Game Design Preproduction
MONTH 1: GAME DESIGN PREPRODUCTION
Every milestone below consisted of seven day sprints, requiring everyone on the team to log 40-hours of credible work each milestone. At the beginning of each milestone, a Task List was created that contained an overview of what we wished to accomplish for that milestone. Followed with all the tasks broken down as granular as possible to fulfill that goal. Tasks were prioritized and dependencies were also mentioned to clarify further which tasks would hold higher priorities than others. Each member of the team would write out a Completion Criteria for each task that clearly stated what classified the task as completed. We also wrote in an Estimated Time of Completion to determine if we were within range of fulfilling all the tasks during the seven day milestone. Finally, the team kept an Hour Log to track all their hours of work, accomplished tasks, bugs that have been resolved, etc.
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MILESTONE 1 - PROTOTYPING
At the start of this milestone, the team formed to begin brainstorming ideas on what type of game we wanted to create for the next four months. We agreed upon making a Top Down Adventure game, which excited me mostly due to the story-based potential we could incorporate within the games mechanics. Once deciding upon a genre, we started right away drawing up the overview of our task list to get started.
MILESTONE 2 - DESIGNING GAMEPLAY MOMENTS
Using what we learned in Milestone 1, we decided to rehash why we wanted to make this game and what we wanted the Player to experience from a fresh perspective. Iterating upon the mechanics we introduced last milestone and stopping development on others—we set out this time with a refined goal to design a linear gameplay experience for the Player to enjoy.
MILESTONE 3 - GAMEPLAY ITERATION
Wrapping up the month and this final milestone required everyone’s effort to refine and polish up existing mechanics, as well as expand and implement new features. By the end of this milestone, we have carved out a great foundation to build upon going into Month 2: Game Systems Integration.