Connected Games DEVLOG 3 (Feb 23 - Mar 9)

Ideation Presentation

I created the presentation and invited my team to help edit it and write the script. I ended up having to fill in a majority of it while the programmers handled all the technical aspects of it. I had some help with the slides from one of the other designers, Sagar. I filled in the script as well. I also started making cleaner visuals to be used for the presentation and for the GDD eventually. I took a sketch of the game progression I had made and made it look more visually appealing.

Our presentation went alright, but I could tell that on the design side of things we were lagging behind other teams. I wrote down a list of things that we needed to catch up on quickly. That list included refining all of our first draft designs, figuring out the math behind our designs, making concept art for everything, creating the level, creating assets where we needed them, and getting our music and sound effects figured out. I raised my concerns to the team, and the programmers agreed. From there, I organized a sprint sheet for us to use. It's primarily to keep the designers on track and to make sure everyone is consistently working.

New Working Structure

With our new sprint sheet in place, I also wanted to instill sprint meetings. These would be quick 10 minute meetings we'd do every day to say what we've been working on and to mark that on the sprint sheet. This was my solution to the problem of things not getting done fast enough or not getting done at all. Alex, one of the programmers on the project, also suggested we have an hour long in person meeting once a week to doubly make sure we were all on the same page on what we should be doing and working on, because there was a persistent problem of mismatched work expectations.

Refinement

I began going through my parts of the design and making tweaks to the design with notes from programmers. I added an option to the shop design for it to just be UI instead of the physical shop I had originally designed for just in case the programmers wouldn't have time to put something like that together. We had also decided to shift from puzzles entirely to opportunities for chaos, so I took my designs for puzzles and reworked them to better fit our new vision. I also started going through what I designed for the HUD and I began sketching it out.

Creating the HUD

I had joined the programmers one afternoon for a work session. I found this to be very productive, as I ended up nearly completing the HUD for them in this session. I started by creating several thumbnails of what the HUD could look like for them to assess.

From these thumbnails, we worked together to create a more finalized sketch:

From here I started creating the individual elements of the HUD so that they could be easily implemented by the programmers. Even in the creation process, we were still making changes. I decided in changing the enemy indicator from an arrow on the screen to making the reticle's whiskers shake depending on where the enemy was.

After completing all the elements of the HUD, I put them all together to see what they would look like. This was the result:

All of the assets were given to the programmers and they started implementing them right away.

Next Steps

I was going to do what I could to make sure all the designers stuck to the sprint sheet so that we could get everything we needed done and done quickly, as we were running out of time to get everything together. We really needed to get everyone's rewrites done so that everything could be put together into the GDD and so that the programmers had a road map of what they were making.