Recap:
We did it, we made it to next semester! Necromanager has officially become an approved Senior Team game. The Cutie Pies have been successful in our attempt to create a worth game (Too most).
Our game about keeping your graveyard under control and bank account full is preparing for the big polishing and improvement phase. At least that is the current major goal moving forward.
The Good:
The team of Matt T, Matt C, Tim H., and Ian were able to appropriately find a core experience to work toward, providing an understandable vertical slice. All disciplines established their pipelines early and was able to break down individual tasks to work on.
The best choice the team made at the beginning was identifying what would be the core game play and the three phases that would help create the intended player experience.
The Bad:
The hiccups of the journey become apparent during the development of direction. The team had a lot of ideas for the future of the game, but we had little to work off. So we developed the three phase to help direct, but allow for creative design. Allowing the team to produce possible assets, code, and design that could highlight the phases and fit with the feel of the game.
Which was still a little up in the air for some time. Finding the light-hearted theme to sell the mundane routine of zombie keeping. Giving it that unique feel in addition to it idea of limited violence in game.
It took some time to establish all the elements, but once the team was in agreement of these elements. We were able to create the current product, which we are still very excited to be working on.
The Ugly:
Creating character art was the hardest challenge our team encountered this semester. Appreciation (as much as I can give) goes to Matt Therrien for his willingness to accept the task. Producing something that would help to get our theme across for the enemies and player avatar.
While the first few character art pass result in some interesting sprites (the turtle zombie), the visible improvements to the in-game art was huge. Meeting a lot of praise and some critique, but the resulting affect from more art polish was critical to maintaining the game feel.
The Team Moving Forward:
Having worked with the art direction for characters and enemies in a 2D stylized idea. The team found it to be placeholder and moving forward we want to move to 3D. To allow rigging for the animations with have in mind to add to the theme, to allow shadows to be cast by the character and enemies, and to allow the oncoming 3D artist to produce 3D models.
Programming wise taking on a graphics artist is important aspect for polishing and to allow our lead programmer's talents to be put to else where. Additional programmers to help with coding and splitting the workload.
Additional designers to have a more committed producer role and new/fresh ideas for developing the game moving forward.
While our current team has a strong dynamic and is able to work well with each other, taking on new members is going to require a adjustment phase. Hopefully that will be short and every one is able to work with issue.
The next steps/goals for the team moving forward is going to require so re-working of the current idea to fit the new art style, but the entire team feel the game will benefit from the change in direction. An additionally it will allow our original artist to work in their specialized field, so they can produce strong art for environment and props game.
