Tasks Completed

• Researching visual/node-based scripting plugins: 5 hours
• Meetings: 2 hours
• GDD work: 1.5 hours
• Experimenting with StoryGraph: 1 hour

Total Hours: 9.5 hours

Positive

After we built our Week 2 prototype, I wanted to focus on finding an efficient, easy-to-use toolset for building levels for our game. I wanted it to be accessible enough for any of my teammates to learn quickly and use with minimal fuss. Ideally, we'll be able to draft up designs for levels and have working prototypes within an hour or two. Node editors are common solutions to simplifying scripting for non-programmers, so I started searching for one in the Unity asset store.

After spending way too long testing out various free options (they were terrible), I settled on StoryGraph, a paid asset developed by my friend Matt Wagar. I've used it before on a previous project, so I'm familiar enough with it to implement it for our game and teach teammates how to use it.

After filling out the Tech Requirements section of the GDD, I got a good sense of the systems we'd need to design for our game.

Negative

While using StoryGraph sounds great in concept, we're really not sure how many of us will be working on designing levels in Unity besides me and Rush; we're unsure whether it'd just be a pain to limit ourselves to a node editor. In the (likely) case that it's just the two of us using this framework, I imagine we'll see most of the payoff in the next term of the class when the new teammates begin putting together levels in Unity. They only have one programmer and few 2D artists, so I'm sure at least one or two of them will work on levels with us.

Since we're not 100% set on using StoryGraph, I'll be testing it out as a viable alternative while Rush continues maintaining/expanding our current codebase. That way we have a solid fallback in case it doesn't pan out. I also haven't had time to try recreating our current level in StoryGraph, so I'll have to get on that as soon as possible.

Tasks Completed

• Team Meeting - 2.0 hours
• Organized team's Google Drive notes, documents, presentations, and tools - 1.0 hour
• Concepted new designs of Ghost main character - 1.0 hour
• Concepted new designs of logos - 1.5 hours
• Created overall color palette of game - 30 minutes
• Assisted in the development of the GDD - 3.0 hours
• Created Trello cards and established system of labels - 30 minutes
• Created and led development on Artboard - 2.5 hours

Total Hours: 10 hours

Positive

This week was very productive in terms of creating concepts and getting the deliverables done. I led the development of the Artboard and organized the Game Design Document to be a lot more formalized, detailed, and cohesive. Still, it's a first pass at it, so I don't expect it to be anywhere near done. We finally got our final color palette to use as a team, and I expect that all our assets will look great once color has been placed on them. I also created some concepts and sketches and finalized the design of of three things: 1) our studio logo, 2) our game logo, and 3) our main protagonist, Hatto, the "Scared" Ghost!

Negative

Working on all of these deliverables and creating content for the game at the same took a lot of time and effort to get it running, and it took a toll on my sleeping schedule, but I want to lend that to not there being enough hours in a day for me to create the work that I did. I also did not get to create new assets to use in-engine nor did the other artists on the team unfortunately. However, we do have a closer, fleshed-out look of our game idea now!

Upcoming

My plan for this upcoming week is to gather the art team to discuss a lot of standardization of art assets by tying in the final color scheme, art style, and specifying the animation frames and style in Photoshop and Unity. I plan to do this by creating 3 example assets to show for my teammates and they'll use that to use to reference how to match the colors and style of their assets with the game.

Personally, I am continuing to work on documentation of the things that we have and will discuss. I also want to create more concepts for assets in our game.

Tasks Completed

• Meetings: 2 hours
• Research/Color Pallette: 1 hour
• GDD: 1 hour
• Doodles: 1 hours

Total Hours: 5 hours

Positive

This week was all about setting up a foundation for moving forwards. The mood boards and the style were the big point of this week. We wanted to get ourselves unified for the direction that we want to head in and I think this week was well done in that respect. From what I found I think a slightly darker color palette is want to want to go towards “Lofi Hiphop” ironically is the closest match for the types of colors and the tone we ended up going with.

Negative

As far as art goes I didn’t produce much this week. My original animations were scrapped and we are redesigning the ghost so it was more planning than it was doing for me this week. I’m doing doodles to maybe flesh out the character style that we chose, but nothing has been totally set in stone just quite yet

Upcoming

Next week I think we are going to set the designs in stone and hopefully begin animations so we can begin to polish the produced art.