The Dreaming Lake - Production blog 1

2 years ago by DTLgrady

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Welcome to The dreaming lake, I am Derek Legrady the producer for this game and I have high hopes for it and am looking forward to working on and eventually completing this game and making something both fun to play and vert artistic with my team of highly talented individuals. Working with me as the lead designer is Beren Franklin, working under us is a strong team of 9 people.

As a brief overview The dreaming lake is a first-person exploration game about memory and the passage of time. Explore this mysterious lake and attempt to understand its larger story through the memories that others left behind. The player piece together fragmented storylines as you make your way through an environment that frequently changes before you can discover what’s out there. To accomplish the team will be using the agile system and Jira to track to work completed on a biweekly basis called a sprint. For the project we will have a time period of seven sprints or fourteen weeks to complete it. So far we have completed sprint one and are starting sprint two. With that I would like to go over specific areas of production, who is working on it and what they have accomplished during the first sprint.

The first area i'd like to cover is the programming for the game, it is the most important aspect of development as with the code for the game to run one does not gave a game. Making up our programmers are Justin Donato and Hunter Lawrence-Emmanuel both are highly talented, to best make use of this talent each has been tasked with largely separate parts of the game. Justin is taking the role as our de-facto head programmer handling the core memories of the game, the season changes we will be incorporating and gong forward will handle many of the more major features. Hunter then will be the one taking smaller features and thus far handled the player zoom, a quick tutorial, player input and a player controller. They got in a good amount of work despite the chaotic nature of our first sprint and the little they had to work with given the challenge of programming something as abstract as the dreaming lake is.

Hunter's tutorial example:

Justin's memory:

For our 2D art we have a single dedicated 2D artist and another working 2D art and animation. The first I'd like to talk about is Mari Fong, thus far we've had Mari actually working on some ground materials for the game as a texture artist in substance designer. Me and Beren both wanted to have some good ground materials and felt Mari was best suited to do this for us, there were some complications during this first sprint due to computer troubles and we had to devise a solution to her being able to work in class however we ultimately have since worked out all the issues for her and are getting some good work from her. Our other Artist is Mel Madamba, we have so far used her as a more traditional 2D artist creating logos for the game, a menu theme, sketches sketches of memories and story boards for memories. We wanted a cohesive design for the game as soon as possible to theme the game and its visual elements around as well as to plan out memories quickly so that the rest of the team could begin work on them sooner. I'm really excited to see the works these two can push out for the game as what I have seen so far has really helped the team either find a style or helped us with pushing the project forward in the right direction.

Mari's ground material:

Mel's logos:

Moving right along to 3D art we have the part of the team I am most excited to see work from, they are the largest section of the team with Brie Parr acting as our environmental artist, Justin Wagner as our prop artist, and Patrick Tambunting as our character artist. Having seen what each of them can do we decided to break them up in this manner as it seemed to be where each not only produced the best work but also what motivated them most to get more work out. I don’t feel words can do what these three have done so far justice and will simply show you what they have so far.

Brie’s Fence:

Justin’s Trees:

Patrick’s character base mesh:

Lastly I’d like to show off some level design work being done by the team’s two level designers Alex Celeste and Matthew Montalvo. Much like the rest of the team we’ve tasked them in such a way that they created a flow pipeline with Alex using his wonderful map creation skills to plan out everything and Mattew doing a great job turning these maps into reality by creating them in unity. So far the map for the game is still in the planning stages however it is shaping out to be well thought out, so far a block out of the main land mass is already in place showing all the major land features planned out in annotated maps.

Alex’s Annotated map for quadrant 2:

Matthew’s block out:

And now I'd like to wrap up with a quick once over of the total amount of work done as each example shown here is only a small part of everything so far as well as my own learning experience with tracking work done. For tracking everything we are using Jira a tool i’ve never used before and we have had a heck of a time to say the least, between some backend issues and my own confusion at first to how the tool worked there was a lot of chaos at the start of sprint one where we as a team had to jury rig a solution to getting work started and making sure everyone knew what they were doing. In the end however we pulled through and can now work much more smoothly now that everything is final and I could begin truly planning out the development of the game and big milestones for us to hit and by when we needed to hit them. With that said i’ll leave you with the burn down chart for sprint one and the statistics for it.

Sprint one burn down: