Connected Games DEVLOG 3 (Mar 10 - Mar 23)

Setbacks & The Game Design Document

Work wasn't progressing like I had hoped it would. The sprint sheet and meetings worked for most of us but key parts of the work still weren't being done, and a majority of that work fell on me to complete. This was a situation I was trying to avoid by setting up these lists and meetings. We had another meeting about it and things improved slightly. We still have sprint meetings and we have our regular in person meetings. The programmers have more meetings outside of these and I've been joining them when I can because I get a lot done.

I had started putting the GDD together. My initial plan was that each designer would be responsible for designing a third of it, that way we could stitch everyone's sections together, edit it, and then have a nice GDD by the end of this. This did not end up happening as smoothly as I had hoped. A lot of reworks I said needed doing did not happen nearly quickly enough. I ended up having to do a lot of redesign work due to this, as our game had changed and the programmers needed some changes implemented as well. This slowed things down on my end, as I had to completely rewrite certain sections of the GDD. These rewrites also included me doing math to figure out how the designs would work in game, so some sections would take me over an hour to write.

After a lot of writing, editing, and formatting, I got the GDD to a final draft that I was happy with. I would just need to make some tweaks to it and make it look like it matched our game with illustrations and design before it's fully ready to be turned in.

Logo and Additional Illustrations

Now that I was finishing up my design responsibilities I got to move on to doing the part of the project I was really excited about: creating artwork for it. Right after I finished the HUD I started making sketches for what the logo could be. I did this while working alongside the programmers and Sagar.

From there, I started lining the logo. I wanted it to look very cartoony so that it matched our game well.

While I was coloring and rendering, my cat Pete ended up on the logo.

After completing the logo and the GDD I started creating additional illustrations. These might be used in game to show how to do some of the tasks, but they will also be used in the presentation and in the GDD. I had fun with these, they were very gestural. After spending so much time on the GDD doing very rigid design and math, it was a lot of fun just to draw cats being silly. It helped reinvigorate excitement for this project.

Next Steps

We will need to start putting together our final presentation as well as finishing the GDD. I am hoping going forward the sprints will be completed much quicker, as we do not have much more time and I have made my expectations of what I need and when clear. The deadlines are coming up quickly and I know I will be doing a lot of the work pulling all of it together.