Blog Post #3
What's the Plan?
These past three weeks of developing our game have gone by quickly! We've managed to fit what feels like a ton of work into the last few weeks. It's been a significant amount of getting to know each other and our work styles, as well as coming together to fully realize the core ideas and foundations for our game.
After the first week where we evaluated and re-evaluated our game ideas to put together something we're all excited to work on, we jumped headfirst into development. By Alpha (the end of the third week), we had many core elements to the game fleshed out. Our fabulous narrative writer and designer Gale put together a large document, basically fully thinking through the basic narrative for what could be the entire game. After that, she narrowed it down to the section that we would be focusing on for this vertical slice, aka what we are capable of getting done for this shorter project. Our vertical slice will take place further into the game, providing enough context to engage the player without giving away the entire story. The narrative for this section revolves around Marley realizing that the entities in this place may have knowledge of her past, and can use it to taunt her. The slice aims to display a tonal shift into Marley, and hopefully in turn the player, becoming more stressed about her situation and being placed in a situation where she may have to face her past and internal issues.
Here are some art concepts/mock-ups/beginning assets that we've produced for Alpha!
Here's the first draft of our VDD that we created for Alpha! We will continue to polish and adjust it moving forward to Beta, but we believe it's a solid base to continue from.
[Insert gif of build] Here's a gif/video of our build so far, our goal was to have all of the main mechanics in-game. We still have yet to integrate puzzles, however, due to our team's lack of a technical/systems/puzzle designer. We plan to meet with mentors about puzzles and get all of the ones we want to have into the build for Beta and testing, of course.
We have been continuing to manage our time using Monday to track our tasks, and logging hours on Clockify. Monday has been helpful to us in setting up tasks for all of the sprints through the project, and adjusting as we need to moving forward. One of our major goals coming into the Alpha week and going ahead was/is to continue to break down tasks into manageable and detailed sub-items or checklists. If someone has too many tasks with themselves tagged as the owner, we try to address it and ask if there's enough time in the sprint for the individual to complete all of the tasks. If not, we work on delegating the task to someone who is capable and has the time to do so. One of our team and studio values as a whole is taking care of yourself, and to not push yourself to work beyond your limits. If a team member needs to take a day off to recuperate, and there's a specific task needed, we will do our best to work around it or have someone take it up if possible.
Every week we check in and make sure we're on the right track for what deliverables are due. If there's a piece of the vertical slice that seems like it will be too much to include, especially by beta, we will set it down and move forward without. Beta's aim is to be feature-complete, so in the next three weeks our main focus is getting everything needed to test, and to have everything we need in the build. Art does not necessarily need to be fully polished, but it's important everything is in to be tested and iterated on before the end of the project.
This is the spreadsheet of our current timeline for the program. It is based off of the main Rad Studio timeline, with some updates for the goals set for each week. The weeks have been going by quite quickly, and having a guideline is helpful. Every team member has committed to 20-30 hours a week of work, varying depending on life circumstances and mental health. We have scheduled work time every day between 1-5, but hours can shift depending on the individual. If there is a mandatory meeting besides the weekly one on Mondays, the meeting is put into the calendar and reminders are sent out via discord. The spreadsheet can be found here.
Based on the progress we've made so far, and our plan going forward, we're confident we will reach beta with our build feature-complete, and will be ready to test the game by the end of the week of July 13th-17th. By then we will also have a QA form that we will use to help test our game for the final two and a half weeks. Until the deadline, we will be polishing anything that needs it for our vertical slice! We're set on the right track, and can't wait to continue making this game.