Team Meeting 5: Part Two

A few hours after completing Team Meeting 5: Part One, Shannon, Becca and I began discussing some concerns we had over the current scale of the project scope. We thought that the project scope was too large for us to execute to a good standard before the deadline. We decided that we would rather scale down the scope so that we could create a higher quality game albeit a shorter one.

Additionally, we also discussed other aspects of the game we found to be lacking, such as character interactions. Written below are the notes from the meeting.

Notes

Add characters that either provide dialogue that offer quest clues/elements of narration or/and have them included in the quests in some way – for example, they have the same issue as the deer and voice their concerns

Have dialogue options for other animals?

Decide the environment’s art style – make a moodboard of art styles I want to posit as viable options for the game’s environment

Scale down the game scope – it is only a demo and we want it to be good/high quality even if it is short

Ways of scaling the scope down:
Get rid of some quests and environments

Keep only the two frog quests, two medium quests and one small quest

Get rid of the underground area and burrows? – but we need a burrow to conceal the shell

In the end, I decided to do a quick attempt at scaling down the scope so that I could present it to the group in the next team meeting and provide something better to work from than the current scope. After some deliberating, I decided to choose the snake and skunk quest and the fog quest as the two medium quests to keep whilst the crystal cave quest and the rhino quest could serve as two smaller quests. I decided to incorporate the two smaller quests as both are very simple quests that offer different rewards. I thought keeping both wouldn’t make the scope too much larger as opposed to only keeping one. Keeping both quests also offers the player more variety in terms of quest rewards.

So in the end, these are the quests I chose to keep in my rough reduction of the scope: the fog quest, the snake and skunk quest, the crystal cave quest, the rhino quest, the two frog quests. I also decided to quickly make a layout for the new environment this smaller scope creates so that I could present it in the next team meeting and easily edit it if need be. Shown below is the new environment layout.

I placed the frog area first since the deer should trigger the flies quest first. I also combined the waterfall area with the frog pond area to make them one area – the waterfall can lead to the pond. Next, I decided to make it so that the burrow is beneath the fog area since the fallen trees area is no longer included. The fog was another method of concealing the burrow’s entrance. After that, I decided to space out the NPCs by placing the swamp between the spider and snake. I chose to place the spider first since that would mean the player could easily/quickly complete the first frog quest since there is no reward for it.

I chose to place the wind plant with the swamp since the swamp area didn’t include any other key elements at the time whilst all the other areas had more than one key element except for the fog area. I couldn’t place the wind plant in the fog area because the fog quest requires the player to find the wind plant.

Finally, I placed the crystal cave next to the swamp since the last area was supposed to be the rhino and the special flower.

Tasks

My Tasks: Practice/Draw a mock piece for the art element I wish to take on in this project – either environment design/art, character design/art & animation
Make a moodboard for art styles I think would suit the game’s environment
Deadline: Friday 21st February