This week, I worked a lot on the documentation. I completed the 1-pager for the initial Mech Game proposal and the bulk of the 5-pager for this week's deliverable. I also took some of the notes for the three meetings we had and chipped in a tiny bit on the creation of the website and slides. The biggest adjustment for me was definitely the role of producer - I'm still getting the hang of it, and thankfully, everyone has been very patient. I'm sure I'm not the only one who felt that the turnaround this week was pretty tight, but it feels like we've managed to get the ball rolling and we're working on an idea that I find I really enjoy.
I'm writing this retroactively at around the Week 4 mark, since I unfortunately picked up a concussion near the end of Week 2 and had to stop using screens for a bit. This week I had primarily focused on getting my foot in the door with production work. Since Notion has support for Gantt charts with dependencies, we opted to use it for our Kanban board. I learned to set it up so that our team can create tasks and tag/view them by sprint, priority, status, or category, and those tasks automatically populate into the Gantt chart. The whole team also spent a great deal of time this week meeting to work out specifics in the mechanics, and we also came up with a story that a lot of us find really fun (and it clearly informs the art direction of the game.) I also made the skeleton for this week's scrum presentation but did not do the bulk of the work on it.
I was out of comission for most of the week due to the aforementioned concussion, but towards the end of the week I was feeling well enough to tune into a few of the meetings to make sure I was keeping up with where the team was at.
This week I slowly started to pick back up my work so that it wouldn't burden other team members. I'm refining a better system for checking in and also working with the team to determine if we need a clearer pipeline for the implementation of art and testing of code. I also worked on the scrum presentation and started gathering data on what mechanics and interactions we want feedback on so that we can start thinking about playtesting as soon as possible. Playtesting was one of the main goals we didn't meet this week. We discussed this early on in the sprint and decided that the game wasn't far enough along to receive useful feedback from testers, and that our time would be best spent bringing it to a playtestable state. I also cleaned up the Notion a bit and made it easier to use.
The scope of the game was more or less set in stone this week; I completed a full task list containing most of the expected assets and systems, which will be used to plan work going forward. We did a lot of level design work this week and had a meeting pertaining to how we wanted to approach our platforming design and the mechanics surrounding it. I advocated for (and continue to advocate for) making a blockout "kit" of pre-sized elements which we can place now and decide the textures of later. Since the state of the demo is slightly behind, it was important to spend time refining our vision for the final vertical slice. I also worked on the scrum and sell presentations.
This week I primarily worked on production materials, including reorganizing this whole website to look and behave more neatly. I also learned last week that we're swinging a week ahead where I thought we were (due to a missed class/week on a holiday) so that gives us more wiggle room on certain deadlines. To that end, the sell presentation wasn't actually due last week, it was due this week, and I got extra time to polish it and update it with things from this sprint. I also did the scrum. There's still a way to go on cleaning up the rest of the production materials in accordance with the notes the professor gave us, but Aiden and I have gotten started. The GDD and KanBan/Asset list are our primary targets at the moment. We're aiming to get all our materials into a state where people can onboard themselves with as few questions as possible.