Game Development Methodology 2019

We delivered our lofi prototype and tech prototype this week as well as user feedback documents. next week we need to do a workshop with our focus group, which will be quite interesting i think. also, we will meet our two designers and talk about the project. we are now a quite big group (6 people) and i think the communication overhead will be higher. we need to make sure that everyone is always up to date and knows about the latest design/development progresses. we therefore have a facebook chat and work on shared google documents for now, lets see if this suffices. Philipp

Hello! Since last time we have made and tested our low-fi prototype as well as our tech-prototype. With the low-fi prototype we have collected a lot of user feedback. This week we also got in touch with the artists we are going to collaborate with! :) //Melanie

Hi guys! We built a low-fi prototype and tech prototype that the professor enjoyed a lot in class this week. We're really proud of ourselves for these prototypes and we could tell the professor was too! We have also delivered our user feedback report today in the afternoon, along with our low-fi prototype tutorial and the updated Design Cycle document to make it a more complete submission! Now it's time to take a deep breath and go into the new cycle whose document just went out yesterday: Development Cycle . We will organize ourselves and divide ourselves in three main fronts for the following 2 weeks at least: Game menu and player statistics : 1 developer (+ 1 artist, if it justifies) Game map : 1 developer + 1 artist Game levels : 2 developers + 1 artist Let's do it!! ~evoll~

We have done the workshops and it went really well! We got the chance to change our board-game and final videogame ideas for the better by brainstorming between us and, more importantly, hearing what the people had to say about our game low-fi prototype and testing it out on site. This was exciting! Furthermore, we have already something to show this Wednesday for our PixiJS tech prototype: a game map and fog creation. This might be good enough for this version, but we must be quick to develop it furthermore! Stay tuned! ~evoll~

This week we made a paper prototype to help us out converting our game "paper-into-digital" and find some flaws that we may have with the help of some members of our focus group. At the moment the prototype was tested by four members. We want to keep testing, so next week probably will have more members of the focus group coming to experiment and to help! // Francisco

On wednesday we met very early before the lab and constructed our lo-fi prototype. We recognized so many details and discussed a lot. On friday, Joao and Francisco arranged a meeting with some representatives of our focus group, and tested the prototype. I started to work on the tech prototype, which can be found here . I began with showing a screen of how a neighbourhood could look like by night, added some animated fog (well it's just a alpha transparency texture that is moving horizontally) and some atmospheric background music. The others will continue and add a moving, controllable character to it. Philipp

This week we have been preparing our low-fi prototype and the questions in a google form to present to the people in the focus group that will be present in our workshop with the low-fi prototype. We've been talking to the people and will do most of it tomorrow in a workshop in a first part. We don't know yet if we'll have another one next week, but we may have one as well because not all of the group members can be present tomorrow. As always, stay tuned! ~evoll~

In the lecture this week we did a low fidelity prototype for a game. We tested it out and added some rules to see how it affects the game design, the playing, etc. It was very helpful to understand issues and to see which parameters work together or not. After this, we made a paper prototype for our own game. We now do some research questions to evaluate different parameters of our game. In addition, we are also beginning on a digital prototype. From tomorrow we will already test our different versions on persons from our focus group. //Melanie

This week in the lecture we built a low fidelity prototype. It was very interesting and i am eager to make one for our game too now, because it reveals a lot of design issues and shows which parameters one has to adjust to make the game more fun. It is good a first approach to a realization of a game idea. We also finally decided to make the final implementation a web-based one, coding in javascript and using a library called PixiJS which already provides functionalities to load 2D assets, have a scene hierarchy and do transformations like rotations and translations, as well as playing animations and a ui system. Philipp

This week we finished up the 1st cycle project document everything went smooth, from now on we got to focus on which software/game engine we want to use to build/develop our game. Its definitely going to be a hard decision, choosing from so many options and knowing that once we choose "there's no way back" and you just got to stick with it. Hope we do the right decision!! // Francisco

Hello again, this my second post this week. We have delivered our assignment in this previous wednesday and are now working towards deciding the technology we're going to use for the game. We will also worry about the lowfi prototype of our game. Thank you for reading ~evoll~

This week we have finished the part of the 1st cycle document that had to be submitted on Tuesday. We did sketches, talked and wrote about our personas and scenarios. We will now decide a technology to use so that we can start developing the game asap. //Melanie

After all the discussion about the project, it converged quite nicely on the night-time and secondary concept and we have the project document almost completely finished. While having worked tirelessly in our project document throughout this past week, I've been busy experimenting with PixiJS and other JS libraries such as ThreeJS. I think that we can easily build the web application with PixiJS and NodeJS as a possibility in case we want to make player connectivity functionality, with no actual need for a game engine. Having that said, we know that it might be a challenge to accomplish so many things as we talked about in the document, but that's why we've commited to at least work on the Night Cycle and improving it, which is already a lot of work. The Day Cycle and secondary concept (badges/achievements) are something to be thought about in the future of the game on the longer run. As for the TODOS this next week, these are (not necessarily in order): - Finishing up the

Hey! This week we have been working on our shared document 1st cycle. Sadly i couldn't go to the laboratory (sickness) to discuss all the details about our game but one thing was concluded after it that we must focus on the nighttime cycle first and then figure it out the daytime. // Francisco

Hi! This week we have talked more about our game idea and realized that we did not have the same visions about our game. We discussed in the group and with the professor. Part of our game idea is that there is a daytime and a nighttime. We all agreed most on the nighttime and will focus to develop that part. Otherwise, we have been working on the 1st cycle tasks. We are also exploring which technology to choose, which isn't easy to decide. //Melanie

Last week we had many ideas and finally chose one. In this week's lab we talked more about our idea in detail for the first time. We realized that our visions converged quite a bit, and this led to discussions, also with the professor. Without going into the details of the concept here, my view on our game idea was that the player has to deal with the villagers (npcs) for multiple days and nights. During this time he gets to know their personalities, and learns about their preferences and interests. Like this he can make them happy during the dialogues, and so he is finally able to cure them during the night. the player character is not strong enough to defeat / weaken an angry / aggressive and therefore strong villager (in his monster transformation) during the night! Therefore the player has to survive multiple nights, and has to progress quickly during the daytime. This also opens new possibilities for the nighttime gameplay: the player has to hide and run away from strong mo

Hello again! This week, we started working on the project document for the first cycle. This wednesday, 06/03/2019, we shall discuss our progress with Professor Carlos Martinho, apply corrections to the document and continue to work on it. We have defined our game concept (and title), core experience, first tweet (elevator pitch), domain research, focus group, some play scenarios and the core gameplay loop. We'll start defining player personas after we gather some more people for the focus group! As of right now, the focus group has 2 members already (they fit in the target audience and they are available to give their opinions throughout the semester) and they have already commented on our game idea/concept, so that we could understand what they like and dislike about it. We have also updated our game concept in light of these comments, but we are still thinking a lot about whether these changes should happen or not. Stay tuned for more news! ~ evoll ~

Hi! My name is Francisco and im studying MEIC and i will be apart of a team and our goal is to make a game in the Game Methdology Development course. // Francisco