Week 3 and some of the artists are officially running out of work!
We discussed that pending issue and quickly came to the conclusion that the programmers were soon to run out of work as well, and we'd have enough time to add the mushroom mechanic from my pitch week 1. So add the mushroom mechanic we did.
After the meeting Oscar and I went ahead and updated the Trello board with any new mushroom-related tasks, and let team members assign themselves a task.
That week Oscar volunteered to represent designers for the sprint, so I had more time to keep working on dialogue with Fabian.
Sprint went well! We got some good feedback from the supervisors. Mainly stuff to think about for Friday's prototype as good as it possibly could be, and to make sure we wouldn't be TOO stressed the last few weeks.
Us Designers huddled with the programmers in order to flesh out how we wanted the mushroom mechanic to work, since the game was so different now from the pitch it appeared in originally. Still it went pretty unchanged, "When a villager has a high enough reputation(tweakable) and is served a stew they like, there's a possibility that they may give you a mushroom.
We kept the "papers, please" aspect of the magnificently named "SHROOMPEDIA", where the mushrooms are toxic only to certain trolls, and you need to consult a visual field-guide to see what mushroom you currently possess, and what effect it will have on your present villagers.
- Serving stew with a mushroom they all can eat in it, allows for a flat reputation boost.
- Serving stew with a mushroom even a single troll is weak to, will do a massive negative hit to all present trolls' reputation, which is guaranteed to anger the trolls into player-death.
I recommended that mushrooms have a decay-mechanic, meaning they disappear if not used- to avoid cluttering up the cutting-board. We discussed and agreed to make it a 2 day decay timer. (The mushroom disappears after 2 in-game days.)
Finally we decided on a set number of mushrooms, 6, and let Esther make whichever mushrooms she pleased. (We ended up with 8 by the end of the week, with a Rock-shroom and an ice-shroom being added to the roster by David and Agnes, respectively.
Finally we decided on a set number of mushrooms, 6, and let Esther make whichever mushrooms she pleased. (We ended up with 8 by the end of the week, with a Rock-shroom and an ice-shroom being added to the roster by David and Agnes, respectively.
The rest of the week up until Friday was quite uneventful, as I kept on writing villager bickering/reactions, whilst helping out with UI on the side.
- Feel like I ought to clarify, Gabriel and I are the only ones in the team comfortable with 2D art, and Gabriel was busy texturing EVERYTHING in the game, so we delegated that task to me, to offset his workload.
On Friday it was time to present our prototypes to the rest of the class and the supervisors.
We, as a group, discussed what we wanted to prioritise for the showing and landed on mostly showcasing the visual assets; like all the lovely art models that were implemented, alongside the basic gameplay of picking up ingredients, chopping them and adding to the stew.
This was mainly because we wanted to make sure to accurately convey the core feel of the game.
After presenting the prototype (Thank you Oscar, Hampus & Reymond! I was watching from home with a splitting migraine, but kept active and cheered them on over discord.)
We all felt like we were in a good place, scope-wise, especially compared to some of the other groups, which definitely increased over-all morale in the group. :D