Powerpoints & Parties - Alex
Assignment Tracker
We started our last semester at the NYU Game Center last week, and an exercise we had to do was break up our vision for what we'd like to showcase at the end of the semester into macro tasks, then micro tasks to complete each of these micro tasks. We both really loved this as it made it so much clearer what had to happen to tackle each one of our five billion systems and determine which systems were actually necessary.
As we don't have an official producer, it really is on us to determine what items are important and how to proceed. We will be implementing two week sprints and reevaluate progress and our shifting priorities in a less formalized Agile manner. You can follow our progress at the link below!
This, along with the other documents that follow, is a living document that will change over time but that can all be found here:
Style Guides
A large part of the work I've done this week was put together different style guides for the art direction, audio direction, and design/concept of hangoutitude itself. As we've onboarded a few contributors to the project, it's increasingly important for us to determine the "vibe" of our game and to be able to have a living document that could convey this in a meaningful way accounting for our contributors' mediums. I'd built some before with the original concept (one that leaned much more into the whimsical nature of The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker and The Professor Layton series), but as we've moved away from this style, it's important to update these and begin tying ideas together.
Concept Bible
Something our faculty advisor, Patrick, had asked for at the beginning of the semester was a concept bible-- something akin to a design document, though it needn't be as formal. This ended up falling to the wayside as we shifted ideas constantly, but it becomes ever more important as we begin showing these ideas to more and more people. It, too, is important for us to remember the pillars that hangoutitude stands on as we move forward. Steele and I often get excited as we discuss new systems and with the limited time we have left this semester, we need to keep thinking about which systems directly answer our creative challenge and save everything else for another day (unfortunately).
The current document lives here and is, as with everything else, a work in progress.
Art Style Bible
The first and probably most fun (for me) thing to do is look at other JRPGs. It lets me dream about everything I want for this game! The hardest part, however, has always been tying together what I want into a cohesive style and understanding the hows and whys of the visuals of games that do exist. I'm by no means a visual artist but thankfully am surrounded by many. Maggie, a good friend of mine and fellow member of the cohort, sat down with me to discuss the basics of art direction and to emphasize the importance of deciding a time period and a region for this town to take place, as all these would determine things like fashion and technology that exists in this world. We're, of course, granted some liberties as the genre often veers into the fantastical, but we still want to be cognizant and mindful of the things we do choose.
The current document lives here, though it is (and will always be) a work in progress.
Audio Bible
A key component of JRPGs is the bleep blop bloops of the neverending menus-- it's important we get those right. This is the last of the concept documents that I need to create, and this is probably a bit more intensive. I unfortunately have the least expertise here and lean hard into Steambot Chronicles or Kingdom Hearts at every opportunity. Thankfully, another one of my good friends and cohort-mates, Austin, is one of our audio engineers and has helped me understand what is helpful and important to think about when speaking about/asking for audio assets.
This is currently an empty document but it will be updated during the week and hopefully become a bit more substantial once I find some time to work uninterrupted.
Party System
Aside from the design work, I've spent much of my time working on the game's party system. A JRPG lives and dies by its characters, and the party is an essential component that evokes the "hanging out" and belonging feelings.
This is an essential system that needed to be designed modular as to allow for other systems to read from it and potentially write to it. At current, these are the bits we needed completed:
- Recruit a Party Member through dialogue choices
- Add them to a Party data structure
- Update the camp menu
- Have the Party Member follow the player in town
Party Member Recruitment
I had already created a Scriptable Object for Party Member that holds information you would expect, such as their name, HP, MP, level, and whether they were recruited (among others). Our preliminary dialogue system has also been set in place already. The difficult part was learning how to use Yarn commands to call upon C# functions-- which, honestly, isn't that complex, but I was having trouble and still can't tell you 100% what had gone wrong.
Party (Data Structure)
The Party data structure is a linked list (my fave). It allowed for modularity with the addition and removal of Party Members throughout your journey. This, I anticipated, would become important once you begin removing party members or rearranging them via our menus. A linked list allows us to swap the order of Party Members with little overhead.
Next Up!
The next bits to do by the end of our sprint is to update the camp menu, which you can read about in the last devlog, and tie together our existing Character Follow script with this new system. Then from there, we can start worrying about removing party members... Oh joy :' )
That's all for now! Thanks for reading and joining us on this journey-- you keep us accountable (and we need that).