BeeYou Games - sprint 2
General overview: Going from sprint one to two saw us still in the concepting phase. The designers have been busy with iterating on the gameplay and narrative while documenting it for the whole team. This meant however, that there could not be a greenlight for the artists to move away from the concept phase. In general, sprint two was defined by concepting, design, early prototyping and research.
We found out that because of our passion and motivation, we moved a bit too quickly into the ideate phase, nearly turning a blind eye to the research we still needed to do. It was an important part that multiple parties were expecting to see during this period. This is what pushed the design of the game a little bit into the background, leaving artists and engineers with little new tasks to work on besides more concepts and new iterations on the main gameplay mechanics.
Because this research took longer than expected, the game design was pushed back to the second week of sprint 2. And because the game design was not something we could just rush out the door, we were not able to finish the game design document within this sprint to push the team forward into the next stage of development.
We did manage to still be very productive within the project, the work and tasks done are as follows:
Engineers: Worked on the character controller, added a general event system that allows the player to talk with NPCs and more tool creation revolving around the dialogue system.
Artists: Some more work was done for the characters, creating more concepts that we would be able to show to the clients (can be viewed in Kalina's post), and the first concepts for the creature designs were made (can be viewed in Lisa's post). Unfortunately, because the way we need to create levels and how the design intertwines so much with the narrative, we were unable to consider a lot for the environment art.
Designers: The designers were busy with the research for the project, namely the empathy phase and define phase. After we went through that hurtle, we focused on the game design document to get everyone on the same line with the mechanics and so we can push out of the concepting phase. The narrative design document is also well underway with the main outline for each level having been decided on. Some work has also been done in Figma for the UI of the game.
Plans for the next sprint We hope to be done with the game design document very soon, so that we can get the whole group together to go over the rules we need to set for our game and the levels. We will also plan an extensive meeting with the whole group where we will look at the important tasks we need to plan when jumping over from the concept phase to the development & production phase.
Once we have discussed everything concisely, then we can start working a lot more practically, and we hope that we will be able to present more cool things other than concepts.
