Month 1: Game Design Pre-Production
This video shows a quick weekly demonstration of what is being achieved during the milestones.
Key Things I Worked On This Month:
Project Details:
Every milestone consisted of seven-day sprints, requiring everyone on the team to log a minimum of 40 hours of credible work for each milestone. At the beginning of each milestone, a Task List was created that contained an overview of what we wished to accomplish for that milestone. Tasks were prioritized and dependencies were also mentioned to clarify further which tasks would hold higher priorities than others. Each member of the team would write out the Completion Criteria for each task that clearly stated what classified the task as completed. Finally, we wrote in an Estimated Time of Completion to determine if we were within the range of fulfilling all the tasks during the seven-day milestone.
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Took the initiative to implement a new turret as a level mechanic
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Designed a mini-map to show the enemies and the player's location
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Helped perform playtests to gather critical game bugs, levels feedback, and gameplay balancing
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Tuned and balanced multiple systems for a better game experience
Below you can find more information related to the month!
Ideas & Design
During this first month, we wanted to start building mechanics in order to have an idea of what we wanted and could achieve in 4 months. We decided to go with a "Bottom-Up" process since we didn't know what we wanted to incorporate into the game at that time. What we knew was that we wanted a fast-paced movement Third-Person Action Platformer game, so we all agreed with this and we started building the character movement along with several game mechanics without focusing on the story or any other content related to this.
Designing the Combat
We also featured the first iteration of our combat system, which at that time was something basic and not very sophisticated, but we had something that the player could use besides being a simple platformer game. We also included different player mechanics which were a warp-strike, a time slow-down ability, a wall-running, an AOE attack, a spin attack, a mini-map, and a skill menu that the player could use to acquire new skills and progress through the game.
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Implementing Level Mechanics
We wanted to add some Level Mechanics in which the player could interact with them in order to progress, providing a different experience across all levels. We decided to add turrets, jump pads, an objective tracking system, and a cutscene system. All this was later implemented in a test scene for us to perform a QA process and see if it was fun and at the same time listen to the player's opinions.
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After performing some QA tests, hearing the player's feedback, and analyzing the mechanics we had at that moment, we decided to cut some of the main Player and Level Mechanics we had by the end of the second milestone of that month. Of all the mechanics we had, we decided to eliminate the turrets, the jump pads, the slow-down time ability, and the mini-map. The purpose of this was to avoid delays. We also did not know how to implement them correctly in the game, apart from the fact that they were not being used much by the player. Also, some of these mechanics had bugs and other problems that we had to fix first, so we decided to remove them instead.
Skill Menu
We also ended up adding a skill menu, in which the player was supposed to grab the skills by exploring the levels and reaching the end of some of the sections. This mechanic worked great and gave the player a meaningful decision by choosing which skill they wanted to unlock at that moment.
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Gallery
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