Newsletter 1: January 16th
Team Gaia – Weekly Newsletter – Week 1
This week was a week of introductions, the members of the team introduced themselves to each other and we all were introduced to the project, its advisors and our client. This week’s newsletter will be a representation of those introductions.
We opened this week introducing ourselves and figuring out where we fit into this team the composition was decided upon Jake Ahn and Brentt Kasmiskie working together on both Sound and Game design. Tiffa Cheng and Bing Liu will be the artists. Jerry John and Melody will be programming alongside me, Vivek Sangubhotla who would also help out with programming. The producers would be Vivek and Tiffa.
We also after a brief round of discussion and democracy decided upon the name of our team to be Gaia. This name ties itself in many ways with our project landscape of a rainforest game/biome, Gaia being the Greek personification of the earth.
Lastly as part of our team introductions we got our core hours together. We figured out what works well and got a Monday, Wednesday and Friday schedule set up. This schedule of core hours ties in well with our advisors’ schedule and also overlaps with the actual project time slot well, so it provides added benefits…
We began to work on bringing our ideas together by sharing a google doc where the team could note down interesting game mechanics or games in general that could begin the process of creating an end product.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1p_pTzNGDM_Nx6v6_PHrTbb7AIhqWzH5j7uq-Y2kuUfw/edit
The artists also began working on palette which represented what art they thought could inspire the various directions we could take the game. This would help to find an aesthetic feel that we as a team liked and could influence the direction our game went.
Obviously as time goes by these ‘abstract’ aesthetics will (if all goes to plan) end up more defined and will build into concept art that acts as a representative to what we envision our end product to be.
Following up we were able to align our schedules on Friday in the hope to meet our client, which due to unforeseen circumstances had to be postponed to the following week. We were able to get a skype meeting done with the client and got a lot of our questions answered. A lot of answers did lead to more questions and others became talking points in our discussions about what is important to us and the client and as we brood (not too long) over it, they will help find the common ground between us and the client.
A compilation of that discussion can be found here:
https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1W9EGJHmtrfXx8pdVT8xtIjUTYod0QQwSxNoV0K5LcaY/edit?usp=sharing
Lastly we attended the play testing workshop on Friday:
It was helpful in working on some brainstorming with Plex cards, bringing what we found important as part of experience and tying it to the Rainforest themed biome. I personally think that maybe the workshop could have been held in the middle of the second week as we didn’t have much of solid grasp on what we were doing when the team prepped for the workshop but it did help provide a framework to work off of for our upcoming discussions in tying together what is important to the theme of the game/biome.
Moving forward we have a lot of work to do. At this point in time we still have to unify ourselves on what we our vision for the end product will be, tying together interesting and fun game mechanics with the necessary experience of learning. Also as producer I need to start making some schedules and give the team deadlines our nothing will never get done… but that just may be my wishful thinking. In conclusion next week should hopefully be more hands on and if all goes to plan we will be able to go meet our client and check out Mountainview Elementary school
This is how the week went. We realize this is somewhat of a report style newsletter, so all feedback is welcome. Moving forward we will have all this up on some website of some sort where commenting is enabled so that people can comment on these newsletter and give us great feedback.
Also the question of this week that we are signing off on (Square Enix did this a lot so I will be blatantly remixing them):
How do you make an exploration game feel less of an open non-constrictive world (where you can get lost) and more of a micro chasm of interactions which drive learning?