Saturday 29 March 2014

Red Sun on Facebook

The development team is currently putting up a facebook page for the game here: https://www.facebook.com/pages/Red-Sun/626703384065819

The link in temporary and we are looking for an agreeable URL that is not currently in use.

Each team member will be making posts over the next couple of weeks as we start up our production. Most of our documentation is complete and under review from our overseeing faculty.

Sunday 16 March 2014

Tutorials

We have all come together and decided Unity 2D is the way to go for our project and the end pre-production is fast approaching. The prototype has started to form on paper. The programmers have taken to the technical document and building the custom tools we will require. The designers on the other hand have started the GDD appendix. This will outline exactly what pieces will be made in the four months of production as well as a list of all the assets that will need to be produced.  This includes all of the sprite sheets that will have to be made for both the characters and the monsters.


This week the Red Sun team has been going through tutorials. That being said, Unity has put together a 2D tutorial ( http://unity3d.com/learn/tutorials/modules/beginner/2d ) that touches upon all the major areas we'll be working in. Doing the research now will hopefully save us time in the long run as we start building our game.

Saturday 8 March 2014

Living Document and Living Group

The preliminary GDD (Game Design Document) has been completed. That being said, the document is 'living' and will continue to change with the project. We've started setting up our SVN for file sharing so the group can work on different parts of the projects as well as the documentation. Its very important that as the project changes all the members of the group are together and talking about the changes as they happen.

This has brought up the interesting discussion of the democracy vs. the dictatorship group mentalities. Both group designs require leadership, but they are very different in the over all feel of the group. The bottom line to most group discussions have come down to deferring to expertise. Good leadership knows that they can't know everything and being in a group has the great advantage of being able to rely on group members and their working knowledge to make the best choices.

Sunday 2 March 2014

Making a Physical Prototype Kit

Spring break is over and now its time to get back to work. It's time to start prototyping. Physical prototypes can save time and money in the long run by working out mechanics using pencil and paper. There is little initial investment, many of the ideas for a basic kit are house hold items. A few of the more useful items can serve multiple purposes. Several interesting pieces that have been particularly useful are as follows:

Dice:  While these can be used as intended, as a random number generator, an assortment of dice can also be used as counters or uniform game pieces.

Binder Clips: These clips can be used to hold pieces of paper (or other little items) together, latch onto the sides of tables, hold sting, but also can be turned upside down to hold pictures to serve as character markers.

Tiddlywinks: The flat little plastic pieces can be used as markers or counters.

Harvesting pieces from old board games can yield many useful and interesting pieces to use in a prototype. Its a matter of getting creative and having a clear idea of the game before spending the time to make a digital prototype.