Devlog - 1 | Pre-Production

As the game and level designer for my team's game, I primarily helped with documentation. I aided in solidifying our team's ideas for what we wanted, and created some simple representations and demos for the team to use as we move into development and implementation. One thing I worked on was the demo for our news creation screen (see image below). Using the information gathered from our GDD about what our goals were for the news creation, I was able to put together a proof of concept for the team.

Earlier on, I also created a proof of concept for character stats and modifiers (see image below), with the goal to show how NPC's are perceived by the school based on the players actions in their newspaper. While it's a stretch goal, whether we use it or not we have an idea of how it could be implemented, either explicitly or as hidden stats that are then conveyed through dialogue.    
 

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The rest of my contributions to pre-production were primarily in our GDD documentation, through group discussion of the game, and creating a proof of concept for our level. Since pre-production, we have drastically reduced the size of our level and simplified the layout, but our original concept is shown in the image below.

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Overall, putting together the game documentation and creating the proof of concepts have been a great experience, and I'm excited to get into development and making this thing a reality. While we have had some setbacks due to the loss of our artists, it hasn't discouraged the team, and we are moving forward with our original idea and restructuring some of our roles to possibly fill in where required. I'm looking forward to a fantastic semester and can't wait to see what comes out at the other end.