Team Organisation

Facebook group

To start off with we made a Facebook group, as this seemed like the easiest way to keep in touch with each other collectively. Here we wanted to post up any helpful tutorials, inspiration, or general information about the game development so it was all in one place.

Gant Chart/Calander

To keep on top of the many aspects of this module, we made a calender, and filled it out with the official deadlines and hand in dates, as well as our own team goals for completing each stage of our work and team meeting dates. On our calender we also chose to have pixel art on each, from illustrators/games/animators we admire. We printed off four copies of our calender, so we had one each, as well as a collective one for our workspace at Uni.

Workspace

We then printed off our calendar and claimed the back of the studio as our own workspace, sticking up our mood boards, spider diagrams, research so far and sticky notes for people to leave feedback on (which happened to be in the shape of a space invader). And obviously we needed a few team photos.

Joint email account 

We also got a joint email account, where we can post similar stuff to the Facebook page, however with this we also could have a Google Drive account so we could actually save the assets and work files in one place, as multiple people would be working on each thing, making file transfer a lot easier.

Ven Diagram

Once we had come together to discuss what we wanted to make our game about, and made a couple of mood boards, we decided the best way to combine all of our ideas was to make a ven diagram. We each had our own colour circle, where we wrote the top things we wanted to include in the game or top influences. This worked really well, and allowed us to have a good focus from the beginning. When we had these key references points down, we discussed other ideas, which are written on the right hand side, of combinations of everything together.

Ash - Black

Liam - Blue

Sacha (Me) - Red

Mood Board - two

We then made a second mood board of games and illustrations with the aesthetic style we enjoy. 

Mood Board - one

Once we had discussed the last two mood boards in depth, and found each of our individual interests, we made a couple of mood boards of games which had certain elements we were interested in. 

We primarily looked at pixel art games, and then early 3D work which was still blocky. 

We all really liked the game FEZ which combines both perfectly, and allows you to switch between playing as a 2D sprite in a flat platform game, to the world around you spinning and turning into a 3D model. This concept really sparked off ideas between us, in the idea of two worlds. Ash then remembered in Zelda: A Link Between Times, there is an interesting game dynamic, where you can switch from playing as a 3D character, to merge with the wall and become a strange cave painting style 2D character to help solve puzzles. 

Style examples

From the basic theme ideas we started to think about how the game would look aesthetically. As part of the brief we can't have a flat platform game (unless that is only for a section of the game), and we needed 3D rigged characters. However we were all interested in 2D pixel art and looked into how we could combine this with the mandatory aesthetic outcomes.

Basic Ideas

After the briefing, we looked at previous work completed for this module from the year above, and looked at each output we need to complete. After this presentation we split into our groups and had the rest of the day for development. 

We first did a spider diagram of the three themes we have to work under, and different game concepts for each. We found we were drawn to the topic challenge the most as most games could fit under this theme.

Module Information - with notes

Module Overview - with notes

Studio Brief - with notes