Sydney's Personal Log #2

Sydney Smith's Dev Log

Pre-Production

 Personal Log #2: Finding our footing

At this point in time, we're meant to be in the alpha stages of development before playtesting with our peers. As of now, we have a few different concepts made in Twine for the overall structure and planning of the narrative, but we still have much work to do in terms of our playtesting and analysis since we're really making this in Unity. We are limited with time, but we do have a game plan to combat this moving forward.

For the past couple of weeks, as team lead and generalist, many of my responsibilities still fall under the realm of documentation and group coordination, a lot of the important background stuff that doesn't make it into the build. From the narrative side of things, we were still keen on the idea of three chapters that branch out depending on choices throughout the story tree. The programmatic side seems to be going well enough, where most of the time is being spent making sure that text and interactable buttons on the screen remain legible and intuitive.

A lot of what I needed to take care of for the team was to keep track of tasks and team velocity in Jira, ideate and conceptualize features in future chapters, update the GDD, and create models for the camera. Most of our setbacks stem from each member focusing on other responsibilities such as other classes, work, or illness, which are respectable and foreseeable causes.

More on the camera feature, one part of the game screen is dedicated to offering visual information to the player. Character models and the like would be seen through this small screen to offer situational data that might assist in decision making. This feature comes into play in the 2nd chapter, and is designed to provoke thought in the player as to why exactly they have said feature in the first place. This aligns with the overall message we want to push for this game. Below is a couple of screenshots I have of the 1st model I have created:

As you might have guessed, we're looking to go for a more low-poly retro look to the 3D aspect to differentiate between it and the sleek visuals in the rest of the game screen. We're also looking into some aliasing shaders, but those are a visual feature we'll touch on in the future. I have passed this off to the lead artist on the team and the progress is looking promising. My next steps are to rig and animate this model in engine to get a rudimentary implementation for future iterations.  

For the next couple of weeks, I will be in charge of creating surveys to collect data from our first playtest, analyze it, and then come to a conclusion about what is working and what isn't. There are still a few things we need to discuss before we finally hammer the nail. I intend to ensure that development will no longer stray off into ideation territory, despite how much we wish we could pour into this project. By the time my next log releases, we should have insights and solutions to any issues that may arise during the first test.

- Syd