Good day!

This week was all about getting ready for our first production sprint. To prepare for this we needed to finish a couple documents. These documents will lay the foundations for a good and pleasant production phase. We divided these tasks among the team and got started right away.

ArtBible

This document is used to have a consistent artstyle throughout the design of all our game elements. Most of this was finished last week. But it was still missing some slides and needed some fine tuning.  We added some slides giving more information about the environment, scale, proportions and some concepts of how the bowls might look like. To finish the artBible off we applied a coherent style to every slide. A good looking ArtBible is more fun to work with after all!

Tech Doc

This document describes the every technical aspect of our game. We worked a lot in this document last week, so we already had a lot of stuff in there. This week we filled the gaps, re-wrote some parts that were unclear and changed up some of the aesthetics. The biggest part that we still had to write was the controls. Since this is an element our programmers are confronted with a lot, they took it upon themselves to write out the controls. After adding these and giving it all a coherent style, this document was ready for the production phase as well!

Game Design Document

This document describes every mechanic, sound, object, effect and every single other aspect that's part of our game. The goal of this document is to make clear what everything will look like, and how everything work. This document will often be referenced to by the team when we go into production. By making this document we automatically also have a to-do list. Every aspect in our game consists out of one or more tasks that need to be completed to finish that specific game element. This list consists of more than 40 items, so plenty of stuff to keep us busy during the production phase. :)
The hardest part of creating this document was that we have to know exactly how each element in our game works. Usually our team is used to determine these thing along the way. Having to plan all of this out beforehand was a difficult task. Luckily we tested a lot of thing out in the prior weeks, so we had a good understanding of what was possible and what was not.

Prototype

Our programmers worked this week more on the prototypes. The further along our prototype gets, the more certain we get of a fun and immersive game. Last week we had the idea of putting moving parts in the playfield to spice up some of the gameplay. After some testing we ended up on a spinning disc in the middle of the playfield. This mechanic of course also came with it's own set of problems. We need to keep in mind all the kind of interactions the player can have with this spinning disc (walking on it, spilling soup on it, RFX and many more) 
We also changed out the placeholder meshes for real bowls with chopsticks.
Besides the spinning middle, our programmers also worked some more on fine tuning base mechanics such as the bumping, jousting and soup pickup. 

Next week

Next week we will (hopefully) go in production! Yay! We'll start chipping away on out backlog items.