Thursday, February 5, 2009

After the First Week

As was touched upon in the last post, this game is going to be rather rushed in development.   This will be difficult in many aspects, but it's the best way to go if we want to get something done by the end of the semester.  Right now, I'm writing at the end of our first week of development and already we're feeling the burn a little bit.

We've scheduled 10 hours of group meeting time a week, which is more intensive than any Olin course.  However, very little of this game will be developed alone, so this is actually a reasonable schedule for a what's supposed to be a 12 credit hour course.  Our first deliberable is due tomorrow-- the initial version of the design document.  So we're putting in a bunch of work on that.  We actually have a few hours left tonight and then a few tomorrow morning, so we'll see if we can pull this document off by then.

As for my role in the game, I have been doing pretty high level stuff for right now.  I guess that's the case for everyone, but I have been trying to coordinate the making of the design document, prodding and arbitrating dicussion, scheduling meetings and so forth.  Right now, Nik is focusing on choosing an engine and learning it, and (I just checked) he's even working on that right now.  It looks like we'll be going with the pyglet engine.  James has been coming up with a ton of strategy, which guides our ideation of features, because it's really important to think of a feature, then think of the great ways in which it could be used.  The rest of us are doing more or less homogenous work in ideation and design.  Basically, our strategy is to design the game to the point where we can describe it as if we've played it for a week.  The goal here is that if we can get to that point, we'll have a very clear idea of what exactly it is we need to program, and we'll have a good deal of time to do it.

So far there have been no major snafus in the design process.  At least, that's what I imagine, though it might be too early to say.  Hopefully we'll get a document out by tomorrow that lays out our vision for the game and is something we can all be proud of.  It's certainly coming along, but, not surprisingly, there will be a bit of rush before it's done.

1 comment:

  1. Gday, looks like you guys know your stuff. Good luck with the project, I'll be following it. Hope pyglet works out for you, if you indeed choose to go with it. -- Alex Holkner.

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