This week was a first for me for this particular project, but also in general. Now that our development team has honed in on our concept, we have begun the work of fleshing it out and proving its viability. For my team, this meant focusing on one major element of our game: Guns. My designer focused a lot on gun traits and naming conventions this sprint while my programmers focused on piecing together gun parts in a simple and modular way. My artist takes the cake this week - it was his job to create some simple gun parts and assets to be used for all of this. I'm proud of my team - they've come through for this sprint with 630 different combinations of planned traits with guns. This is a great relief in terms that it proves once part of our concept is viable. Next up is getting networking working properly and building our demo level.
Oddly enough, our other aspect to this game is procedural level building (think rogue-like design where you never know quite what you are going to get when you play). My programmer brought up that this likely needs to take a back seat to Networking, and the team generally agreed. I'd be lying if I said this didn't make me a bit uncomfortable. I feel that procedural level design is pretty key when it comes to these types of isometric shooters. Without it, replay-ability is largely lost. At the same time, I do agree that Networking is very important as well and may be a bigger challenge to get right for us (with not only players, but enemies, spawn points, and the sheer amount of guns and traits that have to work in unison). I also think that we do want our tutorial level to at least be handcrafted. That said, the tutorial level needs to resemble in some way the normal level designs that the final prototype will contain - otherwise it will seem jarring and out of place. For now though, I trust my team and their decision with this. They did agree that the levels should be a high priority item after networking, so that's at least a comfort.
As I mentioned earlier, this was a first for me on this project. This was the first week I really felt like I had some solid work to do to contribute to the project - this was beginning our market research. For the first time, I decided to not only use the generic data I can find online for the games industry, but to dive deeper with a public survey. Admittedly, my results are somewhat skewed. I had a difficult time not leading the surveyors with specific prompts related to our project. The forum the survey was posted (Reddit primarily) also likely skews the general age range of those who took it. Still, it has given me some early data to use and test against next week. My next planned steps are two fold:
* Create an even more focused survey but post it to forums of similar style games only
* Find and interview people who enjoy this type of game and find out a bit of what makes them respond to this type of experience.
This is the first time I've taken a more "hands-on" approach to finding marketing data. I hope that it really helps the team focus our project but also our marketing. For now, I feel my team has a rock-solid start as we push toward the Thanksgiving deadline.
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