The many hats of indies
I am still doing work as a game designer, as described in my last post. As of posting this, I have been at it for approximately 1½ months, give or take a week. So today I will go over some of the things I have done and how they illustrate that in smaller teams, one often has to wear more than the hat that was the focus to begin with.
First of all, I am still doing game design focused tasks. With the design pillars in place, I focused slightly more on getting a simpler version of the map ready for testing with players. I created a document for what I considered a minimum viable test for this game. Due to me joining the team on something that was already ongoing, it will be slightly more than minimal. Getting to a state where we are ready to do the test has been progressing in cooperation with the programmer as we focused on getting abilities and items to work as intended, and we seem to be close to being able to run the first test with players. I have also been working on different templates for team members to use in case they come up with ideas they would like to implement. This is to make sure that we don’t just add anything ‘cool’ we come up with, but put thought into how the suggestion would fit into the existing parts.
On top of that I even prototyped both a dashing ability and a way to do two-way teleporters in Unreal Engine. Using the teleporters didn’t even crash the editor after some rework.
That was some of the game designer stuff. I have also done a bit that would cross over into QA/Testing territory. First of all I created documentation to keep track of what the test is intended to actually be testing for. This is to make sure that once the test has been performed, we can direct our focus to analyzing those parts first. Secondly, I put together a quick template for bug reporting. I don’t expect players to be using it at this point, but it will be a nice thing to have both for internal tracking, and further into production it should provide a benefit by already having been used and accustomed to. Making it this early also allows iteration on that itself, should it turn out to need that.
Level design wise I stared with a partial version of an already existing map layout. My focus was less on creating anything from scratch, but rather use parts that were already in place and adjust for potential gameplay. As this game involves players harvesting ressources, I focused early on on the placement of the spots in which that is possible. I also planned where the teleporters I prototyped will be placed, and currently they add some tactical depth to the gameplay. This is one of the things I am excited to see via the test if players will be using and how. As an added bonus I also started implementing some parts to the map where players can control if those parts stay or not, adding to the tactical depth. The control panels for those will not be in the bases though, but require the players to venture out into the map
I think this will be all for this month's post. For April, preparing for the test will take a bit of a backseat as other things have taken priority, but I do hope that we will be able to progress enough that we will be able to run the first one at the start of May by the latest.