Producer Devlog 1

This first sprint did not go how I wanted to go, which should've been expected, but I was still stunned by how it went. I was thrown for a loop with the new project management software we're using, and elements of it still confuse me. Still, I did my best to come up with things for the team to do. I knew at base the minimum amount of models we needed, along with the 2D art, concepts, and at least enough game design tasks to get our programmers onto something. This was massively stressful, and partially a result of my own lack of preparation and partially a result of not having a fully realized list of features and assets.

2D Art

Our 2D artists are the most consistent aspect of our team. We give them something to do, attach reference, and it gets done. No worries. There was a lot of concept work done during this first sprint, which was performed admirably, and we got started with elements that will soon become part of the UI. However, this does raise a question. We have two people who can do 2D art who require 15 points a sprint every sprint, meaning we need, at least, 210 points of 2D art cards in order to get them through the semester. How do we do that? While we could ostensibly have them do concept art for every little thing in the world, this is silly and not a good use of time. We've started, instead, to look at how they could hand draw textures for hero pieces, do animations, particle effects, basically anything to sustain the need for work.

In particular, a mixed 2D-3D approach for some of the models would likely work best, allowing for the team to work on the same models and give them a workflow that incorporates all aspects of the design process.

3D Art

Our 3D artists performed well. Despite starting from zero and not having full reference for what we wanted from the characters, it took not much time at all for them to get to work on useable 3D assets for the game. We started with demo assets that'll be used for playtesting, as the full models will require multiple sprints and lots of work to reach a usable state. 

This took very little time, and so we were left scrambling for things to do. That sucks! It's a pain to deal with, and my biggest goal after this sprint was to keep people from dealing with Charlie Work (ie, work that is pointless, ugly, and rarely results in a usable target that the worker can feel proud of). 

Thus this sprint involved a lot of Charlie work. I'm embarrassed with the kind of things I asked them to make, even if it ultimately turned out to have positive results. We got started on some wall assets, hashed out polycount goals for character and prop assets, and started creating some set dressing for the scenes. The 3D models we planned out were cleared in such a hilariously short amount of time that it necessitated us to come out with an ALR, which made me prematurely grey waiting for it to show up since I had a full 3D model team nipping at my heels for more work. We still don't have enough 3D work for all of them. Every day I feel like a disgruntled kid's television show host asking an audience of none, "What belongs on a farm?"

I will take any answers.

Animation

I really screwed the pooch on this one, there's no real way out of it. Animation is something I don't know my ass from my elbow from. My biggest assumption over the course of this sprint was that we straight up had nothing for animation to do and thus we had to have them doing literally anything other than animation. Bad move! Animation has a lot of tasks before they can start creating sensible work. I had them doing blockouts without understanding what the blockout would look like, and concept art when most of them were kind of only familiar with MS Paint for illustrations. It was an awkward experience for them and only through talking with Dan and the animators a little bit more did I come up with decent grounds for them to work. The sprint afterwards felt so much better when it came to assigning work.

Programming

Programming suffered from a failed understanding of what we needed for the game at first. Also the github got completely smashed through my fault and my fault alone. That was really the primary issue that halted development for a good three days and derailed at least one programmer's work to focus on resolving the issues. Diego wanted to use a specific version of unity, and the project initially started with that version, and then we moved over to the right version, but not everyone moved on in time. This resulted in version conflicts, and when someone made a commit to main on accident it resulted in some massive errors that took a significant amount of development time to untangle. 

It's a miracle that we got anything done and it's a testament to the strength of our programming team that we did. We ended up having drop-in/drop out multiplayer, the beginnings of AI, and a main menu system/core gameplay loop that overall made me so much more relieved about how this game is going to turn out.