This weeks Monday lecture was about teamwork. We focused on getting to know each others working styles and how we all like to best communicate.
The four of us that were in attendence sat down and filled in this grid given to us by the lecturer. We listed our work preferences, strengths, struggles and communication preferences. Most of us like to work alone but our technical designer likes group work so we will have to be a bit flexible to accomodate that. Our strengths are varied and most of us like face to face communication.
After that exercise we were encouraged to write up a team contract where we outline what we want from the project and make a commitment to the group.
Ours includes sharing work and keeping backups, commiting to twice weekly meetings. Using Slack as our communication line. To always entertain ideas – time permitting.
We also included what motivates us a sense of achievement, fulfilling the vision of the GDD and creating a great player experience.
After the team contract was written we were reintroduced to user stories. We first were introduced to these last semester from a guest speaker.
They take the format of:
As a [blank]
I want [blank]
So that [blank]
To write these we consulted the game pillars in the GDD and based our responses off of those. I contributed two
| As a player I want a visually beautiful game So that I can immerse myself into the world. | As a Player I want my decisions to matter So that I can feel the consequences of my actions. |
This is a board of our user stories. We used stickers to colour code them.
Once we had the user stories we began making up tasks relating to the story. For my visually beautiful one I decided to experiment with watercolour and begin designing the character.
This system will help us keep on track with our goals and helps us never stray too far away from the desired vision.
Tuesday Meeting –
in this meeting we sorted out who would be writing the team blog posts – the technical artist. I had set up categories and a menu for the website the previous day. We also wrote up this piece of paper which we will update at the start of every week to see if we have completed the tasks on them or if they are still relevant. Everyone also provided an update as to what they had been working on the technical artist and mechanics designer had a working prototype and the other artist had created an isometric concept for the UI.
In Thursdays lesson we turned our attention to project planning and the timeline we have.
I created this roadmap for us to refer back to during the project. It is in a miro board that everyone can access and add too. We have compulsory playtesting sessions in week 5 and week 8 I have marked these with stars. The plan for the roadmap is to add tasks and goals as we go.
During the session we also had some issues as the other artist was worried about the artstyle not being consistent. I strongly believe that we can both adapt and make it work, within the same miro board there is an art style section that we should both be uploading images to. We both like the water colour style so to try and asssuade her fears at the next Tuesday meeting we are going to sit down together and practise with some watercolour, allowing the rest of the group to see and decide if we need to pivot direction.
She also came up with the idea of using a “paper doll” style of animation for the character, this would significantly lower the workload and is a fantastic idea – she is going to conduct more research into it over the weekend.
It was also revealed that next week we will present our work to the class using this template:
We decided that we would create the presentation at our next Tuesday meeting.
Next Steps:
To prepare for the meeting next week I will collate my work into one powerpoint slide and I will continue to develop the character.
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