Team Meeting 6

In this team meeting, Shannon, Becca and I began by discussing the contents of Team Meeting 5: Part 2 with the rest of the team. The other team members agreed with our consensus that the project scope was currently too large for us to finish before the deadline. Therefore, we began discussing ways in which we could reduce the scope to a more manageable size.

I proceeded to present the rough environment layout I made after Team Meeting 5: Part 2 was undergone. Shown below is the layout once again.

The layout was deemed to be too large still for a scope reduction and thus, we commenced scaling down the scope by changing my environment layout/the scope’s current environment and drawing a more visual diagram of the environment.

Written below are the notes from the meeting.

Notes

Combine lotus pond with waterfall/frog pond – have the lotus plants appear in the frog pond

Have corpse emitting fog in fog area? – discarded as being unnecessary

Have the skunk appear before the snake

Change the fog quest so that the deer doesn’t have to lure the plant anywhere – the deer can just pick it up – makes the quest less convoluted and annoying to complete

Change the fog quest so that the deer doesn’t have to feed the plant? – make it so that the deer just has to pick up the plant and place it down in the fog area – but how will the player know where to place it?

Have a dirt mound on the ground near the fog to indicate to the player that this is where the plant must be placed

Get rid of underground area – it is unnecessary and helps majorly scale down the environment

Have the crystal cave be at a slant so that it dips downwards – this supports the idea of an underground cave – this will add more dynamic to the new environment – an underground cave offers the environment a change in levels

Place the wind plant in the crystal cave – offers narrative behind its withering state – it lacks sunlight

Change the sakura tree into a mushroom tree – this contextually makes more sense as it doesn’t make sense for there to be sakura tree in a mushroom forest

Make it so that the mushroom forest has no trees – only mushrooms in place of trees

Combine the fog with the swamp? – discarded as have the fog conceal two key elements seemed a bit much and unnecessary

Place the special flower on a cliff face? – makes it unreachable

Discard the rhino quest – it was deemed as unnecessary since we only really need one small quest and we still hadn’t replaced the rhino with a suitable rainforest animal yet – thus, the rhino area and the swamp area were discarded

New Environment Layout Draft:

The draft showcases the following in the order I write them:
Waterfall, Frog/Pond & Lotus Plants, Berry Bush, Fog & Burrow/Shell, Mushroom Tree/Spider, Skunk, Snake, Crystal Cave/Wind Plant, Cliff Face & Special Flower

After looking at the new environment layout draft, we decided that it still seemed too large to be the project scope. Therefore, we continued scaling the scope down and making changes to the environment. Written below are the notes from that session.

Further Notes

Change the flies quest so that the spider asks for something pretty as opposed to a flower – there are too many flowers involved in the quests – change it so that the snake leaves behind a snake scale when it moves – this is the pretty item the spider wants – this makes for a more cohesive quest lineup

Change the seaweed to a more suitable plant one would actually find in a rainforest waterfall – like a reed/river plant? – the plant still needs to be long so that the deer can wear them as stripes

Change the special flower quest so that the frog asks for a mushroom instead of a flower – this incorporates an important element of the game world – mushrooms – this makes for a more cohesive experience

Changing the special flower to a mushroom also means that it’ll be easier to explain how a non-carnivorous deer can kill a frog – by poisoning it – the frog can eat a poisonous mushroom and die – thus, the special flower is discarded

Change the snake burrow so that it contains two mushrooms instead of a shell – one mushroom is poisonous whilst the other is not – the player can choose which to give to the frog – this gives the player the choice to kill the frog – thus, the turtle shell is discarded

Make the frog bigger than the deer

The frog uses its tongue to hold onto the deer before jumping up to the highest ledge

Shown below is the new version of the environment layout.

New Environment Layout (visual)

The diagram above showcases the following in the order I write them:
Waterfall, Frog/Pond & Lotus Plants, Berry Bush, Fog & Burrow/Good & Bad Mushrooms, Mushroom Tree/Spider, Skunk, Snake, Crystal Cave/Wind Plant

Shown below is the new environment layout in text-form.

Environment Layout 2.0:

Finally, we decided to reassign roles to suit this new project scope. Becca and I decided to take on environment design/art, Bernardo kept his role of doing code and music whilst Shannon, Natasza and Sharna filled the roles of character/prop design/art.

Next, we had specifically assign environments, characters and props to people. For the environment we decided to divide it between the crystal cave and the mushroom forest. I chose the crystal cave so Becca got assigned the forest.

For the characters, we had the frog, the spider, the snake and the skunk. We decided to firstly distribute a character per person and assign the remaining animal later. Shannon got assigned the snake, Natasza got assigned the spider and Sharna got the frog.

Regarding the props, we decided to just make a list of them and assign them to whoever is willing and available at a later date since they would take the least amount of time to create.

New Role Assignments:

Bernardo – Coder/Sound Engineer
Jenny – Crystal Cave Designer/Artist
Becca – Mushroom Forest Designer/Artist
Shannon – Snake Designer/Artist
Sharna – Frog Designer/Artist
Natasza – Spider Designer/Artist