He Thinks He Can Design Things

After an awesome award-winning excursion to Ubisoft MTL, I am finally back into the swing of things with The Co-Signers. The team has made some amazing progress on building the level that Chris, Jake, and I created a few weeks ago. Damean's art looks fantastic and we even have almost all of the features completed. But with our Alpha deadline and EAE day approaching, we are scambling to integrate all of the systems together. Will we make it!? Read ON!

Today was supposed to be a great day. The Co-Signers team met this morning to discuss the short amount of time we have to get to Alpha (end of the semester on May 3rd). That's not a lot of time for a 2-player asymmetrical couch co-op game. However, we got MASSIVELY roadblocked today... Want to know why? READ ON.

I just finished a Skype meeting with the whole team and they have come up with some great ideas from their new brain storm. I'm sure you are super excited to see what they've come up with and so... Read ON!

So I'm writing this from my hometown, on the outskirts of Boston after a massive change in my personal life. It has been one strange and life-changing week for me to say the least but some great things have been going on back in Salt Lake City with The Co-Signers. What are they? Read ON!

After torturing us for about an hour, we finally received the decision on which games are going through to full production. The Co-Signers  is officially in full production and I could not be more proud of my team. All of us worked so very hard on every step of this prototype's development and each person was incredibly motivated to build the best game possible. As I've said in previous posts, although The Co-Signers is sort of my brain child - it is not my game anymore. It is my team's game - Team Hack n' Hide. I look forward to seeing what the future has in store for this game: including what new faces will be joining us from the team's that were not selected. My main hope is for new people to join the team and make this game their own as well.

All next week the team will be brainstorming a few new features. I will not be there, unfortunately, because I have some personal matters to attend to back home during Spring Break. Do not fret though! I shall be calling in via Skype to hear all of the new team's feedback on the prototype and idea on moving forward. Truly exciting stuff going on!

Jason T and I met up this weekend for a few hours to discuss the future of our Ubisoft Game Lab project. After getting some feedback from Ubisoft, faculty, fellow students, and some industry pros in the area - we decided to take the game into a new direction. A direction that makes more sense creatively, functionally, and one that we can build. Read ON!

Whew! It has been quite a week working on the thesis game. We made a lot of headway with the project and I think we are ready to go into full-on engineering phase, building the prototype. Oh and there is also concept art as well! Want to see it? Read on!

I battled with this for quite some time now. In the beginning, this game was about breaking a loved one out of prison, then it changed to somewhat of a heist game. Neither one of those ideas is a great hook for a student game though. Both of them are still in the ranged of AAA titles which is something that this project does not want to exactly be. After all, this is the opportunity for this team to make a game that we all care about. In previous meetings, I had everyone think about what they would want to steal in the current world. Read ON!

We got feedback on the design document! Overall, they are most concerned about scope with our game. In particular, they mentioned that combat may prove to be very difficult to build. Jason and I (designers on the game) thought this would be their reaction to our design document. We shall not fret though! He and I are meeting this coming weekend to look at reducing the scope of the game and finding the fun fast. 

Today was the deadline for our cohort to choose what games they want to work on and form teams. After a weekend of intrigue, the games have been chosen and teams are assembled. There are four games being prototyped right now. What are they? Read ON!

Today went a bit strange. After giving formal feedback to each presenter from Tuesday, we were then told how the thesis projects were going to be picked to be prototyped. Basically, the entire cohort chooses which projects they want to work on and prototype to the next stage. Teams must be a minimum of 5 people and a maximum of 12. I was a bit scared about this at first mainly because I did not want Cellblock to be killed because everyone wanted to work on their own ideas. I wanted it to have a fair shot up with an unbiased audience. I was proven wrong, however, because when we were told to break from class and talk about assembling into groups I had four people approach me about developing Cellblock. I am super pumped about that. The one catch is that we need to wait until class on Tuesday to officially head off to the races and begin production on the idea. Everyone on the team already has great design ideas about the game and I am so excited I can finally give this project to a team who is passion about making it. It's not my idea anymore its the teams. 

I've decided to pitch my asymmetrical cooperative game about trust for the thesis project. Not only that, but I'm also pitching the game with another producer in the program - Zac Truscott. Zac and I have had some great conversations about this game and I believe the two of us can really make the idea sing in the 5 minutes we are being given to pitch. The pitch is in 2 days, expect it to be posted on here shortly.

Oh and I'm also being photographed for the University of Utah alumni magazine called Continuum. Apparently, I may have a two page spread in there. I feel so fancy.

-Andrew

The first week of the second semester is now over and boy do I have a busy week ahead of me. Trust me, you'll pity me a little bit. Read on!

I almost could not believe it. The pitch went amazingly. Our demo looked fantastic. The Q&A section was enlightening and well-fielded. I felt like all of our hard work paid off. Then, the other teams presented and it seems we were not the only ones with good games on our hands. I'm not going to lie, I was very nervous coming out of the conference room where we all pitched. Each team had an original idea that would do fantastic with three more months of development. Want to hear how it all went down? Read on!

The meeting last night went great. The team seemed to be in great spirits about our game and are working on tweaking a few minor aspects to the experience. Most of them deal with enemy A.I and adjusting our character's walk animation with their walk speed. Seeing how much my teammates have built in what has been essentially a 2 1/2 week development cycle (including the holidays!), I volunteered to complete the construction of our tutorial. I have had the most experience with level design in past projects, and I recently completed an entire class in level design taught by EA Salt Lake's, Joe Bourrie. I just seemed like the right man for the job. Then I sat down and began crafting it...Read on to see what it looks like!

I just landed in SLC and I'm already working hard on my Ubisoft pitch with the rest of my team. In fact, I have a meeting with them in a few hours to go over the final adjustments of the 3 minute demo will be shown alongside the pitch. The majority of the environment should be built by now as Jason K did a version of it over the course of this week. The two final things that need to come together between tonight and tomorrow is populating the level with the flora and fauna of the jungle that Isaac created and then placing the tutorial triggers within Unity for our audience to grasp the progression of our game.

Finally! All of the presents are bought, 2013 is here, the apocalypse didn't happen yet, and I'm hanging out on the couch playing some Portal 2 - not a bad way to relax for the next few days before heading back to SLC. I'm truly relaxing too! I've taken the next couple of days off to hang with friends and family before I return to working on my Ubisoft project. Not too much to update on that either. We may have a few bugs where the main character ends up flying in the air when they walk backwards but I'm confident we can tune our demo and finish our level design before I give the pitch to the panel on January 7th (so soon!).

In the meantime, I'm going to chillax with some GladOS potatoes and a side of Wheatley.

-Andrew