Team Progress Our team met up and reflected on the suggestions we were given during the GDD presentation last week. With that, we made a few changes to our game's design. This week, we were mainly focused on coming up with the layout for our first playable, making sure that we our game map reflects the post-apocalyptic setting we were aiming for and that the spaces flowed naturally. Aside from this, our team was able to finally start coding the game, starting off with the core mechanics we will need to demonstrate for this upcoming milestone. So far, our programmers were able to code player movement and they got started on the secondary tossing mechanic. My Contribution For this week, I was part of the visuals team and primarily contributed by sketching the layout of our playable's map. As a precursor to this, I decided to search for images to use as inspiration so that our resulting environment would match our intended genre and themes. With the sketches I made, I will help build the environment assets we will place into the prototype for next week's demo. Additionally, I took plenty of notes on the developments we came up with for our gameplay, player-world interactions, visuals, mechanics, maps, and UI. Lastly, I began gathering sounds effects we could use, making sure that they were permitted to be used freely.
Reflection An issue we encountered this week was determining how we were going to introduce all our core mechanics (including all 3 stealth mechanic variations) and 3 enemy types into one playable level for the first milestone. Seeing as how our game is fairly narrative-driven and its gameplay must reflect our character's journey, it was challenging to figure out a way for our prototype to do most of what the final game is supposed to do in the span of multiple levels. We were able to resolve this issue by pacing our one-level map so that it doesn't require players to exercise all mechanics at once and be overwhelmed by the difficulty of the monsters they encounter. Despite the fact that our final game's introductory level may not end up being entirely similar to this prototype, being able to logically plan out and structure the flow of gameplay in relation to the game world was good practice on level design, which we will need more of for later on in the development process.
