Development Blog 10/20/16

Feeling good

Well, our first week in Proof of Concept is complete, and I gotta say, I feel pretty good. Over the past couple of days, I have been working heavily in sound design, our narrative plan, and exploring our secondary mechanics moving forward in our game. The rest of the team continued along our current path, with our artist, Emma, beginning work on our characters and making some beautiful assets for our main game loop. Our programmer, Ryan, worked on developing some super cool particles and is now moving forward into developing some of our more complex books, which he is excited about. Our level designer, Winston, has spent the past few days developing props, but is getting ready to start rapidly prototyping levels which we will be testing in engine.

This week, I really want to talk about our team. Honestly, right now I feel really good. One of the things that is really encouraging about it is the energy that everyone has while working on our project. No one is feeling bored or like they don't want to do it. Everyone is engaged and just having fun with the tasks that we have, and I think it has been a huge asset to our development. From the get go, the plan has been to make a game that we enjoy making, and if we make it through to next semester then awesome, but if not, at least we made what we wanted to. I think this has been a huge benefit to team spirit and we are not as stressed as we would be otherwise. By choosing something that we want to make and that we would want to put our energy into, we were able to benefit down the line because people are putting in more work then they would necessarily need to. Sure, at the end of the day, we are all professionals, but there is some true benefits to your project when the team is happy and moving forward together. We have done a good job with talking out our difficulties with each other, and we have been able to assist or rework things to make sure no team member is being held back by anything. It's been excellent for team spirit. And I think that our excitement as a team has been translated onto our peers and professors. It's always hard to gauge exactly how you as an individual are performing within your group, and similarly how people perceive your group to be performing. It's something I personally struggle with, and it leads me to second guess myself quite often, and I know our team has quietly wondered how everyone else would react to our game. The positive feedback we got through our QA sessions and from our peers who have seen our game, I think, has really helped our team's confidence. It's always shaky when you first start a project, because you aren't really sure how people are going to react to it. So whenever you start getting those lit-up faces and bright smiles, the whole thing really starts coming together.

Over the years at Champlain, I always was quietly dreading Capstone. We were always told that it was going to be the worst experience at Champlain because of the stress and difficulty of what we were being presented with. Whether because of my experience in other classes, the people in my team, or my own personal development, all I know is I am having more fun working on our project this semester then I have in a very long time, and I can only hope that this is just a sign of things to come in my future.

Development Blog 10/13/16

Moving Forward

Well, today we challenged to move forward into the next section of Capstone, Proof of Concept and past Deep Dive. This past week has been about putting together all the things we need to qualify into moving forward.

We had already established the art pipeline effectively, so the next thing on the list was the audio pipeline. I took the main reins on that because I have built out audio pipelines before in other engines, and with the way that Unreal handles other assets, I figured it couldn't be too difficult. Before building the pipeline, though, I needed to do some research. Building a couch coop game, music and sound effects play a large role in the experience the player ends up having with the game. So I went through and listened to the OSTs of our main competitors to get an idea of what elements to utilize in our game. While upbeat tunes where a pretty frequent thing, we couldn't quite go for the same vibe. The reason behind this being that with our game going for a slight spooky vibe, something too upbeat would be off putting in comparison with the rest of the theming. So I took to finding some Creative Commons music that could act as placeholder in the mean time as we built out our own music. I listened to many tracks, trying to find something that would work not only for the theme of our game, but for games in general. Once I had all of the assets together, I was pleasantly surprised how easy it was to simply implement within the engine. The ease of access to the most complex options for sound in Unreal Engine will be a real benefit to our project as it allows us to do much more complex stuff then we could easily do in Unity.

We also did a hefty amount of QA this past week, testing our camera angles, sound, levels, and books in separate sessions. We also received not a single piece of negative feedback during our tests, which was a huge boon to the team. It is always energizing when the players you work so hard to entertain enjoy the game you make and want to keep playing. There were several occasions where players had to be physically stopped from playing anymore because they refused to stop. These QA sessions were, despite this, productive. Despite working with unexperienced testers, we were able to effectively extract useful feedback from the usual myriad of "add everything" feedback that young testers can be fond of by really focusing on directed questions. Our QA revealed what we sort of expected to see: the impressions of the books really determines on how the level is set up for players to interact with; the level had the majority of people feeling its medium difficulty while outlier found it easy or hard; our camera angle was going to be top-down; the music was an excellent fit for the game; etc. etc..

Then there were documents. Whether for the better or the worse, I tend to always complete those last on my list of things to do. For this particular instance, it worked out for the better. Without the stress of all my other work coming down on me, I was able to really think not only about the content of the documents, but also the actual design of the documents themselves. While my documents have always been functional and have always been well received, they haven't been something that I could look back and be proud of. So this time, I really put forward my best effort on this to create something that not only would serve my team, but would be something that I could really be proud. And suffice it to say, I was successful. I honestly believe this is one of my best design bibles ever, and am actually excited to make further developments on it.

And, of course, the icing on the cake was that we did make it through to Proof of Concept. Our team was once again able to go through easily and we were praised for our presentation and design plan. We have already made our plan for the next Sprint and I can't wait to push forward even more.