Weekly Journal - Week 2

Reading Notes

This week I caught up on the reading from last week and read about agile and the crisis in game development. The problem mostly centers around waiting too long to make things fun, which is how waterfall is set up to work. Too much work is done on the front end, so that if things turn out to not be fun by the time implementation comes around, it's too late to make major adjustments. The chapter on Agile is poised as the solution to this problem, by splitting development up into smaller, more manageable chunks, allowing you to iterate faster and get more fun into the game with less money wasted.

These more management chunks are referred to as "sprints" and typically last between 2-4 weeks. At the end of each sprint the intention is that a playable and useable version of the game is output, making regular play testing to "find the fun" is possible. Polish of the features to be kept in the game can happen and every few sprints a "near-shippable release" can be generated with the features and gameplay in a more polished state.

Work Notes

This week I was focused on making up for lost time during week 1 and worked on my game design document. I was able to plow through a lot of the technical information, such as the core attributes, what calculations they affected, some design on the magic system, a small amount of design and description on how perma-death works, and a lot of work on the overall sections and table of contents.

I spent some time thinking about the art and user interfaces as well and have decided on an "evolution of 16-bit" for the art style. Basically, what if 3D graphics were never invented and the definition and resolution of 2D sprites had evolved normally after the SNES... I imagine it would still look a little blocky on a modern-day TV, but not so blocky it could be described as "pixel art" or 16-bit. This would mean bumping up the resolution of a sprite from about 32x32 pixels to 128x128 pixels and including more frames of animation to make things smoother.

Progress Notes

Progress is moving forward on the Game Design Document, though being an RPG, it is going to be very heavy. I imagine that doing a waterfall style document for a game like this would take nearly two-thirds of the total development time since these games are very heavily about the story.

What's happening next week?

Over the next week I want to get my art design document started, and I want to get the story overview and calculations into the game design document. Luckily, I spent a lot of time thinking and considering the different art styles currently being used in these sorts of games, so I already have a good idea of exactly what I want to see.

Links Etc

Links to the raw OneDrive folder with the documents in it will be shared on Canvas to avoid blasting this information all over the internet.