Welcome to Soren Strnisa’s Personal Production Journal
Week 2
Soren Strnisa PPJ 1 Tasks:
Assigning Trello Tasks Setting up version control Working on GDD 2 hours of work
Positive: Our team has a complete understanding on the product we want to create and an idea of how we want to get there.
Negative: Took a while to get the version control functioning for all team members.
Upcoming: Get started on the Visual and Functional elements for the UI
Week 3
Soren Strnisa PPJ 2 Tasks:
Created different game UI concept sketches for implementation Helped with the creation of the Full GDD 3 hours of work
Positive: Each of our sub teams (programmers,artists,designers) are able to meet each week.
Negative: Our team members have drastically different schedules so it is hard to set up meetings.
Upcoming: Pick from created UI template and finalize it in the game’s art style
Week 4
Soren Strnisa PPJ 3 Tasks:
Edited the GDD to represent the new game mechanic changes Made UI Adjustments to match GDD changes 4 hours of work
Positive: Production members now have a full understanding of the game mechanics and the implications they have on gameplay.
Negative: We wanted to make the game more strategic while also having momentum play more of a role in the gameplay. We struggled to find a balance between complexity and fun, but ultimately we think we found a solution.
Upcoming: Update the GDD to expand on how the enemies, progression, and game loop will work.
Week 5
Soren Strnisa PPJ 4 Tasks:
Finshed elaborating on the new game mechanic changes added in the GDD Sent out a survey for playtesters to complete. 4 Hours of work
Positive: We have a complete GDD and a clear gameplay loop planned out. We discussed ways to implement monitization to the game in order to support development.
Negative: The programmers ran into some road blocks this week trying to impletment mulitple system into one working build, so our build is more simplistic than desired. This caused us to get less important playtesting feedback
Upcoming: Design levels for the game
Week 6
Soren Strnisa PPJ 5 Tasks:
Designed multiple levels to test for implementation Sketched out ideas for the look of the ui and menus 4 Hours of work
Positive: Me and Diego made multiple levels that test and play with the main momentum mechanic and force the player to plan their movements ahead.
Negative: Everything ran smoothly this week.
Upcoming: Design tutorial levels and the directions page.
Week 7
Soren Strnisa PPJ 6
Tasks: Created tutorial screens with Diego Updated Sell presentation and created new diagrams Updated GDD 3 Hours of work
Positive: Me and Diego have been able to critically think about how to explain the game’s mechanics. Negative: It took a while to distance ourselves from the role of game design to approach our problems from the perspective of a viewer. Upcoming: Make the UI art for the game
Week 8
Soren Strnisa PPJ 7
Tasks: Updated the sell presentation text and visuals with Diego to improve based on last week’s critique. Updated survey and collected survey data. Updated GDD 4 Hours of work
Positive: Me and Diego believe we updated the presentation to better reflect the speed, strategy, and fun of the game. Negative: Player’s from the survey seemed to struggle more in this build to understand how the game works. Upcoming: Add the tutorial levels and directions page to the game.
Week 9 & 10
Soren Strnisa PPJ 8
Tasks: Updated the sell presentation text and visuals with Diego to improve based on last presentation’s critique. Evalued all previous survey data. Updated GDD 4 Hours of work
Positive: Me and Diego feel like the presentation flows much better and more closely to a story-like structure, making it more engaging to view. Negative: While reviewing the survey’s we found that
Postmortem
Through my time working on Momentum, I spent many hours designing game mechanics to balance out the strategy and fun of the game, along with helping out greatly with documentation, and any other miscallaneous tasks Alex and the rest of my group needed help with. At the early stages of the game’s development, our team was torn on what direction our game mechanics should go in. We had the idea to make the game about fast gameplay requiring only quick swipes and a trial and error way of learning. We however decided that it would be better if we tried to add more strategy and complexity to maintain a player’s interest for longer and make our game stand out a little more. I focused on working mainly with Michael and Diego to figure out how every facet of the game play would work along with finding a really satisfying gameplay loop. After our team had a solid understanding of what our game was to become and the documentaion to reference, I mainly worked on putting together the weekly submissions, to allow the programmers and artists to fully devote themselves into their work. I’m not great at digital art and I’m not a programmer so all else I could offer was to give advice when necessary. I have a great interest and experience in 3D modeling, texturing, and creating visual effects in unity, so my only regret is that I wasn’t able to apply these skills since our project used 2d assets and animations.
Week 1 - 2
Soren Strnisa PPJ1 & 2
Tasks: Team Integration Revising Game Mechanics Editing the Playtest Survey Updating GDD
Total Hours: 6 Hours
Positive: The GDD had been commented with changes that need to be made, allowing us to discuss the changes to the game mechanics in an easier way with the rest of the team.
Negative: Not as much work due to the hicups of team integration.
Upcoming: Completely revised game system and reworking enemies to match the new gameplay loop.
Week 3 - 4
Soren Strnisa PPJ3 & 4
Tasks: Gameplay and scope discussion Updating GDD
Total Hours: 2.5 Hours
Positive: I got a lot more insight on what the team ants to complete within the term along with what each member does in the art and programming groups.
Negative: No visuals for the work finished, was primarily discussion based.
Upcoming: Whatever Alex needs the design team to do next week.
Week 5 - 6
Soren Strnisa PPJ5 & 6
Tasks: Learning how to use Kendal’s level creation tool Creating Level Concepts Updating GDD
Total Hours: 2.5 Hours
Positive: I can now start working on levels and playtest them to find fun and engaging enemy combinations.
Negative: I had to wait for Kendal to finish the tool to start most of my work.
Upcoming: Test and implement levels into the game.
Week 7
Soren Strnisa PPJ7
Tasks: Created levels based on Kendal’s updated engine Playtested levels to improve upon their design
Total Hours: 3 Hours
Positive: Through my playtests I found that my levels felt fun and destinct from each other.
Negative: It was difficult to understand the x,y,z hexagonal coordinate system.
Upcoming: Test levels and update and create levels based on feedback.
Week 8
Soren Strnisa PPJ8
Tasks: Created more themed levels Updated previous levels based on the new enemy AI
Total Hours: 3 Hours
Positive: The levels feel more dynamic with the newly added obstacles. It requires the player to think about pathing restrictions from the map instead of just through the momentum mechanic.
Negative: Nothing. Things went relatively smoothly this week.
Upcoming: Test levels and update and create levels based on feedback.
Week 9
Soren Strnisa PPJ9
Tasks: Created Ice Level 1
Total Hours: 2 Hours
Positive: This week had the team finally fill out levels for each world.
Negative: Nothing this week.
Upcoming: Get playtest feedback on the new levels.
Week 10
Soren Strnisa PPJ10
Tasks: Reading playtest feedback and brainstorming improvements based on critique.
Total Hours: 1 Hours
Positive: We were able to deliver a build to playtesters that was indicative to the final game. The data provided is especially helpful.
Negative: Not much for the design team to work on except planning and reviewing feedback.
Upcoming: Update world levels based on the playtest feedback.
Week 11
Soren Strnisa PPJ11
Tasks: Revising the GDD to meet our current enemy AI, combat system, and finalized levels.
Total Hours: 1.5 Hours
Positive: The GDD is now completely up to date with the final build of the game.
Negative: Nothing.
Final Postmortem
Soren Strnisa
The term started with the inclusion of many new team members, there was a bit to get used to at first. And it took some time to distrute appropriate tasks to people. My job was to work on design tasks like maintaining the GDD and creating levels along with helping with any documentation that Alex needed help with. Some problems I encountered was struggling to balance levels to meet the constantly updated combat and AI. Admittedly I was preoccupied with other classes and didn’t help out as much during some of the weeks. I appreciate the leadership Alex showed during this term and the amount of work and effort Kendal and Matt put into this project. Overall, I’m pretty impressed by how much progress the team made in such a short amount of time, and it was a pleasure working with them all.