Pre Production

Helloo! Welcome back to the Puddle Jumpers Gazette!

Our first week was preproduction, we gathered and discussed our team values and schedule, and made any necessary adjustments that we needed to begin production. To start off, we lost two members on the team, who happened to be our dedicated resident artists. The loss was devastating to say the least. That being said, we must press on. At first we decided to rearrange our role, and split the art team’s tasks among ourselves. Needless to say, it would slow development down a lot and cause unwanted stress on the team. But with two members gone, it was our only choice.

As a team, we agreed on simpler art styles, and perhaps in that moment, some of us had lost hope that the game will turn out looking its best. We shifted our focus onto efficiency. By making one standardized character model/template, we might be able to pump out characters and sprites quicker without much effort. Yes, there isn’t much customization capability, but we’d be able to get the job done a lot faster. 

Luckily however, we have since then been offered help from another team’s artist. Our art director had shown her the artstyles that we’re looking for, and we were astonished by the character design that she came up with. IT WAS BEAUTIFUL!

We wished she could join our team permanently as an artist. It seemed as though that was not a possibilty, but she offered to make art for us whenever we need her. In the meantime, we should probably figure out how to sustain the art department ourselves, instead of relying on external sources. 

Now on my part, I was finally able to focus and begin implementing different functionalities into the Unity project. As the designated programmer on the team, I have my work cut out for me. Amy, our producer will be helping out a bit, which would help a tremendous amount. However, I can’t afford to fall behind. 

In the first week, we carried over and polished the functionality from our prototype/ proof of concept. The game is at a state where it is ready to be greyboxed and populated with npcs and npc dialogue! (Huge thanks to Amy for developing quite an expansive dialogue system in her programming class last semester.) 

So far I feel like we are on track and things are getting done right on time. I plan on using this opportunity, seeing how our workload isn’t horrendous at the moment, to go ahead of schedule and pull more tasks from the backlog.