Written by Ollie

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In our second meeting in class hours, we needed to get together and discuss our expectations on how we would work as a group – things like how we would communicate, when our meetings would take place, etc.

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Firstly we created a sheet of our individual work preferences, strengths and weaknesses to get a general vibe of how everyone wants to go about making the project. See below:

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Our main task though was to create a “team contract” of sorts: laying out what we expect from each other and our motivations for the project.

We settled on a list of objectives, displayed further below but also summarised here in written form for clarity.

• Store the project using a shared GitHub
• Maintain a backup of all group files using OneDrive

• Have weekly meetups: Tuesday afternoons (starting at 1pm) & Friday afternoons before games business class (also starting 1pm)

• Use Slack for online communication: one channel for posting/sharing our work and another for casual group talk

• Don’t rule out any conflicting ideas. Experiment and ideate, but still keep time constraints in mind!

• Set weekly deadlines and objectives to keep us motivated and working consistently

• What motivates us:
  • sense of achievement
  • fulfilling the game vision
  • creating a great player experience

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Written by Ollie

Status: WIP (written work is done, needs an image to show the new role layout — going to work on this at home very soon)

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On the first Thursday of the semester, the selected projects that we would be working on were revealed, as well as the teams and team structures for each.

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Soul Keeper was the last team project to be revealed – the game concept and design document was the work of Elina Orlovska, one of our fellow second year students. It’s an isometric 2D game revolving around the idea of “restoring the order of life by connecting with nature and animals through the world around you”, as put by her elevator pitch.

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Our team was revealed as such:

Ollie (me!) would be the group’s technical designer, overseeing the general design for the game and being a bridge between the art and mechanics for the game.

Xuan as the environment artist, in charge of creating the lushous landscapes for Soul Keeper – one of the game’s defining factors.

Lettie as our character artist, responsible for creating the character designs for both the player character and the all-important animals the player would be interacting with.

Misty as our mechanics designer — in charge of scripting and all the behind-the-scenes work that goes into the game engine…

…and Yulia as the world designer, behind the layout and organisation of the world and its assets: again, very key to the direction of this game.

All of us had the understanding that these roles would fluctuate though, and later we would come to re-establish them somewhat to better fit our preferences.

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After some discussion, we decided that because of the project’s scope and prefrences within the group, we would keep our given roles but rely on them much more loosely, reconfiguring into simple two groups of two: Ollie and Misty as the tech/design group, and Lettie and Xuan as the art group.

Despite these two groupings, we want to avoid becoming bubbled within them and so are going to have meetups as a full group whenever possible — rather than fully dividing into disconnected groups of two.

[image here]

Unfortunately, Yulia is currently absent and it seems she will stay unavailible for the medium-term, so we are planning around this and are splitting the responsiblities of world design between both sides of the team. If she comes back during the project, she would act between both groups.

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Finally, we spent some time setting up our short-term aims for the first week of the project:

On the art side of things, 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.

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

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