Journeyman Week 2

In the second week, we were formally assigned our roles which presented its own challenges as I was the only gameplay designer. As a result, I took on a more backseat approach for this week whilst I tried to come up with reinventive ideas for the Rail Shooter Genre. I still took on my lead responsiiblites but acted more as a consulting party for the team as I already have 2 years industry experience!

I found this very hard as the genre itself was basically dead in the water outside of Virtual Reality, Light-Gun Arcade cabinents, and motion hardware (like the Wii and Playstation Move Controllers). As a result, I organised a number of ideas and pinched one of talented Level Design team (and also my housemate) to help work on the mechanics with me. This made things a lot easier as I was unable to be face-to-face with other members, but could do co-research with my housemate.

Throughout the week I also took it upon myself to work closely with the Chinese students as they had made it clear to me in one of the meetings they were worried about not understanding what we were saying (as we communicated mostly through calls). Therefore, I ensured that I messaged directly with him during these calls so that he could easily understand what was going on and could translate the messages if need be!

Before the end of the week, I organised a Trello board and held a SCRUM meeting with every person in the team. I asked them what they were already doing, what they were going to be doing heading into next week, and asked about any worries they had with completing their tasks. I then put these tasks onto Trello, and taught the team how to use Trello so that they could add their own tasks using my easy-to-use templates! The templates I created made it so that they could sort their tasks by role and member.

At the end of the week, I created a basic games design document including my own research into House of the Dead, the mechanics and systems I'd like to implment (including tables and code logic/functions), and diagrams for how these mechanics may work. I only included the base mechanics for the game in this one, and will go more in depth with enemy mechanics and more inventive mechanics next week after consulting the team. Despite missing some of these details, I got a hugely positive response from the team for the document!

HOTDMechanics.pdf

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