Sydney's Personal Log #3

Sydney Smith's Dev Log

Production

 Personal Log #3: Work, Work, Work...

Once again, a few weeks have gone by as we are slowly moving forward and making progress towards our vertical slice. We had successfully completed our first playtest and received some important feedback on the game's structure, aesthetics, and dialogue. We had tested with a version of the game itself made in Twine, with another visual placed in the Unity engine to show off the game's visuals considering our current development state at that time. We also now have concepts for beginning and end screens from our artist, story structure is sorted out, along with the programmatic structure taking  shape. Now, our main goal for the next few weeks is to get a revised (or Beta) version of the chapter #1 dialogue implemented in Unity, along with a framework and Alpha version of the chapter #2 dialogue in as well. We will also be conducting another playtest with the previously mentioned features implemented.

One of these weeks was our dedicated reading week in which no classes were held. Some members made it clear that they would not be able to dedicate much time to this project to focus on other responsibilities, which was foreseeable and planned for. We, as students enrolled in the Honours Bachelor of Game Design program at Sheridan, understand that there is a program-wide event called design week in which participating  students work together in teams on a game based on a given prompt or challenge. All team members participated, leaving less time to put towards Project Runtime. This was another event that we understood would leave us with less development time.

One of my main contributions towards the group these past weeks was taking care of the organization for the first playtest. I will also be in charge of organizing the next one. I was also able to test out some implementations for the cameras for chapter #2, with only minor issues with the rendering order that shouldn't be too difficult to fix.

A screenshot of the Unity scene with the camera and character being rendered.

You may have already seen it, but I was able to implement the first version of character #1, who will be textured soon at some point during the polishing process, not to rush our artist at all. This model is also completely rigged and weight painted properly for implementation. 

A screenshot of the model inside Maya, with all bones and movement done properly.

Another member of the team asked if I could create some concepts for the game's soundtrack, which isn't a strong suit of mine as I had never studied anything in relation to music theory other than dabbles in foley art. As the team's generalist, I am up for the task of trying it out, but there are no promises of quality work. I will also need to assist other members with implementing much of the dialogue since it is such a massive part of the game and such a heavy task.

I noticed many members of the team also haven't used Jira as much as we mentioned we would from previous weeks. I have yet to discuss this with the team, but we may end up using a different tool or trying something different to keep track of what needs to be done.

- Syd