One More Week Discord Contributions [WEEK 18]

 

Here is a compilation of some of my personal contributions to our group discord, it is to note i have not included all of the discussions we have had and i have tried to include only relevant responses [my team have definitely posted more messages than this but they revolve around other aspects not relating the the subject i have screenclipped, just for the sake of this blogpost not being unreasonably long, i will only cover the main discussion points from throughout this project.]

Here is our channel list

#General

Here I was asking my team for what backgrounds they required for their individual parts of the script, we never ended up having storyboards for all of us, and instead i had to read through the entire script which did give me some conflicting answers for how many backgrounds i needed. After a meeting with my team, we resolved this issue and got everything down in a more concrete fashion.

I put together these channels

Renpy - Contains important information and links to the renpy guide website in case anyone else in the team wanted to look over my script. I also put the video links to my Devlog posts on youtube as well as some shorter clips of some bug fixes

Code archive - I copy and pasted each version of my script in this channel in case I accidentally lost some of it, this way i always had a backup

Alpha testing- I set up this channel for my team to report bugs in my code, it contains the link to the google drive containing the latest build for the game as well as my form i put together for people to fill in

UI - a more concise channel for Nathan containing GUI information in Ren'py, canvas size for UI elements and provides a channel for him to put his work into.

 

I did end up making a gantt chart, however nobody but myself is using it. We talked about having a group Kanban to track the process of our project, but this also never got made. I make sure to tell my team about every task i am working on throughout the week to stay informed, however this is an issue i wish we had resolved sooner because i feel very much left in the dark sometimes.

I had some concerns about our project management and how we are showing our assets, it was causing me a lot of anxiety that our work was spread across so many platforms so i suggested a meeting for us to all get on the same page. This meeting ended up being very beneficial and i feel that stepping away from the miro, onedrive, jira and all the other apps we were using and just focusing all on the discord and onedrive was a good move to make. We are now more aware of assets being created, and i make sure to post everything i have made in case others need to use them in their own work.

Here i asked about the music student and sharing out work as well as asking Nathan for a sketch he had done  to put in the game [he sent it after this message i was just unable to clip it in the screenshot]

#Important-info

Here is the link i sent regarding the Gantt chart

I havent included the list itself here but i sent through an asset list for everyone to be informed on what assets would be in our final game, i made this so that people could have a more clear plan on what to do next and plot out their tasks accordingly to reduce stress.

Here I posted the link to the Alpha/Beta test feedback sheet for my team to send to others when we
 were ready to begin testing

Here i sent and pinned the link to the google drive where i routinely update with the latest builds of our game, It is set to share-viewer so that they can send this link to others when we begin Alpha testing.

I also set up a collaborative YouTube playlist that my team could add songs to to send to Amiya for inspiration

#Brainstorming

I had some concerns about whether or not we could fit all of our content down into 10-15 minutes of gameplay towards the start of the project, I decided to look into how other games that followed the themes of anxiety tackled this in such a short amount of time and found a very interesting game called Adventures with Anxiety!. The game was short, effective in it's portrayal of anxiety with it's dialogue and options, and was very fun to play. I decided to send the game to my team to have a look at and take inspiration from to how we can improve our own game.

#Concept-art

Again for the sake of not making this blog post unbelievably long, this is where myself and my team posted final concepts for our game, it is similar to the 2D-art channel. We didn't give any feedback in this channel as it acted mainly as a dump for all the asset considerations.

#WIPS-and-Feedback

These two screenshots relate to some sketches i initially made but ended up not needing as this scene was omitted from the game. I was very confused at what backgrounds were actually needed at this point so i suggested we all get together and really solidify what our ideas were.

Below is some general feedback:

#Alpha-testing

Here are some bug fixes i personally found and recorded.

I'm not sure if anyone aside from Niamh has play tested the game yet

When Lottie joined our group we assigned her as the QA tester and so i made sure to ping her with the link to the google drive in case she had trouble finding it.

Some of Seb's friends are going to Playtest our game

On a public server I'm personally in i sent a link to the game too for others to try out

This is another server I'm in with some friends from America who also really wanted to play our game