Some Recap/What's New
So I've been back at school for about a week now, and things are going great. If you've been keeping up with my Senior Capstone blog, you'll know that my game Change, Please! got greenlite, but I personally felt that it would be better for me to move forward with another team, so the game ended production. With that, I managed to be picked up by Wrong Warp Games to work on their awesome game, Arachnotron. To give a basic summary of the game, you take a spider and a tank, put them together, and get a game where you can climb on any surface and fight a bunch of robot bugs. There's a bit of irony being apart of this team, as I hate spiders, but I just see so much potential for this game that I can ignore that.
What I'm Doing
Lucky for me, I'm gonna get to focus almost solely on level design. While I'm super excited, doing level design for this game is also a little scary. The fact that you have to account for every surface being interactable means that you have to be unimaginably careful with your level design. I'm up to the challenge though, and I know I'll have a lot of support from the other designers. Our second associate designer, Conor, is gonna be helping me with the level designs along with his QA duties, and after working with our lead designer, Evan, on Rolling Thunder last year, I completely trust his decisions and perspectives.
Work This Week
Seeing as it's only the beginning of the semester, things are gonna be pretty slow this week. It's more about the leads helping to get the new recruits on the same page, and to ultimately get us ready to make this game amazing. From the designer perspective, the three of us got together to set up times when we could all meet, and to flush out everything about the design direction that we're going in this semester. We talked mainly about each of the new levels that are going to be made, what enemies are going to be in them, the mechanics that each level will focus on, and each of the bosses for the levels. Along with that, we're gonna have another meeting later in this sprint to go over Evan's level design process, so that me and Conor can get the hang of making the new levels.
There's also a couple other things that we'll be working on this week, but will be less focused on. I'm taking some time to do some design research on games that are similar. Mainly, I'm doing this by playing through more of the story-mode in Splatoon 2. Along with being a third-person shooter, the way you can move on walls is pretty similar to how Arachnotron works, and I'm not really gonna complain about playing a game I liked way before I started working with this team. All of the designers are gonna be going to the first QA session this coming week as well. Conor is pretty much going to be living in the QA labs this semester, but Evan and I figured that it would be good for us to go this week and see tester reactions and find any bugs.
Next Sprint
By the time next sprint comes around, the new recruits will probably be familiar enough with the game to really get to work. For me, that entails beginning to concept the first of the new levels; a train station where the final boss is the train that you're riding on. Along with that, the team leads have talked about doing a game jam where the new recruits break off into teams of 3 (1 person from each discipline) and create one of the new enemies that will be in the game. I'm all for that idea, but we'll have to see if everyone is available for it. Overall, I'm really looking forward to this semester, and am super happy to be on this team.