Welcome to Ravi Patel’s Personal Production Journal
Week 2
Ravi Patel, PPJ 1
Tasks Completed: Elevator pitch, One page GDD, TechDemo
Number of hours: 3 hours
Positives: Was able to finish all the tasks needed for the week
Negative: Issues setting up git and version control
Upcoming: Talk to team to assign roles for the future of the game
Week 3
Task Comleted: Finished concept art for the enviorments
Number of hours: 3
Positives: was able to finish all the work before deadline
Negitives: Struggled in top down art style
Upcoming: Start refining enviorments and start production on assets for levels
Week 4
Task Comleted: Finished making damage numbers for hits
Number of hours: 3
Positives: I was able to create a set of numbers that would appear for the player if they hit an enemy
Negitives: Not able to make a “custom font” but found an alternative solution
Upcoming: Start creating assets for the levels
Week 5
Task Comleted: Finished making tiles for the game, got people to playtest current build
Number of hours: 3
Positives: I was able to create a tile for the environments
Negitives: Not able to make a variations for the tiles
Upcoming: Start creating assets for the levels
Week 6
Task Comleted: Made a Damage effect for when the enemy is hit by player
Number of hours: 3
Positives: Able to make the animation look in the same artstyle as the main character
Negitives: Drawing tablet broke and forced to use mouse to draw
Upcoming: hopefully finish the remaing tiles
Week 7
Task Comleted: Made UI visuals for the game
Number of hours: 3
Positives: The game almost has full UI visuals now than prototype place holders
Negitives: Couldn’t finish item art
Upcoming: Finish the item art to have a complete look to the UI
Week 8
Task Comleted: Found fonts for the game, also playtewsting
Number of hours: 2
Positives: The game was at a good place in terms of art assets so I focused on finding fonts for the game, I found some that were free to use by anyone online
Negitives: Couldn’t make a custom font exclusivly for our game
Upcoming: Add any art assets that we could squeeze in for the end
Week 9
Task Comleted: added more ui and new lab tiles to the game
Number of hours: 2
Positives: Added in some new ui buttons such as a play and pause button and also a custom cursor
Negitives: nothing got eerything i wanted done
Upcoming: add in anything before the final
Postmortem
So overall this project was really fun to work on and it gave me experience working on a game project in a big group. I think that the team was great. Everyone got along with each other and treated one another with respect. I think that what we wanted by the end of the term was achieved at a point where we could be satisfied.
So what went right. When first starting the project we were able to give everyone a task that played to their skills and no one was doing something that they did not enjoy working on. Also having meetings weekly to check in on progress outside of class was very crucial. I will say that I could not make some of the meetings due to out of school issues. However we always made notes of the meeting. So that if anyone was to miss the meeting they could look at the notes from that meeting, and know where everyone was with production. Also the implementation of the trello board was very great. We were able to delegate tasks to everyone and able to mark off jobs that were completed. Also just overall producing a game with visuals and music is also amazing.
So what went wrong then? Well for starters on my end I was unable to produce art at the level I wanted to due to my hardware breaking. So for that I gave more of the complex art to Matt because he had a good sense of the art anyways. While I started to focus more on the UI portion and make visuals for those elements. Another issue I think that went south was how we explained the game to our testers. When playtesting most of the testers said they had no idea on how to play and didn’t understand the concept. So it was on our end of not making the directions not clear enough. One more thing that went wrong was just some of the time it took to implement some assets in the game in terms of the art. We had a bunch of art that was made for the game but it took a lot of time to get implemented and so we didn’t know what people thought of it till way later in production.
However I still think the work that was done on this team is still amazing. There are lessons I want to take away from this project. One idea is to make a concept that is fun and enjoyable for people to play. So taking a small aspect of a game and trying to see how far we can take that idea and form it into a game. Also just overall production checkups and make sure everyone is on the same page and try to get assets implemented on time to see how people think of the look.
Week 2
Task completed: Came back from the break and started production again with a new team
Number of hours worked: 5
What did we do: Overall for this first week we all met with each other and started to talk abut the overall production of the next 10 weeks. We wanted to see what the new team members would want to do on the project and started diving up the task around. I am working on art again and have new ideas to add in the game for the coming weeks.
Upcoming: starting to work on new assets for the game.
Week 3
Task completed: Ice world assets completed
Number of hours worked on: 4
What did we do: So for this week I worked on making new assets for our ice level so i made all the background pieces and a new border for the level
Upcoming: Make any changes to the ice world if needed and start working on the next list of assets needed
Week 4
Task Completed: Fire world assets done
Number of hours worked: 4
What did I do: This week I was given the task to stret on the fire world assets
Upcoming: Reciving notes on the current assets and edit where touch ups are needed
Week 5
Task Completed: Art fixes
Number of hours worked: 3
What did I do: This week I was given the task to makes edits to the art work for the worlds. I used chir’s notes that he had for me and made those edits where they were needed.
Upcoming: Reciving notes on the current assets and edit where touch ups are needed
Week 6
Task Completed: New Tile Art
Number of hours worked: 3
What did I do: This week we decided to get the new tiles in for the worlds and update old ones with the new art style
Upcoming: Concepting some splash art for win and loose screens
Week 7
Task Completed: Adding animations to the tiles
Number of hours: 3
What did I do: I added animations to the tiles and fixed some of the visuals for the boost and snow tile
upcoming: Ui buttons
Week 8
Task completed: Edits on ablility buttons
Number of hours: 1
What did I do: I went in and added small deatalis to the buttons showing if thye were ready to use or not ready to use
Upcoming: new art assets
Week 9
Task completed: Update Slash effect
mber of hours worked: 2
What did I do: So for this week I was tasked with remaking the slassh effect for our game. The current one had alot of stuff happening during the animation. So I decided to get rid of all the extra flames and fancy highlights. So I made a simple slash thats a bright color so it can easily be seen with all the assets on screen.
Upcoming: try to add any extra art asstets we decide to squeeze in for the end of production.
Week 10
Task completed: Gather PlaytestData
number of hours: 6
What did I do: Since there was really no art work needed we decided to shift over to helping with gathering play testers. I was able to help gather more info on the game on its current state ad see how the players felt while playyin the game.
Upcoming: Help in areas that will need aid back