This week we began back after our break, and decided that it was important to have a clear foundation set out for our game as well as plan the upcoming production. We discussed what our timeline for this semester will look like and some challenges we might face and how to rectify them. Our key areas of focus currently are: game mechanics and implementation, bug fixing, level creation and asset production. We have altered our roles from last semester slightly with Nathan taking up more of a coding role to support Lewis further. This means that I (Evie) and Theresa will be focusing on asset production more. Kris and I have taken the role as marketing manager and will be working on marketing and PR for our game, Kris is also looking into more into texturing assets. Theresa will be very busy this semester with bug testing as our test lead and also potentially will make some animations for the game. We tried to redistribute our roles to alleviate some of the stress Lewis was dealing with as the sole coder of the game.

A short summary of what each team member did this week:

Kris (Producer & Marketing)

This week I have worked on some beginning of the level design for 2nd stage. Main aim was to drop down ideas on some themes and explorations of what the level should look like and how will they variate from each other. I have also done some quick sketching to develop discussion sketches for what the layout should look like for main point positioning.

Theresa (Test Lead)

I did a fair bit of bug report and added 1 or 2 feature requests. I did a bit of scribble over how people navigated around the current level. Just trying to figure out how we could make it bit more efficient and still keep the chaos.

Nathan (Design Lead)

This week was spent mostly in discussion with my teammate Lewis, who will be the other coder, on the solid foundation of our mechanics. Making sure we have a clear vision of what we want to aim for by the end of this semester is the most important thing to get right at the start, and I think we have a pretty solid plan going forward for this project

Evie (Art Lead & Marketing)

This week I was working on designing the layout of the 1st level. This level is very paired back compared to our final and will work as an introductory level to new players. I tried out a few different layouts which all tried to push the player through the house or create different routes for them to take. I also had a look over the current state of our game and took notes on some things that can use polish for this semester to just elevate the quality of our game, these are changes that we can make throughout the semester.

Lewis (Tech Lead)

I worked with Nathan, who I will be sharing coding duty with this semester, to finalise the plan for all the mechanics that will be implemented. There are critical bugs that need addressing first, but I’m glad we now have a far more detailed picture of how exactly the levels will be structured in terms of gameplay. With clear design goals, we should be able to work efficiently.