had let us know that the first dialogue scene would be ready during the weekend for Anna to review, as she had requested her to in the first couple of weeks to make sure it had a good flow and made sense.

A vertical slice is a playable part of a game that demonstrates the core features of the final product. It serves as a proof of concept and is typically used to secure funding from investors and publishers.

For simplicity of the vertical slice, we decided to create a linear series of structured events the player must go through until they have to make the decision of the ultimate goal (offworld, purge or adapt).

This structure encapsulates the most important gameplay elements and key narrative themes while being manageable in scope for development. The slice includes:

• Base Management & Resource Gathering – Players assign survivors to different tasks by dragging them onto buildings, producing food, scraps, and other essentials.
• Moral & Survival Decisions – Multiple pivotal choices arise: should the player invest in the individual needs of the camp?
• Environmental Storytelling – Players explore remnants of a collapsed world through beautiful dialogue sceneries, camp buildings and mutated flora, hinting at the past and potential future.
• UI & Presentation – The interface will mimic a retro-futuristic survival device, reinforcing the game’s aesthetic and emphasising data-driven decision-making.

Gameplay Breakdown

The vertical slice opens in a survivor settlement at the ruins of the Merritt Island launch complex. The player, acting as a leader, must assign survivors to gather resources by assigning them too designated camps. A series of narrative decisions soon arise as survivors begin approaching the leader with their desires. Choices affect how the game progresses and showcase the branching narrative that defines the experience.

Conclusion

This veritcal slice provides a small but complete look into the game’s world, ensuring that every system – management and decision-making – works cohesively.

The idea is that this slice is more than a demo – it’s a glimpse into the ruins of tomorrow, where survival is not just about endurance but about the choices that define humanity’s future.

Monday 3rd Feb

This week we got the opportunity to meet Producer Paul Macgillivray as this weeks guest speaker. Paul provided incredibly useful advice on team organisation and how studios manage deliverables and tasks. To better explain this us he used the analogy of making a meal and breaking the steps down into tasks, then further into order of priorities considering dependencies, then adding timeframes.

After we were done with the activity we moved onto applying the same structure to our actual deliverables.

From there I moved everything onto Jira, a project management software made for this exact thing.

We finished our meeting with making sure everyone understood and knew what they were next meant to work on.

Thursday 6th Feb

Today was presented by none other than our games designer in residence Sophie, who gave us a run-down on the importance of prioritising our health, knowing when to slow down, and the different ways of communicating to others of emergencies.

We began drafting contingency plans and planning ahead for any potential emergencies, knowing how to and what to cut from the game if need be. This meant declaring who would step in to take up someone elses work and choosing areas of the game that were not essential to the final product.

Additionally we began to think about user stories, this concept emphasises the point of view of the user and shows us what they want from the gameplay, this gives us perspective over the project.

User stories are very important to design systems around, you’re creating games for the user afterall. As a developer it is not just your job to entertain a player but to understand their pressure points and frustrations – this is a basis to communication priorities with teammates. So what are OUR user stories?

Our user stories – focus on immersion and accomplishment

• As a player, I want to have a good camp management so I can feel like a successful leader
• As a player I want to be involved in a story decisions to feel immersed in the world/to feel like my decisions matter
• As a player I want the family dynamics to feel natural and human so I can become more invested in the characters and story

We assembled a roadmap using a calendar we printed out for the next 3 months. After colour coding ourselves we began to add in tasks and timeframes, preferring to set work to be weekly rather than hourly to allow for a bit more flexibility when it came to the deliverables. What was important about the roadmap was putting down milestones we needed to reach and noting down specific dates like week 7 reading week and week 11 showcase.

With both the Jira and roadmap made, everyone has something to refer to when they are lost or confused. It ensures everyone stays on track with the project and knows what others are up to.

Thursday 30th Jan

With the beginning of the new semester came the votes to be assigned into groups of (mostly) 5. The teams are structured in a sort of hierarchy, with a technical designer as the lead spokesperson at the top, splitting off into two departments – art and design. Working on Those Left Behind are Joe (the lead), Gabi, Anna, Rosie and Yiran.

We are a diverse group with many skills to offer, we’re very confident in producing a game we can be proud of. After introductions, we agreed to research our roles and the GDD to make sure that we were prepped and ready for the development process.

We created a Discord server with all the designated channels, this would be our primary form of communication with Slack as our secondary. The next step was to set up Version Control (using Github to backup and collaborate on projects). After all members accepted the invite on Github, we would go on to make shared google docs, a miro board and later start organisation on Jira.

This first meeting was about getting to know each other and our skillsets, analysing some of the GDD, sharing our visions for the game at first glance and brainstorming what a vertical slice could look like for a game like this. This resulted in a lot of sketches and all sorts of rough diagrams.

What’s next?

The next meeting’s task will be about delegation and creating a reliable roadmap/timeline. Once that is complete, we will continue to have two meetings a week (Monday & Thursday) to check up on eachother, ensure that we have met our deadlines, and assign new tasks when needed.