In the preproduction phase I took on two roles. The first being the team lead, and the second being the programmer. As the team lead it was my job to guide the design process and support the team's design, and to resolve any team conflicts that we may have had throughout our study. Thankfully the latter issue was not a problem, the team worked together wonderfully. During this time I was very hands-on with our game design document, describing many features of our game (Figures 1, and 2) and assuring that my language was clear enough for my team members to understand exactly what my expectations were for these features.

Figures 1,2 - Game Mechanics: These are some of the mechanics I had a hand in writing.

My second role as a programmer had me making a prototype of some of the features in our game. I mainly focused on creating a working inventory system (Figure 3), but additionally we created some tools for moving our character around, and creating a tool for the camera that sets up the boundaries that the camera can not escape (Figures 4, and 5).  This was by far the biggest challenge, because creating items with properties that can be added and saved into an inventory was quite the monumental task. My greatest challenge so far has been allowing the player to move items within the inventory because it required me to change the entire system and make it a little more resource intensive (I made each inventory slot its own object). I hope that this does not have too much effect on the performance of the game, but it should be okay based on my testing thus far.

Figure 3 - Inventory System: You can add objects and move them around within the inventory.

Figure 4 - Movement tool: game designers can adjust a few parameters to adjust the player speed

Figure 5 - Camera tool: You can adjust the bounds of the camera, how fast it moves, what it looks at, and the camera offset.  

As of now we really only have the skeleton of a game, but with most of the player actions programmed into the game, we now get to shift our focus on expanding the world around the player in order to make those actions feel good. I don't want to celebrate too soon, but Barracuda III (my team) is shaping up to making something quite special.