RedLine Developers Meet
Sunday, April 2nd
Discussion topics
Identifying our skillsets. Discussing the Game Concept Overview. Identifying the Market Competition. Creating Ground Rules on Interaction and Responsibilities. Initiating the Design Document Review. Planning and Understanding the Scope. Researching Visually similar games for researching Art Scope. Planning for the Programming work & Understanding the Code Challenges. The Pilot
The very first meeting with the entire team onboard, we got together in discord and introduced ourselves to the team and discussed about our passion, skills, interests and hobbies.
We congratulated Prithvi who’s idea won the majority vote from the entire Eagles batch and he proceeded with explaining the entire game concept to our team and we all got a visual idea on how the game’s going to look. The team then proceeded to understand their member’s background experience and started discussing on what roles everyone’s interested in.
A long and tiring meeting later all of the members came to an understanding on the assignment of their production roles based on their current skills and future interests in taking part on multiple fronts, thus began a long and interesting journey of 6 oddballs who came together in forming the Team RedLine Anarchy. Initial preparations for Pre-Production were already assigned to each member as they expressed implicit interest in the Game’s idea and the nostalgia that brings all the 90’s 8bit gamers.
A simple Concept Document explaining the game’s story, features, scope and risks was made that day as part of the initial prep. All the members of the team reviewed, planned and critiqued the document based on the challenges and the scope of the game.
Initial Dummy Document
Tuesday, April 4th
Discussion topics
Deciding the Final Aesthetic look for the Game (Alpha Build) Planning the Meeting Schedules for the Team Planning for the Programming and Art Challenges Deciding on the Project plan for the month of April Redrafting and Confirming the First Draft of the Concept Document Discussing about the Internal line of communication (Programmer to Programmer / Artist to Artist) Researching multiple games to get a feel for the Features (List of Games is posted in the Discord Server)
Arul missed our team meeting today (She’s busy with a professional project of her own) and we discussed about the Aesthetics of the game in general, we started off by discussing the main agenda which is planning the pre-production phase challenges. We got together in the Discord call and updated the Concept Document adding the information about Core Pillars and finished the Pre-Production sections.
Revisited the games with similar scope which was curated in our discord server and decided on which the features would be necessary for the first iteration of the gameplay. This month has been a very hectic one in terms of planning as we pushed on aggressively on the progress for the Pre-Production phase by confirming most of the content. We then proceeded to list out the required resources for the month of April and listed out our challenges, one of the most important things we discussed is the open line of communication between teammates of the similar departments as it solves the problem of overflowing messages in the group and makes teamwork more efficient since there will be a good amount of pushbacks from people in the similar roles.
Thursday, April 6th
Discussion topics
Identifying the Main Mechanic of the Game Deciding the Story for the Game Game Completion Conditions (Mechanical Condition Concepts) Mentioning the Success Narrative of the Game
This week’s G2M class was about answering 4 main questions which are essential to be posed to every game developer. We finished this assignment very early and agreed upon the answers that were submitted.
We all agreed upon a very simple rule this weekend that the game has to be made with a simple win condition (Like crossing the Finishing Line) for the prototype model and its absolutely necessary to make sure our Agile process flows in a healthy flow without any wasted effort. Upon curating multiple images and video files which point to the features we were planning we successfully made our very own reference library for the game, which we can use daily as part of the development process.
Rahul sir was quite adamant about the games scope and its mechanics being over scoped so we decided to have a second look at the game’s concept doc to cut down any unnecessary mechanics that were pitched during the initial phase of the development. (Found nothing important to remove but helped us reorganize or thoughts on how to approach the developmental milestones).
Friday, April 7th
Discussion topics
Give Arul a brief Recap on the agenda of previous meeting Discuss the Games Researched during the Week with Team Complete listing the FAQ's for the Concept Document. Drafting a Clean Pitch Document for the entire team in case they ever have to present it during discussions with other Batch or the Project Management Mentor. Re-Iterating the Game Concept Document Again for proceeding to the next Version. Bringing up the important focus points regarding the MVP.
Sunday, April 9th
Discussion topics
Decide the Aesthetic look and feel of the entire Gameplay. Develop the Game Concept Document to the next Version (i.e. 0.2 and above) Discuss on the Assets and Programming work required for the First Prototype of the Game. Ask about the downtimes of teammates to make a rough assumption on the Timeline Board. Conceptualize the discussed topics of interest and make a Miro feedback board to follow up with the Visual Side of the Project. @arulmozhisivasubramanian has to be informed and updated on the current progress of the Project Plan.
Tuesday, April 11th
Discussion topics
Discuss and Finalize the Narrative Construction of the Project. Ask for the Team's opinion on the Increasing the Pace for the Development of Game Concept Document. Give a brief Recap of the previous meeting's Agenda to help Divyansh catch up. Re-Project the Goals for the month of April and bring up the changes in Scheduling. Assigning Divyansh and Ashutosh with a Mental Deconstruction Task on Programming Research. Assigning Satya and Prithvi with a Mental Deconstruction Task on Art Research. Discussing the Change of Plans in the Case of Scope Failures. (Possibly will be pushed to Sunday Meet). Entire Team should be available for this Meeting. Regroup, Critique and Re-Iterate further on the Narrative Documentation. (In Case of any new ideas).
The most important Narrative Document has been drafted and it looks very promising in mentioning all the features and scope for the game, there was a little pushback from the teammates today about the increasing work calls as they were feeling that these were going on for a very long time. We decided that most of the important concepts and any development issues have to be addressed in this month itself as once the production starts its quite impossible to halt everything and check from the ground up to see where we needed the changes.
Both the Programming and Art Teams discussed the important challenges they were going to face during the production and our design team made sure to mention all the important challenges which might shoot up our project risk. We also discussed the fact that we have to be prepared even for the failure of the project, which created a little spark between us since none of us wanted to talk about the risks in general.
We checked the Narrative Document and made sure that all the details of it were matching the fine print of the game concept document we submitted.