Sydney's Personal Log #1

Sydney Smith's Dev Log

Pre-Production

 Personal Log #1: Just getting started.

Over the past few weeks, myself and the rest of the crew have been working hard on nailing down what exactly we want players to experience from our game. Of course, we had our initial ideas from the previous semester to refer to in this endeavor, so we had a foundation to work from. Our main task was to define how exactly the gameplay screen would look/work, and how players would interact with it. Not only that, but we needed to figure out the story beats associated with it and determine how it would function programmatically. 

My role as team lead left me with responsibilities associated with mainly task designation and organization. For a moment, the team was torn on what tool to use for task organization, but we ultimately decided to use Jira for the sake of learning the software. On the topic of group management, I welcome the presence of our new member, Rashai Barnes, to the team! That makes five of us now, and more hands working on the project may do us some good in the long run according to our four-month scope constraints.  

Since deciding on using Jira, I wanted to spend a little time making a few initial tasks and assigning them to each member respectively. It is in its infancy, but that is to be expected given the current stage of development. I have made the board in reference to our schedule that we had made during the previous semester.

After the first week, our lead artist kindly made a 30-second sketch of a visual design idea for how the game may look conceptually. I took it upon myself to create another concept to pass off to her as a foundation to work from moving forward in visual developments. The concept that I made can be seen below:

In class, we had a conversation about many of the concepts we made regarding the game's visuals and story development and confirmed what exactly we like the most and what we think most aligns with the goals of this project. 

I briefly looked into some ideas for shaders and graphics for the camera module we talked about as a group seen in the game and places some mental notes on both CRT emulating shaders and pixel aliasing shaders as a future idea. I admittedly was hoping to have more to show in terms of tangible content for the Pre-Production phases of development, but I am sure this is subject to change due to the plans we have set out for ourselves in the future.

- Syd