Week 1

Project Brief

For this new project for the semester we were tasked with creating a vertical slice of a game that we voted on.

In this first week I found out what my role was, who my teammates were, and what game I was working on. We began planning out how we would make the game and how we’d divide the work equally to our skillsets. My group consisted of E-Jay, Riya, Ayse, and Josh.

My Role

I was given the role of environment artist. I was happy with the role although admittedly at first I wanted to also do some character art and level design. At first myself and the character artist, Riya, thought of maybe dividing up our roles between each other, doing half the characters and half the environments each, but after some reconsiderations and redrafting our plans we became settled in our original roles.

The Game

I was working on Lament, which was one of the games I voted for as I appreciated the game world concept and am a fan of the roguelike/roguelite genre. For this game the GDD actually gave us quite a lot of freedom in several ways, for instance the art style, allowing us to choose what sort of art style we wanted to do. Myself and the two other group mates who were present, Riya and E-Jay, discussed it. I pushed for pixel art as it fit the genre of the game, would be a style that we could feasibly make in the allotted time we had, and because I also personally liked it. My group mates agreed to the idea and we decided that would be our route (we did bring it up to our other group mates later that week who also agreed with the decision).

Planning

Scoping

One of the first stages of planning was deciding on what the vertical slice of Lament would contain. After some deliberation we decided we would develop one of the realms of the game. The game contains four realms and a hub world, the realms pertain to depression, anger, bargaining, and denial. We decided to make the depression realm our main realm for a number of reasons. Firstly it stuck out to us most due to its nature, a realm about utter sadness was just appealing. Secondly, when thinking of other realms it seemed that depression was in our scope, the anger realm would require a lot of fire and lava effects and level design around, whereas the depression realm was described as simply a cold and wet cave, not to diminish the amount of effort we would put into it but rather that it seemed more achievable. Denial and bargaining seemed to be a little more mundane and abstract. They didn’t appeal to any of us particularly and their contents were not as clearly defined as the depression realm. Also, the artworks provided in the GDD depicting the bosses of each realm played a part in our decision as we found the depression boss to be the most appealing, thus the depression realm was settled on.

Roles

After we were given our initial roles we deliberated on how we’d divide up the tasks among the three present group mates, however the decisions made in that first lesson were very early and after discussing with our other two group mates we redefined our roles once more.

Redefining these roles complimented our individual skillsets more so than the previous planned out roles and gave each group member a sizable amount of work to do.