Week 3

Abstract Our learning objectives for the week were:

Post 1: Planning

As part of the project planning and team leadership aspects I had taken on, I set up a weekly meeting to run Sprint Retrospectives and Sprint Planning sessions.

I also did a lot of organisation of the confluence space, setting up areas for each team member. The structure looked like this:

  • Assignments

    • Presentation

    • Assignment brief 1

    • Assignment brief 2

  • Team Management

    • Team Charter

    • Project Roadmap

    • Golden hours

    • Blog pages

  • Meeting notes

  • Game Design Documentation

  • UX

  • Game Narrative

    • World setting

    • Story setting

    • Character setting

    • Nomenclature

  • Development

  • Art

  • Market Analysis

In addition, I worked on my Sprint tickets and started looking at the story setting, character setting and Nomenclature.

Post 2: Nomenclature

I had a bit of a brainstorm and was left with a few open questions that needed answering for it to make a cohesive story:

  • What abilities will the player gain over time, and in what order?

  • How do these abilities work with enemy abilities to create interesting combat scenarios for the player?

  • Why do characters gain abilities globally, and how does gaining more abilities inform the protagonist's adventure?

  • Does the protagonist gain an ability every time they realise something about their journey, so the player and the character grow together?

  • Who are you fighting?

I knew I couldn't answer these alone, but we discussed a few things as a team to tried and nail down the concept which had to be finalised this week:

Gameplay mechanics

  • 2D isometric

  • Protatgisit Melle and combat

  • Antatagonist Melle only

  • Build some ML agents interact with the character

  • Score system can power-up

  • Kill 'X' amount to enemies to proceed

  • Gradual difficulty shift, based on previous behaviour

Who are the bad guys, define characters

  • Kill the boss to get a blueprint and collect the parts, and then you can deploy that enemy bot to assist.

Companion name (spark) - Grumby and sarcastic, dark humour.

  • Happy with bodies that he likes.

  • The job was a world builder.

I'd made a loose start on the world structure by looking at current world jobs (International Labour Office, 2012) and tried to tier them in our new Rentism/post-scarcity society.

I created the following list of character types:

Grade 1 Managers

  1. Chief executives, senior officials and legislators

  2. Administrative and commercial managers

  3. Production and specialised services managers

Grade 2

  1. Hospitality, retail and other services managers

  2. Professional

    1. Science and engineering professionals

    2. Health professionals

    3. Breeder and conception professionals

    4. Teaching professionals

    5. Business and administration professionals

    6. Information and communications technology professionals

    7. Legal, social and cultural professionals

  3. Technicians and associate professionals

    1. Science and engineering associate professionals

    2. Health associate professionals

    3. Business and administration associate professionals

    4. Legal, social, cultural and related associate professionals

    5. Information and communications technicians

Grade 3

  1. Clerical support workers

    1. General and keyboard clerks

    2. Customer services clerks

    3. Numerical and material recording clerks

    4. Other clerical support workers

  2. Service and sales workers

    1. Personal service workers

    2. Sales workers

    3. Personal care workers

    4. Protective services workers

Grade 4

  1. Skilled agricultural, forestry and fishery workers

    1. Market-oriented skilled agricultural workers

    2. Market-oriented skilled forestry, fishery and hunting workers

    3. Subsistence farmers, fishers, hunters and gatherers

  2. Craft and related trades workers

    1. Building and related trades workers, excluding electricians

    2. Metal, machinery and related trades workers

    3. Handicraft and printing workers

    4. Electrical and electronic trades workers

    5. Food processing, woodworking, garment and other craft and related trades workers

  3. Plant and machine operators and assemblers

    1. Stationary plant and machine operators

    2. Assemblers

    3. Drivers and mobile plant operators

Grade 5

  1. Elementary occupations

    1. Cleaners and helpers

    2. Agricultural, forestry and fishery labourers

    3. Labourers in mining, construction, manufacturing and transport

    4. Food preparation assistants

    5. Street and related sales and service workers

    6. Refuse workers and other elementary workers

From that I decied I created a table of the type of characters that would exist in the game:

Friendlies

Name

Type

Personality

Ability

Human

Main playable

Chip

Companion

Breeder (vulnerable person)

Relies on the main character

Data Scientist (best friend)

Advice and support character

Teacher (mentor/voice of reason)

Main character can undoubtedly trust

Based on John Yorke and other games' best practices, I also created someone who relies on the main character and is vulnerable, someone the main character can look to for advice and support and someone the character can undoubtedly trust.

Enemies

Name

Type

Personality

Abilities

Cleaner

Bot / Basic enemy

Gardener

Bot / Basic enemy

Driver

Bot / Basic enemy

Food vendor

Bot / Basic enemy

Market stall person

Person / Mid level enemy

Coffee Shop worker

Person / Mid level enemy

Personal shopper

Person / Mid level enemy

Hotel concierge

Person / End of level boss

Doctor

Person / End of level boss

Store Manager

Person / End of level boss

Accountant

Person / End of level boss

Chief executive

Person / Final boss

The idea around these character groupings is that all basic jobs are fulfilled with automation and robotics. Humans take jobs that require soft skills, requiring a creative eye and a level of care.

I then stopped there and pulled the ticket into the next sprint as I wanted input from the rest of the team.

References

  1. International Labour Office (2012). International Standard Classifi cation of Occupations. [online] . Available at: https://www.ilo.org/public/english/bureau/stat/isco/docs/publication08.pdf [Accessed 8 Mar. 2020]. ‌

Meeting 1: Sprint Retro and Sprint planning

15/06/2021 In the first third of the meeting, we went over the status of our tickets and presented our progress. We'd been keeping each other up to date in regards to ideas within Discord, so none of it was a surprise.

I'd gone through where I was in terms of the story, built out several characters, created an antagonist and discussed the need to work on the character details more—arranging a workshop for 17 Jun 2021.

The main meeting and talking points were:

Item

Notes

General thoughts

We need to work on the character details more, arrange a workshop at 13:00 on 17 Jun 2021

Sprint Retro

  • Start / Have more time to write our blogs

  • Stop / Filling the sprint with too many tickets

  • Continue / Collaborating the way we are

Sprint Planning

  • Create tickets and close Sprint

The main meeting notes can be found here.

Tutor Meeting 1: Development log and ways of working

16/06/2021 We had our first tutor meeting to clarify a few things regarding our development log and ways of working. I discussed the project planning I had done and my attempts to keep us on track.

We went into a bit of detail about the First draft of the deck and whether it would be enough for the mid-module submission.

The way I had drafted it was:

  • Concept

  • Features

    • Dialogue

    • Graphics

    • Soundtrack

  • Marketing

    • Target Market

    • Markt size

  • Technology

    • ML

    • Roadmap

  • Prototype

  • Team

I'd done it this way based on previous experience and a requirement to tell a story that flows well enough to convince investors.

We also loosely discussed terms of assigning roles on who would talk about which parts of the pitch document.

I asked about Market sizing and the total available market for a rogue-lite game.

Giovanni sent across some reading material and sources to better understand the business proposition of creating a game. I found it difficult to find resources on budget sizes for a lot of Independent launched games.

Giovanni said try not to look or compare ourselves to outlier games and look at newly-released games in that genre and see how they have progressed in the last 6-12 months.

Meeting 2: A Character nomenclature

17/06/2021 I met with Dan and Luke, went through the project plan, and tried to nail down some artwork deliverables. Creating a backlog of most of their items.

Artwork deliverables

  • Base character animations

  • Enemy animation

  • NPC animations

  • Character key art

  • Environments

  • objects/props

    • vending machines

    • street lights

    • crates

    • vehicles

    • tileset

    • In-game Brand stuff

  • UI art

    • hud

    • dialogue

    • menus

    • start screen

    • dead screen

    • pause

    • loading screen

I then went through my ideas about the story and character, and we decided on the team name. Asking them to create a logo.

I went through my reasoning around picking a high elevation city and that Yerevan was one of the world's oldest continuously inhabited cities. We looked at Yerevan and Ashgabat (a local city) and built on the idea that economic borders had merged, and we should Mash-up of both locations.

I went through the nomenclature table I had created, and we started filling out the details:

  • Personality discussion

  • Type of person

  • Abilities decided

    • Main

    • Enemy

    • Fighting style

  • Story discussion - Forgotten what he did, feels burdened about it like Control

This then led to the game mechanics and story pace. I created some names for the NPC characters and left it open for voting

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