Busy Busy Busy

I realized today that it had been quite some time since I last updated my blog, and I am way overdue. I'm going to do my best to update this once a week. My team's thesis game has been eating up a lot of time, but we're making terrific progress.

We started with the original idea, which I outlined some in my last post, and through a ton of deconstructing, brainstorming, more deconstruction, and more brainstorming we've come up with a pretty great concept, one that I think is getting more and more refined. When Jason came up to me with the synesthesia idea and a grinding mechanic, I latched on to something that I didn't quite realize: I wanted the player to experience music in a way that clashes with how society now treats it. Today, music is all about quick access, giant libraries, shuffled and curated playlists, portability, headphones, .mp3's, .acc's, iPods, iPhones, and Spotify. There was a time, even when I was younger, when we didn't take music for granted. The accessibility of music now is terrific, and I wouldn't want to lose it. But I fear that we've lost the idea of experience, and not just in music. We listen to podcasts and music as we stream movies and television and write on our blogs and update out Tumblrs and play FarmVille and chat with our friends while taking pictures of our food to upload to Instagram while we live tweet our dinner date. We don't take time to have an experience with anything. At some point I realized that this game was in direct response to this idea of the always connected brave new world we live in. There's some quality to just experiencing a thing, taking it in completely and fully. I want our game to be about inhabiting a space where music is listened to and not just heard, so completely that the player sees the music, feels it. The real question is how do we use the immersive nature of games to submerge the player in the synesthestic experience of music while not distracting her with too great a challenge or bore her with too easy a task? We need to nail the flow of the game just right to bring the player into the experience.

So enough pontificating. What are we doing to see this goal realized? We've broken down the core mechanic to surfing or snowboarding (as opposed to grinding) in a half-pipe, where the player needs to move left and right to avoid static electricity obstacles, which will send the player in a direction or slow her down randomly. Its mostly the same idea but with a few twists. In the interest of not duplicating work, and promoting our awesome team, I've linked the wiki I created (with the input of the team) here. And here's a screenshot for the lazy (although we have a great deal of information there so I do recommend reading it):

Credit for our awesome logo goes to Brianne

Right now we have the Wiki, but we also have a Google Group for nice and easy email communication to everyone on the team (which is linked on our Wiki) and a team blog with thoughts from the team (which is also linked on our Wiki). Brianne and I have just tried to make communication very easy for everyone, with plenty of ways to express your thoughts or share interesting finds. We've also tied in our scrum process to the wiki, with a small task list to keep things going forward.

As a small team we've been very agile, if not Agile with a capital A, meaning that we've taken the spirit of the Agile development process but maybe the process. During our prototypes last semester, I tried to get people to use my scrum documents with very little luck. Given that our team is literally the same as a prototype team would have been last semester but with an extra producer, we have taken a more organic approach to team tasks. We also know our team and know what they're capable of. None of them need much oversight and everyone is really into this idea. So for the moment, we've given very large tasks to our engineers and ourselves, with stand-up meetings to discuss what's going on and what we need to do. Its worked out great so far, but the minute we pass this first gate, especially if we pick up more people, we're going to implement a more rigid scrum process and schedule to ensure we hit a nice feature-lock come alpha.

And to prove it, here's a short video of our first real playable build, with the player movement in (including speeding up and slowing down) and obstacles that move the player in a random direction. Also, that sweet half-pipe was created and textured by me, so I guess that Game Arts class is helping me already.

So check out the Wiki. and the team blog. My next post will have a little more levity, where I talk about a game I've been playing recently, among other things.