I’m going to talk a little bit about what we are focusing on this week, as well as some things that I think our team needs to think about over the longer term. I guess these could also be looked at as things that need to be considered when forming a team, but that we have not done up to this point.
This week: We are continuing our mission to break everything into component pieces and try to find out where our fun elements are. Early contenders are moving various pieces of the world around to solve puzzles and allow progress.
Up to now we have been building a fairly basic platformer in which the player moves through the world and avoids bad things and so on. Think Mario Bros, Donkey Kong Country and those sorts of games.
But with our new thinking, we end up with a game that has more in common with Monument Valley or Echochrome in which all of the elements of the world are there to see, and your mission as a player is to manipulate all of these elements into the correct positions to allow the character to proceed.
This style of game is potentially more at home on a mobile device than a PC, and that will be something that we will need to discuss if we end up following this path.
All of this is still up in the air of course, this is just my latest thinking.
The other thing I wanted to discuss this week was defining group roles and using that as a way to convey ownership.
So far we haven’t had much of a structure within our group. As I have discussed previously, I took on a decision making role, but that was the only real defined(-ish) role that we had.
This coming semester, I’m keen for everyone within the team to have a role and title that they can take on and clearly state that that is the part of the project that they are responsible for.
There are two reasons for this:
- I think it will help to have each group member to have ownership of a particular element of game production.
- It will take some of the load off me!
OK, that second point is a bit of a laugh. But, I think we will be better off if there is more than one person making all of the calls in development, and having a go-to person for different elements will help, I hope.
Finally: back on schedule for this week! Not a whole lot of actual game stuff to discuss, sorry, I seem to be focused more on team dynamics at the moment. I’m going to try to have some proper game news for next week.
I see that there are people looking over these, which is cool. If you have any feedback, disagreements or just want to make fun of me for writing a development blog, feel free to hit me up on twitter @kipslife.