Studio 2 - Week 08

What have I accomplished this week as a developer?

This week in studio 2 we got straight into our final projects of the trimester, the home game! After discussing many ideas with the team we had already found some inspiration in Ubisoft's “Valiant Hearts” and decided on a game revolving around war and how it impacts home. Our preliminary idea focused around a farmer whose must complete his daily work around his farm to sustain his family while the world burns around him. We were able to pitch this to the rest of the class and get vital feedback which we used to scope the game down and really focus the core concept around the brief. It was a great learning experience in scoping as a team and trying to use three brains to focus one idea. The other incredibly valuable part of the process for me was asking each of the other team members what home really meant to them. It was super interesting to see the diversity in the answers and really helped me wrap my head around home as a feeling to evoke in a game.

What have I learned this week about development and being a developer?

After coming up with the premise of our home game “Heartland” we realised with such a narrative based game we would need heaps of animations and models to fill out the farm. With animation collaborators pending we tried to come up with ways to minimise the asset output needed from both the team and collaborators. In comes Victor (our glorious team leader) with the idea to block out our levels with conveniently existing low poly farm assets from the asset store. This gave us the opportunity to skip the primitive greybox stage and get a great visual representation of what our intended style would be. This is going to allow any of the animation majors we get to work solely on the animations and model of our main characters meaning they are going to be of a higher quality and polish which is going to be a huge asset to our game. This process of blocking out with complementary assets has also given me lots of drive on the project since seeing such a visual representation early on. I can’t wait to keep working with the team and really expressing what we wanted to with Heartland.