Meeting journals.

Meeting journals:

I've typed up all the meeting stuffs, but I decided against posting it all here as it would be like twenty posts or one heck of a long one. so instead, here's a summary:

1. We got assigned groups, and we were happy with being awesome-supremo-groupnumberone.
More or less decided on who did what in the group, though this was revised later and ended up being:

Platoon of Radioactive Men:

Project Manager: Christian Lovdal (That is ME!! UNLIMITED POOOWAH! Ahem... Yeah...)
Lead Designer: Dan Bone
User Experience Designer: Craig Close
Art Director: James Pendry
Tech Director: Nick Abbs
Sounds Director: David Wallet

Obviously WE all know ths, but I'm putting it there anyways. Remeber guys, this does not mean you have to do all the stuff that falls under your "area", it just means your to blame if it goes wrong, and that you are in charge of it being done etc.

2. So, we got our pitch. It's ducks and zombies, and that's about it. They seem to want old ideas, made new and exciting.

We decided to focus on browser gaming, aimed at Cyber-Ducks own webpage, as they are the client, however we want to make it so it can be used on mobile devices. From this we thought it was a good idea to ask Cyber-Duck for their colour swatch and perhaps some assets which they are using for their new webpage.

3. Our game:
OK, so Cyber-Ducks colours are based around white, orange and blue.
In this meeting we mostly threw around ideas, brainstormed like a bunch of awesome dudes and got thinking.

We also started thinkign about the planning of the game, as well as key things we need to implement.

4. At this point we got our idea down. We wanted a 2.5D (3D graphics with 2D movement limitations) platformer with puzzle elements/stages.

This is essentially what we came up with in keywords:

- You play as a duck
- You escape from zombies
- Three levels devided in two.
- First half is a constant motion running phase
- Second half is a puzzle stage which must be solved to progress further

Beyond that, we narrowed down quite a few minor details such as ideas for where we wanted to go with the visuals etc.

5. The presentation was coming up, and we essentially prepare for that by making power point slides, setting up a gantt chart etc.

6. Finished off the presentation and decided on who was going to say what.

7. Our game was finally taking some form (in our heads). At this point we had quite a few concept drawing, giving us an idea of what we wanted it to look like. We had decided that our three levels would be something like a street, a park/forest and a building (and we didn't get more specific just yet).

We made a small story, which I will post in an other blog entry.

We now also decided on many of the smaller details, such as:

- Do we want points?
- Enemies
- Player abilities/controls
- UI
- Challanges
- Music direction
- Challanges

All in all, a pretty successful meeting.

8. Now came the hard part. We started on the basic programming of getting a character to move and jump etc. and tried to start on designing challanges and puzzles.

We found that we needed to do some research on puzzle and challange design however, and after a brainstorming session we narrowed down as much as we could, before we went each to our own and simply played games with similar gameplay to what we want.

9. Based on what we saw in the games we'd played since last time we managed to narrow down the type of challanges we wanted, and started expanding on that.

We also decided once and for all on character controls etc.

10. We now had a pretty good idea of, well, everything, and it was time to finally actually make it all. In the beginning of this meeting we decided on a last few things, such as quite a few level design features (windmill platforms, see-saws, holes in the ground etc.). NPC classes and the finalized keyboard layout.

That's pretty much it. We've spent a lot of time on our planning, and we really need to get workign on implementing this, but hopefully our extensive planning will make that much easier.