Newsletter 3

The third week of our project was a transition from the concept phase of pre-production to actual beginning of development. After first two weeks in the semester we felt very comfortable about our common team vision, and as soon as we got access to version control software, we began to work on our prototype.

To do this in the most efficient way possible, after working on a high-level schedule, Arseniy officially started to incorporate AGILE method and SCRUM and assembled a physical SCRUM-board. On Monday team had a meeting where we broke down our game on core features, created user stories, assigned priorities to them, and then broke them down on tasks. Each day since then team had 10-minute meetings updating on the progress and with all the routine that comes with following the rules by the book, we have to admit that there is some satisfaction in sticking the posted-notes on the wall-board.

 Alex and Casey were excited to actually start developing the prototype in Unity, and soon enough, Casey has developed the first iteration of a house-plan and a shell building for it in AutoCAD. The team has got an access to Unity Asset Server, and as soon as pipeline was established by putting a cube model from Casey in the scene, character’s apartment appeared in front of us magically. Casey keeps iterating on the architecture and is currently working on furnishing the rooms.

Nathan’s focus this week was beginning to create the narrative for the game. He was working on character’s bios, project description and level design in collaboration with Casey. He created and shared a folder with reference-pictures that would help Casey to convey the feelings of alienation and being out of place through the architecture, since well-thought environment is decided by the team to be one of our main focuses and the main character of the game will spend a lot of time in his apartment.

Besides all the content work, after advisor meetings we decided that since an ETC deadline of Quarters is very close, we want to find a good way to convey our vision to the faculty and to general public, and for that Nathan is also working restlessly on documentation, such as game flow document and lists of visual effects we want to incorporate in the game.

Alex started with making the player movement as comfortable as possible, and after Arseniy received the Oculus Rift for the team, he immediately started to work on enabling it to work with our game. This is being done In order to improve the immersion by having a body for a character you play as instead of floating in space as a ghost, like you do in most first-person games. He also found a way to tilt player model’s head in a natural way depending on the Oculus movements, which will really come in handy when we will have the mirror-like surfaces in the game. Besides that he wrote the shaders for materials so that the environment in our prototype looks realistic and special, and doesn’t say “Unity project” by just looking at it.

We feel like we are doing a really good progress and a great vision of the game we are making inside the team, all that is left is to convey this vision to the outside world.