Week Two

Thursday 18th February

Team Leader Meeting

The team leader meeting this morning also included the chosen heads of department. These department heads are "specialists" who will be able to either provide training for any member of any group or be able to temporarily work on another teams project to provide work in areas they do not posses a skilled practitioner for. If I am to require a specialist for the development of my teams vertical slice, I must get in contact with the department heads team leader and request for them to make time for the specialist to come over and work with my team. I expect as I do not have an experienced coder or 3D artist on my team, I will need to request time with a department head later in the project.

The heads of department are as follows:

3D Art & Modelling - Callum (Mishu)

3D Animation - Flora (Outer Mind)

2D Animation - Lio (Misho)

Tech Support - James

Marketing - Emilia (Anima Mundi)

I expect we will require time from James, Callum and Flora if we are to be creating a 3D game.

Scope Analysis - Lecture

During the lecture on Thursday the 18th of February, we dove further into what a project scope analysis is. This week we will create our project scope analysis and project pipelines as a tea, in order to create an idea for what we want the game to be, what experience it will provide and how we will accomplish it. It is incredibly important o create a brief timeline early on in the project so we can set key milestones and keep track of our progress to make sure we meet our deadline.

Commercially, a vertical slice is…

A list of features or software requirements that the software must have - the features are known as they are written in the GDD. Make sure to look through the GDD and make a list of them to start with.
An estimated development time. This the project pipeline which will provide a list of key milestones and the process of creating our assets as well as their versions.
An estimated development cost. This is the budget which we will need to calculate, taking into account what are roles are and what we are worth, as well as the costs of outside hires, consultants and specialist software and hardware.

Vertical slices are not functional software. We must take the list of features that are essential to the experience and find a way to present the game trough those features. Small and condensed in better than big and empty as the team will be able to put more time into the most important features and have them be more successful in presenting this game. Quality over quantity!

This asset list should contain all elements and features that will be present in the vertical slice that we will develop. It is an important piece of documentation to refer to and keep organised during the process of development. It should at least, contain all 3D models, animations, coding, sound effects and UIX. This asset list can be put into a table that will include feedback on each asset, the authors and the asset versions because of course things will need to be fixed and adapted as the vertical slice is developed.

The scope in summary:

Features list (what must be present)
Presentation format (how features are shown)
Assets list (how features will be realised
Timeframe
Pipeline analysis
List of milestone dates
Project budget

Tip: Put everything into smaller refined categories for clarity.

Team Meeting

Today we had our first team meeting to kick off this project. The target for this meeting was to organise a first draft for the project scope, to summarise the game features and assets and list them all. Together, we went through the Anima Mundi Games Design Document once again to get a clear understanding of everything we could include to create a successful vertical slice. This was quite a long process but it was important to spend enough time on it that we all developed a firm understanding of the game and our intentions as a development team.

We also discussed which part of the game we would want to use for the vertical slice. After going through the six regions of the game which are ultimately the levels, Emilia created this table (on the right) to show what is included in each "level".

We came to the conclusion that the air and fire regions/levels would be best to create for the vertical slice because they would allow us to demonstrate all features fo the game without going into too much detail or having to include too many features unnecessarily. For example, we didn't deem it necessary to showcase every single environment in the game, every ability or character. What is most important is that we successfully present the experience of the game and summarise its gameplay as accurately as we can. The air and fire regions are two contrasting levels which I think will create quite a stunning visual experience. The levels will be quite different but will showcase the designers idea of a great world ready to be explored, a world full of wondrous features and exciting interactions for the player.

While we talked our way through the story of the game, discussing each feature and how it would be implemented, I wrote out our first vertical slice and this was provided to the other members of the team at the end of our session.

The link to this document: https://kw4u19.wixsite.com/gamedevelopment/post/project-scope-analysis

Team Meeting + James

During this brief meeting we discussed our project analysis, as a team, with James. We explained which part of the game we wanted to use for our vertical slice and after some discussion about the limited 3D ability within the development team, James suggested that we make the change to a 2D game. This bought relief to everyone on the team as we all had some worries that we would not be able to achieve the greatest outcome as we would have to take some time in the project to train our artists to use 3D software.

We decided that the main themes of the game are firstly the objectives of overcoming the environment puzzles using the Shamans abilities, but also the beauty of a spiritual world, made to impress and amaze the player. As we have a. great team of 2D artists, we will be able to create a visually stunning vertical slice, reflecting on the themes of wonder and discovery, discussed in the Anima Mundi GDD

After this lecture, I assigned tasks to the group. These were to create some mood-boards and start brainstorming for how we want the game to look, start exploring potential environment puzzles for the game and look into the intended art style of the game. It is best that we create an art bible as soon as possible so when it comes to creating the game assets, we will all be able to follow it and keep the aesthetics of our combined work consistent. I don't want to give more specific tasks to the group before it's clear that we all have the same understanding of how the game should look and feel, as well as what are collective goals are.

After this meeting Emilia and I set out to create a new, updated scope analysis which is adapted to the new 2D design. There are many changes that are going to be made so of course this needs to be done as soon as possible.

The updated project scope analysis can be viewed here:

Friday 19th February

Budgeting - Lecture

Today we had a lecture on budgeting and how to make an informed budget for our game, supported by our project scope and individual skills. Additionally, we had to consider temporary skilled workers that we would hire for specific tasks. A budget estimates the development costs for creating the project.

There are assumptions that we have to make in order to work out the budget:

We are an independent studio, creating software for a client.
We have means to publish our own games

We use the following payments for our workers:

Programmer (0.66% as unqualified): £386 pw
3D Modeller (0.66): £324 pw
2D Artist (Animator and Concept) (0.66): £339 pw
Team leader: Pick an appropriate role and multiply by 1.5
Consultant: Pick an appropriate role and multiply by 3

Assume for purpose of budget we have all basic hardware but not necessarily all the software and specialist hardware.

Cost this project only for the creation of the vertical slice.

Overheads: additional 12-20% on budget for things such as specific piece of hardware/software.

Risk Mitigation: additional 7-12% of total production cost. Allows for possible financial impact, needing to hire more people, training, inaccurate pipeline estimate etc.

Profit: Multiply budget by 2-2.35

Decide on an appropriate price for the game and then work out how many units we will have to sell. At the arcade event, a survey will be done to see how many people would be interested in buying the game. One person saying yes will represent 100 sales.

Group Task - Budget

As a team, we joined a slack call together and took some time to discuss our own budget by first working out what skills we already had and which ones we needed to bring in through hires. Emilia created an XL document wile we discussed the roles we possessed and required, as well as their costs.

Here is the summary:

Base on our calculation of our individual salaries and input from overheads, also accounting for any risk factors, we would need to sell 8053 copies of the game in order to achieve our desired budget. At the arcade event at the end of this project, every visitor that says they enjoyed our game and would be interested in buying it, will account for 100 sales. Therefore, we will need to convince 80 people at the arcade event to buy our game.

For our Project Scope, I will create a more refined budget that will include every estimated cost, as we didn't have much time today to get a final document created.

Week Two Reflection

This week, as a group we created our project scope analysis, including the asset list, pipeline with key milestones and the estimated budget plan. I have created a separate page to keep the documentation of our project scope, found here: https://kw4u19.wixsite.com/gamedevelopment/project-scope

Creating the project scope has been quite a stressful task and took some time to get right but I realise it is incredibly important that it is in fact finished and correct, as well as up-to-date. Emilia and I have created a more refined budget plan and the project scope will be altered and kept up to date as we make changes throughout the project but I will keep all previous versions accessible in my blog posts.

Now that the project scope is complete and everyone on the team has access to the document expressing our objectives for the vertical slice, I can assign more specific tasks to members of my team to get development going!

As we have established that the main focus on our development will the the beauty and immersive experience of the game, the visual design has great importance and the collective image and art style is going to need to be decided on as soon as possible. Therefore I have given tasks to all members of the team to create some visual mock ups of how the game should look and then we can come back together and decide as a group. They were given the weekend to do this task.

The screenshot above shows the tasks assigned for the next week. The Anima Mundi GDD provided some concept art for the main character of the game (the Shaman) but there was not a finished design. Molly had experience in 2D animation and rigging so its suitable that she takes the lead on any animation throughout the project. Once she has established the designs for the shamans movement and abilities, she will be able to apply them to Daniella's complete character assets. I am going to work on the narrative of the game, the structure from start to finish and Emilia will work on the individual puzzles that will take place. Charisma is going to come up with some concepts for the chosen regions we are creating.

As seen in the pipeline, documented under the project scope tab at the top of the page, in these next two weeks the team will be working on the design of the game before we start working on final assets.

My task set this week (Gameplay Structure) can be found here: https://kw4u19.wixsite.com/gamedevelopment/post/gameplay-structure

I also researched and planned how we will implement parallax scrolling, and that can be found here: https://kw4u19.wixsite.com/gamedevelopment/post/gameplay-design-parallax-scrolling