Development Devlog

Development Process:

Our overall development process can be divided into three sections: brainstorming, Sourcetree, and executing. We spent the first week and a half taking time out of class to meet on Zoom and discussed about which direction we wanted to go. This process will be discussed in further detail below, but the brainstorming sessions helped us to make sure everyone was on the same page. Our next phase was with Sourcetree and the various difficulties that came from the lack of experience of collaborating through Sourcetree. It was a new and complicated system that gave us a lot of trouble, but looking back, the difficulties greatly helped to understand how to navigate around. Lastly, in our executing phase we were constantly updating each other on Discord to fine tune our game to completion.

Design docs, notes, moodboard:

In the first week, our group was brainstormed about rough ideas that we were interested in. We listed key words of topics and concepts that we could potentially develop further for the game, but didn't have to commit to. Below are the notes from our first brainstorming session:

• Mountains - Artic
• Desert
• Rooms - abandoned warehouses with graffiti?
• An escape island - abandoned 
• POV: first person
• Game references: Alice In Wonderland, Detective Pikachu, Stanley Parable 
• Questions to consider:
  -What environment are we making?
  -Who will be doing what tasks in our team?
  -What do we need from the asset store?
• What to prepare for next week:
  -Design sheet (rough notes for concept)
  -Character sketch
  -Game scheme (1 outdoor + 1 indoor)

Building off of these notes that we created, we narrowed down to a concept in a separate meeting as well as the specific details that we all agreed upon. Below are those notes:

• Tone: eerie, abandoned, lonely, quiet
• Environment: realistic, hi-resolution
• Arctic mountain landscape and indoor setting
• Character: lost hiker, finding friend/civilization
• Exploratory game

We also created a mood board with images that illustrated our ideas visually and shared some potential assets that we were interested in using for our game in order to make sure the aesthetics were of the similar visual language. Below are the screenshots of those:

Play-testing feedback:

From here, we created rough prototypes where we used a free snow mountain asset to set the environment. In first person perspective, you could look around by moving your mouse and move with WASD/arrow keys. Using particles, snow fell from the sky to augment the chilly, snow mountain landscapes along with the audio of the wind blowing. We also received play-testing feedback that provided valuable information on details that we could improve further:

• Snowflakes look unrealistic because they're too large - smaller would be more convincing
• Moving things outside to enhance exploration
• Some indication bar for hunger or distance to friend
• Add scenes and props inside cabin

We considered these comments and tried our best to make the following improvements:

• Smaller snowflakes
• Walking penguins that provide direct way to clues
• A friend distance bar that indicates closeness to friend
• Change scenes when moving into indoors with solid boundaries
• Interactions within indoor cabin