Adventures in game design
inertious GameDev DK30 Winter 2020 3 5
Description
This project is part of a group effort to build a game that grew out of the experience of doing the fall DK-30 game jam. The goal for this DK-30 is to finalize design considerations that are needed to integrate a demo version by the end of the DK-30. We are working on a space building survival style game.
Recent Updates
Hello Week 3. Week 2 missed it’s update. The reality is that I have largely gone off the map in terms of what I had planned to work on in the first 2 weeks.
In general I have de-prioritized the importance of finalizing the storyboards. They were largely complete already and filling in the extra detail I was imagining would begin to heavily cross into the doing straight up UX design work. Unity is actually pretty decent in the plasticity of UI so I feel like going straight from rough paper sketches to reposition and adjusting in unity itself makes more sense for workflow.
In terms of Game content generation - up to now I am roughly on track. A lot of placeholder values have been filled with the corresponding objects created in Unity. The math has been done around a lot of the ‘chemical’ reactions such that we shouldnt have magic transmutation occuring. I’ve made some requests to Berndy to parameterize things like the unit scale of what is being consumed and produced. This should make testing and refinement of the system much easier. The plan is to set up some production scenarios and essentially time how the system progresses and try and get a sense of how stable or unstable things are. Since the game is going to have grand strategy style time control, what I will be looking at more is the rate of change vs the time it takes to perform various actions in the game.
Another thing I sidetracked on was to make some progress on a short story that might help capture the feel of the universe the game takes place within.
Progress has been made on working and thinking about game concepts. However I have not finalized or checked things off the list as I had hoped to. Part of the more personal side to doing this as a DK-30 is about the tangible completion of things and not just bringing things to 90% and then letting it languish. I’ll try and use the first part of this coming week to work on finalization.
Estimated Timeframe
Jan 24th - Feb 19th
Week 1 Goal
There are two streams that I am following: storyboards, and game content. Storyboards are about instantiating developed ideas and working through what game play should feel like. Game content is about assigning actual values to things in the game that should at least somewhat be a starting point to figuring out a balanced game.
Storyboard: Engine Start up / Encounter End
Game Content: fuel / travel model, object mass
Week 2 Goal
Storyboard: game start, encounter
Game Content: resources, building compositions
Week 3 Goal
Storyboards should be wrapped up by Week 3
Game Content: making objects in Unity, creating test events with the event system
Week 4 Goal
Integration and testing: help team put things together and test