CAGD 377 - Blog Post 1

I am on Team 2, and we are making Portal Packaging, a mobile game about solving puzzles by using portals to transport packages and crates across different levels. This process has gone very well so far. We have just finished the first sprint, but my team is already very structured with goals set in mind for each sprint, and thanks to our programmer, Chase, we already have functioning portals and crate physics. I am the designer of my team. Although a designer is what I originally set out to be in the first place when I first started attending Chico, this project has been my first real opportunity to lead the design on the game and be the primary driver on things such as mechanics, art direction and level design. It is pretty unfamiliar to me, because I mostly have done producer related work in the past, but I think this semester and project will act as a great learning experience for me to see if I prefer to produce games or design them. As a group, we did not encounter any major issues. One issue we did run into that I was not anticipating was that our producer, Conner, has been not writing enough cards for us that are relevant to our current work and has not been writing enough to keep up with the pace that Chase and I have been working at. This is not a major issue, as we have been preoccupied with the cards already in our assigned category, but nonetheless, it is an issue that we as a team have. Personally, some of the issues that I encountered were that within this sprint I did not want to just work on the paper prototype, and I was hoping to have a lot more levels designed and built in Unity. However, as I mentioned in the sprint review, the paper prototype construction took me far longer than I had anticipated. Part of the reason why was because I had no graph paper available to me, so I had to make sure that every part of the levels that I made was measured. Even though it took me a long time to complete the paper prototype, I had also repeatedly reduced the scope of the playtest. I went into it knowing that I wanted to keep the scope limited so that I could spend more time on the digital game, but I ended up keeping the levels small and simple and only having a few interactable mechanics within the paper prototype so that I did not end up making the prototype overly complicated with the time I had available to me.

For the paper prototype, the work I did more specifically was to cut out a portion of a box so that I could use it as the cardboard frame of the game board. I measured and cut all of the paper to shape, then drew lines spaced half an inch apart from each other so that I created grids that the player could use to measure their movement distance. I created hazards on the map and then designed the physics on the rule sheet around the game board so that the player would not accidentally put themselves out of bounds.

After I was finished with the paper prototype, I spent some time taking the levels that I designed for the paper prototype and blocking them out in our Unity project. I was pretty happy with how they turned out, so my primary goal for this next sprint is to continue to block out a large variety of levels that are all compatible with the portals so that we have a lot of different levels to test and play with in the following sprints.

Overall, I think the communication in our group has been a huge proponent of these first small successes which are going to snowball into much greater success further down the road. During our first sprint kickoff and second one just yesterday, we spent a good amount of time discussing what kind of work we all wanted to accomplish across the sprint, why we thought it would be helpful for our groupmates, and then set out to distribute cards based on that. There is always an open line of communication with our group and it has been very refreshing to experience.