The second week has been rather uneventful for The Cake is a Lie team. However, we did progress with our ideation.

Ideation

We continued with our ideation from week 1 and expanded on the idea we had. Things went a little haywire as you can see in the screenshot below. Since we continued our ideation asynchronously a lot of ideas have been added to the Miro board (2021) for discussion and that meant some ideas went further away from the original theme. This highlighted that there is some lack of clarity or misunderstanding of the original idea that we should aim to tackle quickly before finalising the idea.

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We chose the main theme of the game to be Sustainability with the Level Editing to be a mechanic of the game as otherwise, the scope of the game would have grown too much for the time we have. Apart from the ideation, I brought into our shared folder a Game Design Document template created by Benjamin “HeadClot” Stanley (2015). I found the template online some time ago and it provided us with a structure for writing down the ideation.

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Having long stretches of free time where all five members of the team are available is difficult. However, I feel this has been the reason why we left the team meeting in week 1 with some members not being fully in agreement with the idea we were going for. In future teams, I will highlight that the initial ideation takes a long time and ask members not only when they are free but also for how long would they be free to ensure there is enough time for going through the meeting.

Team organisation

During this second week of the project, we finalised the team organisation. I ensured that we have at least 2 people in each category where possible. This was to ensure we don't have bottlenecks during the development of the game as we are a small, distributed team working in a part-time capacity.

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Towards the end of the week, I checked in with all members to make sure they are aware of the upcoming supervisor meeting since some mentioned they didn't receive a notification for it. At the same time, I highlighted to the team my concern for our progress as it was the end of the second week and we still lacked a finalised idea to start working on. The rest of the team did share the same concern and the conversation and collaboration started to pick up.

Working in a distributed team is difficult and working in a part-time distributed team is even more difficult. Personally, I have worked in a distributed teams for half of my career so far and learned to cope with it reasonably well, however, we all come from different backgrounds. I feel it is an acquired rather than a thought skill, however, I can work towards highlighting best practices to the other team members and guide them in the right direction.

Kicking off the development

While we didn't progress much on the prototype this week, I took the opportunity to add the Kinematic Character Controller (St-Amand, 2021) package from the Unity Asset Store (2021). My Game Jam experience has thought me that Unity's build-in Character Controller has a lot of issues and it is very hard to work around them, especially in a short period of time. To solve this problem and remove the annoyance for the developers and players of my games I bought this Unity asset in one of the store sales. It provides a solid foundation for building responsive and customisable character movement scripts.

Image from Kinematic Character Controller Asset Page

References

Miro. 2021. Miro | Online Whiteboard for Virtual Collaboration. [online] Available at: https://miro.com [Accessed 13 June 2021].

Stanley, B., 2015. Game Design Document Template. [online] Google Docs. Available at: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1axeeBWp683LPU8gCBQQqmquHMYHuG3uhNTN0LjSJBKk/edit#heading=h.9z2dsbsoc8hm [Accessed 13 June 2021].

St-Amand, P., 2021. Kinematic Character Controller. [online] Unity Asset Store. Available at: https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/tools/physics/kinematic-character-controller-99131 [Accessed 13 June 2021].

Unity Asset Store. 2021. [online] Available at: https://assetstore.unity.com/ [Accessed 13 June 2021].