Senior Production - Week 1

This week has mainly been dedicated to figuring out the logistics of meetings and laying out the groundwork for all the tasks we want to accomplish this semester. In the first meeting, I was focusing on creating a new UI/UX design for our Merchant Screen. The brown boxes that we used as placeholders last semester were honestly hurting my eyes, but now I have an opportunity to fix them! On top of the UI/UX, I had some discussions with Dmitri, our lead programmer, about what to do to make the Adventurer system more interesting.We decided to try and incorporate the Arming mechanic that we wanted in last semester and a way of leveling up adventurers. I decided that I am going to make a paper prototype next week that way we can get the mechanics tested and figured out without making the programming team to stressed out with all of the other optimization and work they need to do. Then on Monday, the design team met up to discuss some questions the new members had and try and fit in some of the suggestions the new members had made when we met up at our final period last semester. We discussed Riley's idea of branching dialogue and a personality system, we discussed bosses and narrative arcs, as well as answering some world building questions Jed had so he could begin formulating ideas for dialogue. This brings us to Wednesday's meeting, were we all discussed how to incorporate all of the things we want to do without driving the art team to pure insanity. We decided that we're going to ditch the First-Person view in the Merchant Screen and the Isometric-Top Down view from the boss fight in order to have one consistent camera angle across the game. With this new angle we decided to use low-poly character models and just change the color on them to simulate different customers coming into the shop. This gives the art team some breathing room and reduces their workload a lot. Along with the character model idea, this new view allows the ne UI/UX layout to fit in seamlessly. All in all, this week has been incredibly productive. I'd say we need next week to finish up creating the task lists each team needs to get done for this semester, then we can just focus on completing the list.