Game Development Blog - Week 4

Week 4

Progress Update

This week was a hectic one. While we had planned on challenging the next stage of development last week, certain circumstances forced us to wait one more week. Fortunately, we have gotten past those circumstances, and should be ready to challenge for real this week.

Team Disagreements

The start of this week was not a very good one. As the team met up to discuss how we would go about working on our reverse stealth game, one of our team members spoke up in disapproval of our ideas. And not just one of our ideas, but all of them. They claimed we should scrap every game we had been working on in favor of a new idea. We didn't do that, of course - but it still highlighted a big issue, in that our team was not as agreed on our ideas as we had thought. To that effect, our team met and hammered through any preexisting issues. It was a long and difficult meeting. Opinions were heard. Ideas were crushed. But by the end of it, we had brought all of our ideas back to the point where we were excited about them all.

Changing the Game

One of the end results of our meeting was that we changed which game we wanted to go forwards with. Now we have decided to work on DJ Clone (working title) - a 3D beat-em-up game with rhythm game mechanics mixed in. I admit, I was reluctant to stop working on our reverse stealth game - that game was my baby, after all - but I can see now that this is the better game for our team. It has something for everyone of us to get into, be it AI, Music, or Particle Effects.

A Race to the Finish

Of course, with a change in direction comes a huge increase in workload. On the design side of things, I spent a lot of this week getting new VDDs in order, as well as putting together a lot of producer-based documents (our team has no producer, so that role has unfortunately fallen onto me). I spent a while looking into some new design ideas for our prototypes as well, though at the moment that hasn't manifested itself in any sort of document.

Moving Forwards

As I mentioned, we are for certain going to challenge the next stage of development this week. So all that can be said is that going forwards, we have to hope that we'll make it through, and once that hurdle has been overcome, the floodgates will finally open and we get really start getting deep into development.

Until next time!