Development Blog

Week three update:

This week we’ve spent a lot of time working on putting out a working prototype of our ideas. We built off the frameworks we came up with last week, and have worked from our prototype to develop our goals for our next milestone in two weeks.

On Tuesday, Feb 6th, we presented our first prototype to our client, Alan Gershenfeld at E-Line Media – showing our design brief and quick footage of our initial prototype. Our goal with this prototype was as a proof of concept showing that our mechanics could work in a simple environment, as well as being able to show what direction we wanted to potentially take our game in.

Alan was fairly satisfied with our work thus far, and encouraged us to keep exploring this avenue of gameplay. We discussed the very real issues of scope for the project; how we could extend the gameplay through the design of puzzles, using assets from the Unity Asset store if they could save us time on production work. In addition to this, we were encouraged to flesh out the story and worldbuilding to give the player character an interesting motivation to explore and traverse our world.

Thus, we have decided to move forward in the level design by creating tools for the designers – Zacks is primarily working on this to be done by Feb 10th, and from the 10th onward, the process gets handed off to our designers Yuqiao and Erhan and, artist Siyu to work on three more levels involving a few more verbs (level 2 and level 3 operations), as well a first pass at UI, which will be primarily overseen/implemented by Longyi and Zacks.

In parallel with this effort, Erhan and Omar will be working on creating a basic outline of our narrative – what is the player character’s motivations, how can we engage the player using the narrative, what are they discovering, how do the code modules fit organically into the world? For this, we’re drawing a lot of inspiration from games like Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture, and Valley, in their storytelling styles.

Finally, now that we’re all confident on the direction we’re going with Parallel, we are also prepping to be able to show off our work on the second milestone for Quarters presentations. We have been very careful and deliberate in keeping our sketches and designs around in order to properly document the working process and bring faculty new to the project up to speed.

Week two update:

This week’s work, we’ve finally been able to dive into work prototyping, and the branding for our team has been coming along nicely. We have all brainstormed individually the mechanics and frameworks we should work within for the game, and come together to discuss on a daily basis.

On Wednesday, Jan 31st, we presented a basic design concept of our game to faculty – an overview of what we wanted to try and achieve for the semester: Design Presentation. This included an outline of how the gameplay interactions would go, our theories on how the map would potentially look like, and the educational methods (and how effective they would be).

Since then, we have worked on enhancing specific ideas and looking at possible design constraints. One of the things we realized quickly is that in order to teach coding, we needed to begin to break down the topics we wanted to teach into tiers:

• Level 1: things that can be manipulated through code, “block.obj” or other asset types.
• Level 2: simple commands that can be used to manipulate level 1. Transform, rotate, scale, etc. would be included in this level.
• Level 3: more complex operations that can be added on top of the commands in level 2. Things in this level could be loops, if statements, things that can potentially automate parts of environment manipulation.

In addition to this, we took a good look at the gameplay interaction that the player would go through in manipulating their environment – how would the player character use their PDA, what sort of UI would pop up? What button presses would be involved in applying code modules or selecting objects in an environment to be changed? We settled on an interaction flow that cycles between three modes. Players would use WASD and mouse to move around in the environment. When they find an object they want to manipulate, they would press “T” to bring up the selection screen, aiming and clicking on the highlighted object. From there, the editing UI would come up, and players would be able to make changes with their code module abilities, hitting enter or a submit button to return to the movement mode of gameplay.

Taking these design ideas, we have started moving forward with a prototype to show for quarters on Feb 6th, working to implement a simple puzzle that requires the use of a rotation command, and move command, as well as a good example of how we envision the player interaction through the aforementioned “modes.”

The Project:

E-Line Media is a game developer and publisher dedicated to creating games and experiences that help players learn and shape the world around them. Their games seek to provide positive impact in the world by inspiring imagination, curiosity, and education into new perspectives. In addition to this, we will be working in tandem with Endless, a company looking to provide the opportunity for computing to everybody on the planet – enabling people access to digital literacy and relevant information and technology.

The Task:

Our clients have approached us with the task to create a game that fits within E-Line’s educational framework, and helps inspire people to code and create their own games.

Meet the Team:

Omar Cheikh-Ali is our team’s producer. He brings design and art experience to the project, and has a background in architecture.

Longyi Cheng one of our team’s three programmers.

Erhan Qu is one of our designers, and will be fulfilling our game design needs, as well as our sound needs for the project.

Siyu Ren is our team’s artist, with deep experience working in both 3D art and animation.

Yuqiao Zeng is our team’s second designer. He also brings programming skills to the table.

Chaojie (Zacks) Zhu will be working as another one of our team’s programmers. He has experiences with gameplay systems, and will be invaluable to the project.

 

This first update:

This week’s work has mostly consisted of housekeeping and getting set up. On the 16th, after a brief meeting where we sorted out roles and our personal goals for the project, we decided to take some time for team bonding over dinner. The rest of that week we spent researching the potential goals of our project, and individually brainstorming ideas for designs we wanted to possibly implement.

Tuesday the 23rd, we had our first meeting with one of our clients at E-Line Media. We had a chance to discuss logistics, when we could best Skype in, as Alan Gershenfeld of E-Line Media would be in Colorado, and Matt Dalio from Endless was away in Indonesia. In addition to this, we were able to get clarification on the specifics of our project; we learned the specific goal we should be looking at would be a 3D puzzle game that sought to inspire players to learn coding and game design through manipulation of the environment. Beyond that, we were allowed to run free with our creative ideas – possibly so we would be able to bring a fresh take on things to the clients.

Since then, we have been brainstorming ideas of games and narratives we would like to work on, working towards a pitch for our next client meeting on February 6th.

The excitement for this project is palpable in our room.