I have taken a break from playing games pretty much this whole week and have more thought about games that I want to make. How do they play? What is the player suppose to feel? How can I manipulate those feelings in the controls? I find it easier to thoughts on design into questions about game design and let my game idea revolve around that. It's something I picked up a few weeks ago and has just stuck with me.
While my design cap has been on this past week, things have been shifting around on Evenbloom with the rest of the team back in SLC. Uh-Oh!
Before I had left for Boston, we had set tasks for the final "sprint" before the games release. Sagar was to polish up the Giants with Jon providing the model for them, Cody was to work on lighting, finishing up the grass, and keeping things manageable framerate-wise, and finally Jon concluding his work on the lanterns. I tried checking in on them every two days with updates and everything seemed in order.
On Thursday, however, there were branching builds. Jon finished his work early and explored alternate gameplay scenarios and sent me his work. I liked some of the elements he included. For example, the Giants no longer had a painting radius around them, instead they shot darkness out around them as they patrolled. It looked good and functioned well. He also included some awesome particle effects depicted in the head of this post. Looks awesome, right?
Well, unfortunately Sagar did not know that this was an experimental build and thought his work on the Giants was being cut. This was understandable considering he had not been told about any branch. He felt much better though once we all got together in person. The team agreed that Jon's new painting mechanic worked better than the original concept and so Sagar is working on implementing his code.
Once Sagar finishes up, it seems the prototype for Evenbloom will be finished. All I got to do is pitch the game in its glory to the clients on Wednesday.
No pressure.
-Andrew
