Expresso News: Week 1
Kickoff Week!
Fresh from summer break, our team has set about to create an expressive game for Ouya, a fledgling platform that emphasizes grass-roots development with a free-to-play model. We began by setting up our room and discussing goals and project roles.
Sasa will lead the art department. Yang and Xiaoyi will be lead programmers. Allsion will assist with monogramming and be lead sound designer. Ellodie will assist with programming and art. Chris will be producing for the team and assisting with sound design.
Expresso News: Week 2
Branding
This week the team focused on creating our team brand and outlining what we expected from the project. Allison got the website up and running, while Sasa and Elodie began designing our team logo. Here’s a rough draft:
{insert pic of Sasa’s rough draft.}
The programmers are familiarizing themselves with the Ouya. In an effort to better understand our pipeline, they have loaded several test builds onto the system.
We have met with Paolo Pedercini, famous for games like “Unmanned” and “Every Day the Same Dream”. Paolo teaches classes on expressionist game design on main campus; for this project he will be filling a quasi-client/advisor role. We are excited to be working with him.
We also began brainstorming this week to begin working on concepts to iterate on for quarters.
Expresso News: Week 3
Infrastructure
Week three was spent mostly on infrastructure. Yang, Elodie and Allison have nailed down the Ouya/Unity interface. Elodie has also created a simple demo which uses the Ouya controller to move and scale a model onscreen. Work continued on the website, and Sasa has taken his idea for our logo and expanded on it to begin creating our team poster and half sheet.
Most people define expressive gaming differently, so to give our team some solid ground we have decided on a definition for our project. For Expresso, and expressive game is one that uses an experience to create a specific emotional, personal connection with the user to make them reflect on a moment in their lives. To brainstorm, we meet as a whole group for a traditional session to discuss plot ideas, mechanics, and (since we are trying to make an expressionist game) other ways in which we can make player involvement central to the game. Then we break off into pairs assigned to specific ideas for further development. Then we come back together, present our newest ideas and listen to our teammates’ feedback. We find that in our group this facilitates communication and ideation without wasting a lot of time in group meetings.
We are developing three games focusing on the ideas of Sympathy, Regret and Loss. More on those next week.
Expresso News: Week 4
Brainstorming
This week we are continuing to develop ideas for our game. We’ve got three front runners, each based around a different emotion.
First off, Allison is developing a story about sympathy. The user plays a young man at a carnival. He’s had a bad day and takes his aggression out on the rodents of a Whac-A-Rat game until he falls asleep. He wakes up as a rat in the game to experience firsthand the horror he has inflicted as a human.
Next up is a story about losing oneself in the pursuit of a dream. The user is one of a herd of cute creatures being hunted by a monster. He discovers a way to grow in power by consuming the life force of plants and animals, and later his own kind. He grows strong enough to defeat the monster terrorizing his people but discovers that in the process he has become the monster.
The last story centers around regret. Currently, the story is about a man whose village was flooded years ago by an irrigation dam. Years later he returns to his hometown, but by using his memories he can travel back to his past and relive moments in the town before it flooded. We are also working on an RPG-like version of this story about a knight who is sent to save the kingdom, discovers that there are many consequences to his actions that he didn’t foresee.
At the urging of our advisor Paolo, three team members took a trip to main campus this week to listen to a talk about expressive games by Heather Kelley. Heather, a founder of the design group Perfect Plum, is famous for her various forays into expressive gaming and talked at length about her current attempts to use the sense of smell in gaming.
Elodie has also begun building prototypes for our various interactions. Currently we have a working Whac-A-Mole game and another demo with a movable character who can interact with its environment.
Sasa has completed the design for our poster and half sheet; the pics are off to the printer and should arrive next week. This Friday we took our team photo outside the ETC on one of the last warm days we have left before winter arrives.
Our team has agreed to use Agile as a production model, and this week saw the birth of our Backlog and our scrum board. We can use both tools to easily keep track of who is working on what task, and to make quick changes to our production schedule if we need.
Expresso News: Week 5
Quarters
This week faculty visits every project to get a feel for where we are heading in our work. We spent the week finalizing our ideas, preparing slides and rehearsing our presentation. We also did research on copyright law. The purpose of this project is to put a game on the Ouya market, so we have to be sure that all our licences are in order and all our assets are original or credited.
On Friday we presented our three ideas to the faculty and got their feedback. Afterward we met as a group and decided to pursue the second story about regret. To elaborate, we send a knight off to slay an evil king, but along the way he is presented with several moral choices, none of them black and white. After he fights the king, the knight returns home to discover the long term consequences of his choices.
Afterward we created a new backlog and tasks for our scrum board, officially shifting us out of pre-production and into actual game production!
Expresso News: Week 6
Production
This week production began in earnest. The programmers have come up with a division of labor and have begun work on the basics of the game. Allison has begun cataloging sounds and music for the game that are free to use. Our lone artist is hard at work trying to come up with a style that is both evocative and simple to tackle the large list of assets for an RPG style game. First he will try a low-poly model for the main character that won’t strain the Ouya but still look interesting. He will also try to use one skeletal rig for all the models, simplifying future animation headaches.
Originally Sasa was tasked with game design, but as our only artist his plate is pretty full. Chris has agreed to move forward with game design; he is currently busy writing a design doc and script for the game centering on the moral choices the player must make on his journey.
Sasa and Elodie also attended the Unite conference in New York this weekend. Hopefully they will come back with a ton of new ideas to implement in our game!
Expresso News: Week 7
More Production
This week has seen a lot of additions to the code. The player movement and merchant systems have been finalized, the different class for the game have been created, and we have begun to merge code and fix bugs.
Sasa spent the week reworking the design for the main character to address feedback that our model was too similar to copyrighted material; that is to say, our model looked a little too much like a LEGO character to be used in our game. His new design is more realistic and less likely to get us sued…
Allison has assumed the role of technical artist; she has spent the week working closely with Sasa and writing shaders to help realize the look of our game.
Chris has continued working on the design document. To determine the emotional impact of our moral choices he has also designed a paper playtest that can be run in person or online. We are planning an official playtest at the ETC next week, but this weekend he was able to record feedback from five players.
Expresso News: Week 8
Playtest
We continue working on technical issues with our code this week. Early on Elodie and Xiaoyi tackled an input problem we’ve been having with some of the controls, and shifted quickly to addressing a frame rate problem that has suddenly popped up.
To help tackle the frame rate issue, Sasa has been working to reduce the polygon count in his models, and is looking into the size of the textures we are using.
Allison continues her work on the shaders for the game and has added three pieces of music for our game; one for the trip to the castle, one for inside the castle, and one for the journey back. The music really helps set a somber atmosphere for our game.
Chris ran more online players through the playtest on Monday. After a few revisions we held a face-to-face playtest at the ETC on Wednesday. After reviewing the feedback from students, faculty and friends, we decided to focus our story on the plague plot line since it had the most impact on testers.
Halves are next week, so this weekend we began work on our presentation.
Expresso News: Week 9
Halves
Halves are here! We presented on Friday, so it should be no surprise that this week we focused on our presentation. Even still, production must go on, and while we weren’t building our slide deck and rehearsing as a group we continued to work on our individual tasks as well.
The programmers fixed our frame rate issues this week; among other things we were importing textures at too large a size. Allison also continued work on visual effects, creating a night sky with a glowing haze and twinkling stars to really sell the atmosphere. She also added varied terrain to make the jumping mechanic more interesting, and added rivers that you can cross quickly by boat or slowly by wading through them.
When he wasn’t working on the script for Halves, Chris continued reviewing feedback and reworking the moral choices to make them more emotionally impactful.
Sasa continues to work on the model of our main character; at the beginning of the week he continued to cut polygons to try and help with the frame rate, and by the end of the week when frame rate was no longer a problem he was putting them back in. Such is the life of a video game maker.
And of course we rehearsed. And rehearsed. And rehearsed.
Feedback from halves was extremely useful in helping us decide our course for the remainder of our project. Primarily we learned that we need a clearer way of presenting our idea, a more structured way to break down tasks, and that we need to focus even more on the presentation of the moral choices to make them as difficult as possible.
Expresso News: Week 10
Iteration
This week saw major redesigns of our game on several levels. First on the list was a redesign of our art style. Sasa is the only artist on our project and since we are making an “RPG-like” our asset list is quite large. We had wanted to do completely 3d models in a 2d environment, but we don’t have enough time for one artist to build, rig, and animate. the ten to fourteen character models we need, to say nothing of background, gui and item art. Sasa has chosen a 2d hand-drawn art style rigged onto a 3d skeleton. Besides saving time creating the models, he can use one rig for all of them, simplifying the animation process. By the end of the week he had completed a new model and a new look for our game.
Allison has become more involved with programming, making herself invaluable with amazing bug-fixing skills. Xiaoyi, Elodie, and Yang have continued altering the different event states in our game to incorporate changes in the script.
Chris continued developing our design doc and looked for different ways to communicate ideas about the game, including graphical level designs and script treatments. Allison wants to add voice acting to the game, so Chris also did some voice recording this week. It will be added to the game next week.
Finally, this weekend Chris began thinking of alternate versions of the final battle with the King. Over the weekend he came up with three new ways to handle the scene, including one way which completely revamps our story (without destroying too many assets).
Expresso News: Week 11
Bugs
Another busy week as we rapidly approach Softs! Our programmers are in serious bug-fixing mode this week. We’ve started a bug list which Xiaoyi and Allison prioritize, and they then assign each bug to one of our programmers. Sasa and Chris contribute by playing the game and logging bugs. New functions have also been added, including contextualized hints and prompts which remind the player what each button does and when, and additional functions in the shop and inventory menu. Yang has begun tackling the trickiest part of our game, where we return after the King’s battle to see the long term consequences of our actions. She has also begun collating the documentation for our game.
Sasa has been hard at work. In one week he has completed animating the main character model and has built six of the remaining thirteen models we need.
Chris continues to rework the design doc. He’s added another event where the King’s men are attacking a village that has succumbed to the plague. The player must decide to defend the village and risk spreading the plague, or of letting innocent people die by the sword. He has also continued working on the redesign he began last weekend. In this version of the story the player is a knight of the King’s court who is sent to kill a rebel leader. Along the way he encounters the same moral choices as before, becoming more and more disillusioned with his king and his mission. Finally, he returns for the final confrontation with the King.
This new story has some advantages over our current iteration, mainly a better interest curve and sense of purpose for the main character. However it leaves less room for moral ambiguity, almost telling the user how they should feel about game events. Ultimately, the group decided against this change, opting instead to focus on ways to improve the interest curve of our current story with less drastic measures.
Expresso News: Week 12
Welcome to our final sprint!
Yang continued working this week on documenting our game, as well as aiding the other programmers in bug fixing. She is working with Brian Maher, our in-house programming expert, to learn to use Monodoc, a program that uses specific notations in code to build a set of documentation for the program.
Sasa continued model making, completing nearly all our characters and most of our background art by Wednesday.
Chris learned XML (roughly) in order to help edit dialogue in the code. When it became apparent near the end of the week that Allison was more valuable working with the programmers, Chris began building a cue list and searching for sound effects for the game.
And on Wednesday, we playtested.
Feedback was largely positive. Because we were not yet 100% on the moral choices or the return trip, we focused our question on layout and gameplay. Afterward, we redesigned most of our GUI, including both the inventory and shop screens, and decided to give our battle system an overhaul.
Expresso News: Week 13
Crunch
One week before Softs. One week before completion. One week.
Honestly, the amount of work we have accomplished this week is staggering.
The action in the room was pretty non-stop. Chris continued his sound work, submitting all sounds on Thursday. He then shifted gears and began production on our promotional videos.
Sasa finished the character art early in the week and quickly moved to Gui and background art. He finished this weekend and began tweaking animation in response to feedback from our last playtest.
The programmers were unable to remove themselves from their computer screens to make any comment. We assume they are hard at work fixing the last few bugs before Softs. Honestly, every night they built a new version of the game, and every morning Chris and Sasa would come in and test.
Over the weekend we worked on our Softs presentation. At midnight on Sunday, Chris demanded that everyone call it a night, and even had to escort a few of his teammates home to make sure they did not stay up overnight trying to implement every last little fix.
Seriously, sleep is important.