Overview

The team  directed their efforts this week to putting the pieces together for a simple prototype using networked devices and communicating the gameplay we are working towards.  By the end of the week, with Legato we had developed two basic prototypes: one allowing 3 players to collaboratively control 1 character through their separate phone inputs, and another in which each player controls a single character and competes against the others to sink the most pool balls.

Production

This week Goksu and Christian worked to set up necessary meetings between the East and West coast team members, and to maintain the constant communication required for the programmers and designers to move forward with the networked prototype.

Design

Christian and Jimin coordinated closely with Legato’s designers to further define the direction of the team’s game design.  To do this, the designers worked together to develop the outline of a design document that detailed the core idea, user stories for game mechanics and the feelings that players should get from them, and level outlines for initial prototypes to test out mechanics. Towards the end of the week, the designers outlined some possible issues with the collaborative gameplay the team envisioned and created a document with potential design solutions for those issues.

Art

Lilian continued to explore different approaches for the game’s art style, and together with the artists in Legato, began to work look more deeply at vector art and do some in depth studies with that art style.  With input from the designers, she experimented with character designs that could incorporate specialization for each of the jelly character’s limbs.

Programming

The previous week Goksu and Michael had been developing their separate pieces for the Unity project side while the Legato programmers experimented with HTML and JavaScript to emulate a jelly object in the browser.  This week the teams worked to put those pieces together, make the necessary changes for them to function together, and continue to develop the functionality of each piece.  Goksu worked on gameplay programming and making API calls for Michael to put in his networking code in order to pass her data.  Michael continued to update the networking code and communicate with Jerry in Legato to make updates as he continued developing the server.  Julia worked within Unity to learn more about the jello physics plugin for Unity, and put a local prototype of the soft bodies on the tablet for the team to experiment with.

Next Steps

With quarters approaching next Wednesday, the team will be working to develop an additional prototype that more fully shows collaborative gameplay, and also experiment with different gameplay built around the existing mechanics to get a better idea of what works and what to explore further.  With a more solidified direction for theme and design at the end of this week, and feedback from the prototypes developed next week, the team hopes to move more fully into a production phase with what we have learned at the end of next week.  We plan to keep iterating on our design, adjusting mechanics, and prototyping levels and gameplay to find the best fit.