Week 1 Reflection – Project & Group Reveals

Our first week was purely about the project unveiling, and meeting with our teams for the first time — on Thursday I would find out that my team project was Elina’s game concept, Soul Keeper (one that I voted for previously!), and that I would be working with Lettie, Misty, Xuan and Yulia as the group’s technical designer.

We decided though that these roles would fluctuate: because some of my teammates wanted to work on different aspects of the game than they were assigned, we quickly chose as a collective to abstract them to broader art and tech roles.

We figured this way we could have a pre-estrablished contingency plan; if one of us on the art or tech side were absent for an extended period, it would be easier to assign the work to the other teammate on the respective side.

It also would lead to us having stronger communication, as the art side and the tech side would be working collaboratively a lot.

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Finally, we spent some time setting up our short-term goals for the project; what we would be getting up to over the coming week(s). We made a simple mindmap and sketched out our plans.

On the art side, Lettie and Xuan would be working to create rough concept artwork for the game and develop a coherent artstyle between them that we could use for the game’s materials.

Meanwhile, myself and Misty would be working on setting up the shared GitHub for the project for the whole team, and create a simple game prototype using greyboxing in which the player can walk up-down-left-right to set the game’s earliest foundations.

My specific role in the project would be to work on a peacock minigame in which the player restores its colour by dragging the mouse over its feathers — I knew this would be a challenging task to set myself but I wanted to purposefully bring myself out of my comfort zone a little with this project, as a way to test myself and learn new skills along the way.

Overall, I think the first week went well. I am very happy with the team I have been set with and think that our project will be a successful one!