A New Semester
…and we’re back!
After 14 weeks of development last semester (and a much needed winter break), I’m back at school and already in the midst of senior production. How time flies…
Senior production serves as the culmination of everything we’ve learned up to this point in our respective game development disciplines as we work in expanded teams to realize a fully polished game experience with a play time of around 30 minutes. Last semester, my team’s game Cash Force survived the cut process and is continuing development this semester. This series of blog posts (which is really just an expansion on those from last semester) will document weekly updates on the development of Cash Force from my perspective, including the chronicling of development progress, problems and their solutions that came up during the week, demonstrations of what the game looks like as well as any code (read: spaghetti blueprint wires in Unreal) that I write.
So without further ado, lets jump into the first week of senior production!
An Expanded Team
In my last post, I had mentioned that the first thing I would do in the next post (aka what you’re reading right now) was introduce the new team members that we onboarded to help us develop the game. I’ll also introduce the returning team members as well, as its always good to give a proper introduction. In total, we now have 15 developers working on the game, ranging from designers, programmers, artists, and producers. They all provided little bios about themselves, so I’ll be including those here as well!
Production Team
Austin Roorda - Lead Producer
"I’m Austin! I like to play games and manage teams of people who play video games. I’m a retro game collector and I also enjoy riding my longboard if it’s nice out!"
Louis Klarfield - Associate Producer
"Hey I’m Louis! I do producer documents and fill where possible. I generally enjoy marketing and figuring out why someone likes a certain game. I like to play a wide variety of games in general."
Brett Schwartz - Business / Marketing Consultant
"Hi I’m Brett marketing consultant for Holo Hexagon. I have a few years experience in marketing research and development for both at home and LBE VR projects. I am a huge fan of shooters, especially when in VR!"
Programming Team
Josh Grazda - Lead Programmer
"Hi, my name is Josh! Besides programming systems and tools, I enjoy cooking lots of pasta and taking long walks on the beach… in VR."
Cameron Belcher - AI Programmer
"I want to use my skills, curiosity, and enthusiasm to create games to help people relax and be happy. Just as video games have done for me"
Michael Zheng - Systems / Tools Programmer
"Just your average gamer. I just be chilling you know. Want something done? Ya got it, hit me up fam. Wanna try something out? I gotchu. What else do you need? Just ask."
Our game has a lot of very technical and complicated systems that need a lot of solid architecture. Michael will be ensuring that its there for all of us, from designers to programmers and artists alike!
Kelly Herstine - Gameplay / General Programmer
"Hi! I’m Kelly! I am mostly a gameplay / generalist programming but I have a passion for graphics programming. I love coffee and I like to play monster hunter world in my free time."
Art Team
Adam Streeter - Lead Artist
"Love being creative and making art, in as many mediums as possible! Focused on prop art, but have some experience with graphic design and video as well! "
Kaylee Sharp - Character Artist
"Kaylees my name and I make characters for games! I can make your characters too, and hope someday that character will inspire some young 12 year old like it did for me! "
Design Team
Emmett Friedrichs - Lead Level Designer / Product Owner
"Hey there! I’m Emmett, I’m a Game Designer who focuses on Systems and Level Design. I absolutely love everything strategy-game related, especially in real-time. Besides games some of my interests are graphic design, and sleeping. "
My partner in crime last semester (and every semester really; he’s been on all of my other game teams at Champlain), Emmett is the helmsmen of the overall vision for the project as well as one of the lead designers. He’ll be focusing his efforts on the level design and procedural generation this semester.
Karl Lewis - Lead Designer
"Hey, its mel! I am a Technical Game Designer who loves designing game systems with an equal passion for engineering gameplay code. Some of my interests besides games include linguistics, music, aviation, and simulation!"
Although I’m serving in a Lead Design position this semester (which involves lots of management of the rest of the design team as well as working on docs and in engine), I’ll continue to work on designing and implementing gameplay and combat systems along with the programming team!
Joseph Apicella - Combat / Systems Designer
"Heyo! I’m Joe! I do systems / combat design stuff and some animation on the side. I run RPG campaigns and also with my legs in my free time. "
Lauren Ritze - UI / UX / Narrative Designer
"Hello! I’m Lauren and I mainly work on UI/UX, but I also have a passion for narrative design. In my free time, I love watching anime/animated shows and movies. I have done minor animations myself and look forward to making more!"
User interfaces in VR are somewhat of an unknown art at this point. Thankfully, Lauren is up to the challenge of figuring out the best ways to display information to the player while keeping the immersion of VR intact! She’ll also be working with the art team to design the narrative context to situate the game in and help bring it to life!
Harry Goetz - Experience / Systems Designer
"Whats up, I’m Harry! I’m something of a generalist game designer, skilled in systems and UX design. I like to fish and play card games in my free time."
Usability is a huge challenge in VR games, since everything needs to feel as easy to do as it is in real life. Harry joined the team to use his UX design skills to help streamline the experience for VR newbs and veterans alike! He’ll also be working on gameplay systems ranging from combos, cash, upgrades, and more!
If you couldn’t already tell, I’m super excited to work with the rest of the new and expanded team. It’s going to be a bit of an adjustment for me to switch to more of a management role, its been a lot of fun so far this first week!
Speaking of which, lets get into what we did this week on the design team!
Docs, Docs, and more Docs
Since its only been the first week of the semester so far, and we have so many new team members, we decided to take the week to mainly review our existing documentation, build, and the code base to get everyone up to speed with the current project. This also allowed us to start figuring out what our priorities would be in terms of design and features for the rest of the semester as well as our goals for the greenlight milestone* are.
As a lead designer, I wanted to get the rest of the design team up to speed with the current state of the game, ranging from docs to the codebase they’ll be working in. Additionally, we had a discussion at the first of our weekly designer meetings to figure out what we should prioritize first for greenlight and what features and systems we wanted to finalize for the game since we have a lot of potential ideas floating around.
These priorities were:
- Re-designing and implementing the technical aspects of our grabbing/handling/interaction system. This is the biggest priority for greenlight, since it is the glue system that ties everything else together and is currently horrendously buggy. I took the helm for this task on the design end of things since I originally programmed the system and know what’s broken about it. I worked with Kelly and Josh this week to start redesigning the technical aspects of this system.
- Fleshing out the design of the combat loop. Last semester the combat was largely a shooting gallery (since that’s all we really had time for), so it was imperative that we give it more depth. This includes everything from guns to enemy types. Joe focused his efforts on creating some concept docs for new weapons and enemy types that we’ll be going over and finalizing next sprint.
- Developing narrative context. The current state of the game has a very vague narrative running through it that isn’t very compelling. In order to elevate the experience and flesh out the context more, Lauren was tasked with concepting potential rival gangs that the player will engage with that have their own backstories.
- Refining the user experience. UX is key in all games, but is especially essential in VR, since actions mirror those of real life and need to feel believable to not shatter immersion. Both Harry and Lauren were tasked with investigating new concepts for the user experience this sprint, with Lauren focusing on docs pertaining to displaying information like cash to the player diegetically while Harry concepted ideas for improving the UX of combat through a combo based reward system.
In essence, this was a very pre-planning and conceptual sprint that involved a lot of documentation from everyone, not just the design discipline. Having these concepts to investigate, deliberate, and eventually finalize has now given us a great start into realizing our greenlight goals and getting the baseline setup for full blown production.
*(For those not at Champlain, “Greenlight” refers to the things from last semester that we either want to fix or finalize before a certain date, after which we will then enter full production).
Upcoming Week Plan
Now that we have lots of design concepts to choose from, our main focus in the next sprint will be to finalize which aspects of each investigated area we want to commit to and start designing in detail. Ideally, by the end of the next sprint, we’ll have figured out what guns and enemy types we want in the game, the most efficient way to display information to the player while keeping immersion, and how we want to proceed with the design of our gameplay scenarios. We also plan to have the re-design of the grabbing system complete and ideally a basic prototype of that up and running as well. It sure to be another exciting week of concepting and design heavy tasks!
See you next time,
-Karl
