This week was an insanely productive one. Perhaps the most productive dev week that I've had since starting the EAE program. Was it solely because of my good looks?
Maybe, although that may not happen again as the beard has been washed away from my face. Now I look like I have a 7 yr old's head firmly planted on a 6'4'' out of shape 24 year old body. Basically, I look similar to Beetlejuice after he felt the wrath of the head shrinker during the epilogue of the Tim Burton film.
Oh and yesterday was HALLOWEEN! I did not dress up sadly but the whole EAE program got together and through a party not only for the holiday but to also congratulate cohort 2 on submitting their games to the IGF. Their games look great and they deserved a bit of R&R. Oh and here is a video of both cohorts dancing to Gangnam Style.
Anywhoo, the game is coming along very nicely. We've got character movement, shooting, enemies, an inventory system, item UI, and sound all yesterday. My engineers are doing a fantastic job working together as well as maintaining a process to their workflow. Many of our stand-up meetings are about 5 minutes long simply because we all know what each of us are doing and have seen the last update to the game. I attribute our synchronization to the first week which I enforced as "design week," where no one could write a single line of code which would go into the game. Perhaps this thorough process promoted the team to get really motivated about the project and hit the ground running at full speed. Regardless we're getting stuff done not only quickly but correctly. We've yet to sacrifice our idea's "fun" for deadlines or code-cutting.
As for me, I'm serving as the level designer for the game. Our team decided to move forward with Tiled as our level editing software. Chris and I decided on a preliminary tile set to begin populating the terrain just as placeholder art for now. I've already drawn out the shape of each area in our open world and how they connect in which has helped greatly in setting the collision areas. One thing I am concerned about is the size of the map. Right now it is 500x500 tiles which seems really big but we wanted to stress our game as an open world experience for the player. Its not that big of a deal if it is too big because tiled allows you to resize on the fly without any casualties to your assets which is amazing. I can't stress how helpful this program has been to this project. It's ability to convert my map to XML to import into our HTML5 game is just super convenient and easy. I'm almost done with the first iteration of the world and I'll be showing it to the team in a few hours.
Here's hoping for some great feedback!
Andrew
