Week 4

This week we officially began development after a meeting with all our team members during a lab. In this we did exactly what we set out to do, we set up everyone’s roles and I showed off my ideas for the game. The 2D platformer featuring the man made out of ice was met with no objections by the team and so this is officially the game we are doing.

 

As I said we set up our roles and I got the role I wanted being producer as well as another artist in Ethan who agreed to work on graphics with me. My plan is for him to work on mainly enemies while I focus on all of the Player animations as well as tiles and backgrounds.

 

I also got the job of sound design and composer, this is a role that I am very excited to fulfil as before ultimately choosing to study computer science in college I was tempted to choose Music as my field of study as I have a background of producing as well as playing keyboard and bass.

Since I am now in charge of all things aesthetics I am now responsible for making sure the player, the world and its music all have their own identity and work well together. The type of music I am used to making typically has a very vintage, funk, motown kind of sound however since I am now making music for a video game I believe leaning towards a more synthy kind of vibe would be the way to go. Older games such as those old sonic games were on very weak systems such as the sega Genesis and so they also had a very weak sound chip that could only handle a certain amount of sounds. However composers were aware of this and made the best with what they had by embracing their limitations by having entirely synthesized soundtracks and souly relying on their skills in composition. This kind of quality of embracing limitations is one that we should aim to replicate the best we can as we all have minimal experience in this field and are against the clock. The software I will be using is LogicPro as it is simply what I am used to being a Mac user and all.

 

 

And so that then gave me the idea of going full blown retro with not only the games sounds but its look and feel also. There is an indie game that came out recently called Animal Well that incorporated an old style VHS sort of filter look over the whole game which really addeed to the games aestetics and charm. This is now something that I wish to replicate and so I assigned this job to programmer Sean Carroll on the team.

It was also decided that the engine we would use would be unity as it seems to be popular with the rest of the team. Though its not my first choice I do see why they would wish to use it and since I will be doing minimal programming this honestly does not affect me a whole lot.

 

 

How we are all gonna be able to work on the same files on different devices was also discussed and I had thought using google drives would be the best way to do this, after an extensive conversation with lecturer Gavin Wade we discovered it would be better to use GitHub as our way of sharing our contributions.

 

Beyond that everyone else got their jobs and now understands what they have to do, it was discussed in the lecture this week to get to work ASAP as it is better to fail at things faster so you more time to resolve your issues.

Tasks At Hand

  1. Get cracking on player sprite and animations
  2. Make a start on the games music
  3. Regularly check in on team members and make sure they are not having any trouble with their tasks.

What I Learned

  1. Game developers use GitHub to share files and that should be the standard moving forward for me.
  2. It is good to embrace limitations in terms of sound and aesthetics and retro looks definiately have their audience.
  3. It is good to not be stubborn and surrender your pride on something you want if at the end of the day it will benefit your team such as changing game engines.
Week 5