Interactive Display Production 3

After a few weeks without an in person meeting, it was nice to finally be able to meet this week. Things that were taking a while to resolve remotely were quickly handled today and we all got up to pace on the current state of the project. Along with that I assisted with a few small programming issues that had popped up. I focused on adding in the user stories for tasks and updating the current state of each task. Almost all of our user stories were focused on the actual player due to the nature of the project. To me, this made writing the user stories a bit easier as every task was obvious in its importance. Along with updating the trello, there were several tasks moved into review today. I reviewed them and ensured they were ready to be incorporated into the build. These tasks were then pushed to second phase awaiting being added to the build. Next week I will be breaking down more of our goals so work can continue as well as testing the build out.

Unfortunately our team has not had as much face to face time as we would have liked due to weather and illness. On the bright side however, our team has been making quite a bit of progress on the various tasks we've been working on. This also gave me more time to work on our GDD. After we had finished roadmapping the other week we had some discussions on what we felt the general layout for the yard should be. This was incredibly productive as it allowed us to generate a list of what assets the art team would need to create and gave Steven somewhere to start on the whitebox for the level. From there I took most of the ideas we talked about and included them into the GDD. Mainly I focused on the different locations in the yard and how we envisioned them tying into the overall gameplay. Out of the locations we came up with, I particularly liked the idea of going into a sand box and sand castle. I think there is something about it that captures the sense of scale so well. Anyhow, w...

Last week we formed our team and got all of the team infrastructure in place. So this week we focused on getting the road mapping done and out of the way so that next week we can hit the ground running. We made good use of the whiteboards in the room for this process. We started by creating a list of all the elements we wanted in the game. Then we assigned them numbers based on how essential they were to the game experience. Things such as a Player Controller were given a 0 for essential while things like sound effects were given a 3 for nice, but not the highest priority. After compiling this list we took the elements on it and created larger goals for the teams from them. For instance we combined player movement, camera control, a health system, and a couple of other small items into the 'Player' goal. This will allow us to have the team focus on one or two major features at once and properly utilize the trello. The road mapping took most of the class period but the time ...