Week 1 ~ 03/02/20 – 09/02/20

In week 1 of the team project, we met with the team for the first time and participated in some activities to generate game ideas, then after class began work on our decided game idea.

During the idea generation activities, everyone came up with a few ideas each, and we all shared and pitched them. There were ideas thrown around like “antigravity and you move objects to solve puzzles” and “you’re a crab and have to collect shells for the crab king”, each with their own merits, but in the end, we settled on Nick’s idea of a character with social anxiety trying to attend a party. This was an idea that we all felt we had an affinity and personal connection with and therefore the one that we would be most passionate about producing.

We made the following notes about the game idea:

During the class, we also discussed what roles everyone in the group would prefer to fulfill. Three people wanted to fulfill the role of Artist and I got designated as lead Artist since I have some experience with art. Adam was designated lead programmer and we assigned “switch” roles for students that weren’t present so that they could fill in and help out with any role they wanted. My first task would be to create some concept designs for unique characters for the game.

Stuart also showed us a game that ours reminded him of, it was called Party 2 Hard, and we decided to use some elements as inspiration for our own work.

Later that evening, we created a group discord server and group Facebook chat. We were able to find, on Facebook, both of the absent students and add them to the group and explain to them the idea that we had come up with. They discussed what roles they would like to perform in the group and Ollie let us know that he would probably not be present for much of the project. Anaise said that she would be happy to do both Art and Writing roles.

In the discord, I shared images of different art styles and asked people to like the one that they would most like to create the game in. The game that Stuart showed us in class along with another pixel art game had decidedly the most votes and thus sparked a debate on whether we should be using a forward-facing or isometric style.

I also created a quick silhouette sketch that I was thinking to potentially use as a start screen for the game. I was pretty pleased with the way that this turned out and members of the group also seemed happy with it! I used some stock images of people at parties as reference for the poses.

Over the coming days everyone selected a role on discord that they would be happy performing and Alvin let us know over discord that he would be happy to programme the audio as well as doing the sound design.