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).