Journeyman Week 1

Throughout this blog, I will be documenting my process during the Journeyman Group Project at Teesside University. The chosen theme for this Journeyman is "Coin-Op". We were split into teams of 16 (not including the external aniamtors and character artists). My role throughout this was Co-Lead for the Design team, and the sole Gameplay/Mechanics Designer.

In the first week I helped set up the Discord and organised the teams' first meeting. Before the meeting, I had each team member give a short introduction about themselves, their roles, and what kind of things they'd like to learn throughout the project. Having the team discuss not only what they're doing, but what they'd like to be doing, would allow me to set tasks more easily, and make sure the team was doing things they were passionate about.

I took the lead role in the intial meeting, and segmented the first meeting into quick introductions and thoughts about our given theme. We had the choice between three different games to "recharge" and the team decided on House of the Dead. Subsequently, I ensured each team did research on House of the Dead relevent to their role (i.e. Level Design, Art Style, Gameplay Mechanics, ect.). Later, we reconvened and discussed the basic gameplay mechanics of the game, as well as differences in later installments.

Before the team went away for the weekend, all of the leads convened and we discussed tasks for the coming week. I spoke directly with the programming team and organised it so that I would be the go-between both design and programming as I had a background in both and lots of in-engine experience. We ended up giving out the task to do research into ways to "recharge" or reinvent the original game within our scope.