Steven's Personal Blog

This was the first week of work so I worked mostly on getting our idea ironed out with the rest of the team. I drafted up our 1 pager and after review made any necessary revisions. Then I worked on what was left for the 5 pager.

This week I mainly worked on turning our 5 pager to a GDD and starting that. We have also gone more into the details of the game and one thing I will have to continue to work on is making sure that the GDD properly goes over what we're planning for the game. This will also be useful to make sure that we are all on the same page. I also worked on our sell presentation and our next scrum presentation.

For this week my main focus was on project organization for the future weeks. Currently we have just been trying to meet whatever the weekly requirements are for the game which have been sufficient, but moving forward we will need more tasks specific to our game. I decided that we're going to try to use GitHub issues for that as well as milestones for long term goals. The milestones will also be kept track of on our Gannt chart. In the worst case I will look into using Trello next week if this proves difficult, but I think that this will work well.

This week, since we had decided to move away from multiplayer, my main focus was on the GDD. The goal was to make it more concise and better showcase our idea and so it needed to be refactored anyway. With the switch to single player, it makes it easier to demonstrate how the game will work. I also worked on getting our scrum presentation together and getting some in game images for that.

This week we refined our new idea of not having multiplayer. For that I had to make some more changes to our GDD. We all got together to create tasks and refine our idea. Then I set out to add a lot to our playtesting feedback form. It was lacking a lot of details that it needed and it went from 3 questions to over 20. I also worked on our sell presentation. Mainly for this I focused on making it clear to the audience what everything within our game does. It should hopefully be much more clear now, compared to our last presentation. Lastly, I worked on our scrum presentation going over what we all acomplished for this week.

This week I mainly worked on improving our GDD. I focused on getting the player perspective into our example of gameplay and essentially rewrote that section again.

This week aside from the usual scrum presentation, I started working on shaders. I implemented a few very simple shaders that add a fisheye lens as well as some color changes. The color can remove any of RGB and also invert the colors. The shaders can easily be implemented by just dragging a script on the shader and editing any respective parameters. I am looking forward to working on some more shaders to change up the game and add more variety.

This week I first worked with Dmo on the story and Dialogue. He took charge of assembling all of our audio and making it sound great for the game. After recording my parts with Dmo I got to work on the documentation. I have rewritten many parts of our GDD and added to it extensively. One of the most notible parts is the GitHub tutorial which should hopefully help to clear any confusion with Git. We also all met together and drafted up our Sell Presentation so I did some work fleshing that out and getting some of the images and demos in for that. Lastly, I worked on our Scrum presentation this week.

This week was pretty intense. It started out with a lighting issue that was a team effort to resolve. The problem was that we had 10 render pipelines running each frame for the main camera and each monitor. To solve this we made only 1 monitor update each frame. This reduced our render pipelines down to 2. After this it was a rush to get as much in the game and completed as we could. We manager to get a lot done. For me that was mostly documentation and I also managed to get two animated shaders and update the dark spot lens. Here is an example of the TVStaticLens which is now in the game.