Producer Devlog 2

Before this sprint kicked off, Dan said at minimum we should have 250 points worth of cards to distribute by Tuesday. I asked him to make it 500. I managed to hit that goal, thank god, and now we have a steady body of work to give to people for these next few sprints. I mention this because Sprint 2 is the last time I ever wanted to do a slapdash sprint. We had just enough work to give to people, and even then there was a struggle throughout to make sure everyone was fulfilled, and confusion with some repeat cards because I would finish a card, get distracted with someone else asking for different work, forget I'd made the card, and then make the card again...

Yeah, you get the picture.

This sprint was a medium between an actually prepared and decent sprint and the utter every-man-for-himself anarchy of the first one. I'm genuinely happy I managed to get my team an abundance of work. I have a major appreciation, especially, for every team member that communicated with me about their workflow so I could design cards for them pre-emptively that cover every major step in their process.

Programming

Programming this sprint was honestly a relief. I was so scared we would end up without a testable game. Instead, the programmers went far above and beyond in order to give us every major mechanic available to both players. While our designs looked relatively meager, it was a huge opportunity for the game itself. Not just in terms of playtesting, this was crucial to giving us vital clues into how the game *feels* to play, which is the most important part. Casual games live and die off of how they feel. If anything starts to give the impression of being hard to play, you can bet that person is making a mental list of things they'd rather be playing.

With the core loop provided by our programmers, we were able to deduce changes that needed to be made to the game off rip, and implemented those into our backlog immediately. We also got an idea on where to take our design ideas to, based on what felt good and what felt bad.

2D Art

The 2D art this sprint was gorgeous as always. However, we have an issue; our two 2D artists are so prolific and their work is at a high enough quality that we simply do not have enough to do for them at any point in time. It took me and Diego some time to figure out how we wanted to distribute the work and how to best apply the talents of our artists. Symon, fortunately, is able to animate and rig, and took the opportunity to rig the farmer model with passion. Calvin jumped on the chance to hand-draw textures for models, so we have a supply of work for him that'll only run out when we stop needing models, and we always need models. With the bulk of our UI work illustrated, we'll heft it off to our programmers to implement in the game loop. 

3D Art

Our 3D art team really came into their own this sprint. Genuinely, I've never been more impressed by a group of people in CAGD before. They are clear communicators, both to us and within themselves, and to the animators. They worked hard early to establish a standard polycount, then a standard visual style, and they regularly share resources and tutorials amongst themselves so that they can have a unified, consistent, visual style with references taken from Diego to guarantee everything is exactly as needed. It is genuinely a blessing to see them working and it's inspirational.

Animation

The animators really stepped up; they realized there was a communication disconnect and sought to remedy it as early as possible. Animation is a field I am grossly unfamiliar with, and so it took a lot of talking to both parties to figure out a proper workflow for them and what to expect from them going forward. I have to thank them immensely for this because I would still be floundering finding work for them otherwise. Now we're started on creating rigs and getting blockouts done, and we have future work for them coming down the pipeline as larger assets require animated components to breathe life into the world we're creating.

Design