We're Back!Hi everyone, it’s been a while! Since our last update almost two months ago, a lot has happened. Weird schedules and snow days aside, we’ve been hard at work preparing for the OGPC in just four months! Every single department has some major developments, and we’re super excited to share them with you. A Special MessageIf you’re reading this, you’re probably a big fan of TGS, and we appreciate you! To show our appreciation, we’ve created a short get-to-know us video where you can learn more about our guiding principles, and also get to know some members of the team. Check it out! Department UpdatesManagementThe team has a new tool in our ever expanding collection: Microsoft Teams! With teams, we’re able to continue our work beyond meeting times, and are able to collaborate and share our thoughts and ideas, not to mention our awesome coach Andrew Merrill is always there to cheer us on! In addition to online communication, we are also meeting each Wednesday for a short, 25 minute check-in meeting where we can discuss timelines, plans, and delegate work. Later in the day, we come together for an hour-long specialized meeting for us to do work, generate new ideas, and polish department specific work. Game DesignAs a team, we have been thinking a lot about our vision for the game. In several brainstorming sessions, we built the foundation for a top down stealth-based movement puzzle game about a robot breaking out of a factory’s cyclical nature. Our game design and story lead, Quinn, has been hard at work creating an early game design document outlining our hopes and goals for our game. While we won’t spoil the story here, we are trying to emphasize the breaking of cycles. We kicked off the long process of level design with a couple of meetings this month, and now have early designs for about 40% of the game! With our rapid progression, we’ve established a system starting by brainstorming on a whiteboard with different interactions and parts of levels, then combining our favorite parts into a complete sketch of our design on paper. Paper draft of the first introductory level. While designing the first few levels we have needed to juggle the need for tutorials that teach the player important gameplay mechanics, introducing new features, fitting ideas into the overall story, as well as trying to keep our ideas within the scope of what we are able to do in the time we have. One big thing we have been working on with these levels is how to bake in the theme of “Breaking Cycles” into each level. To do this, we have tried to create levels in which the player is forced to break the cyclical work being done as a means to escape. Working through all these elements as a team has strengthened our understanding of our game and its progression, as well as our skills in level design. One of our next steps, aside from making the rest of the levels, is to get the levels we have into Unity so we can start to get feedback from our playtesters. Recently, Nico made a tool that will hopefully allow us to create levels quickly. This tool works in the Unity editor UI and gives a searchable library of all the game elements we have created, making adding objects to levels a few clicks instead of digging through the folders of our game. Story WritingAfter the creation of a full story outline last month, our lead story writer, Quinn, has been largely focused in other areas (specifically art and level design) but in those areas, the story has evolved extensively. Collaboration between art and story, which will be essential for an active atmosphere that contributes to the feel and plot of the world, has begun to be considered. How the layout of a level works within the greater game is an important part of even the early level design. The story has changed with the new constraints of these considerations, with justification for gameplay elements attempted to be seamlessly integrated into the lore. ProgrammingWith a solidified understanding of the main game mechanics, our programmers could move away from general gameplay structures and onto features we need in a prototype. This includes game elements like fans, lasers, buttons, and retractable spikes, all of which interact with the player in different ways. We are still continuing our efforts to make everything modular, and are updating our dependency graph with new gameplay elements as they appear. Check it out! This is our dependency graph for our codebase so far. The arrows show how different systems rely on other systems following the direction of the arrows. This modularity means whenever we want to add a new feature, we only need to code for that specific feature instead of having to overcomplicate the code for the game manager or the player. This approach has drastically decreased the number of bugs we have encountered, and is leading to a much cleaner and simpler codebase. That said, this approach also comes with the need for more planning and forethought before delving into the code, and means a ton of refactoring is needed to keep things in perfect shape. For example, the way we handle input and movement was completely overhauled since last post! We also launched our first build of the game, which came with its own set of challenges like UI scaling and dealing with input lag, but with a bit of poking around in the Unity project settings we were able to figure out which numbers we needed to mess with. A preview of our game! Fun fact: we currently have 3,121 lines of code that we’ve written, though that includes whitespace and comments! Looking forward, we’re hoping to finish up the prototype in the next week so we can get started on level design and integrating art, sound, and music. ArtPaul, Nico, and Quinn have begun work on the art for the game, with fully designed sprites for the main character, as well as some designs for various game elements and obstacles. They also settled on their process for art creation, starting with sketches of options for parts of designs then bringing the best ones together into a final design, then taking that design into Adobe Illustrator to create a final digital art piece. MarketingOur marketing team has had a lot on its plate in these past few months. We’ve dedicated much of our time to creating our “This is Us” team introduction video. This was mostly used as an opportunity for our marketing team to practice for the future as we prepare our Making of and Trailer videos for the OGPC. These future projects will require a much longer and more involved storyboarding and planning process, a process which our team will be undertaking… now! Our team’s been more busy than just this, however, as we’ve also updated our awesome website! Now you can see an archive of our previous blogs underneath the “Blogs” tab, where you can see our progress overtime and leave comments to let us know how we’re doing. You’ll also find our latest content right on our Home page, so you can learn more about what goes on behind the scenes straight from our website! There haven't been that many posts to our social media accounts recently, and we apologize for that from the bottom of our hearts. But now, with winter break behind us and schedule normalcy returning to Catlin Gabel, we can continue our weekly in-person meetings which means… More TGS! Each week you can expect updates from our meetings and about our overall progress from the comfort of your own phone. We also have some exciting short-form videos in the works, all of which we hope you enjoy! Some of the biggest projects the department has ever seen are coming up, and we really hope you’ll enjoy our sneak peaks and previews! Final ThoughtsThis has been a long one, but we hope you found this post informative and interesting! As we continue to work hard in making this game, we also hope to continue helping our members flourish, instilling in them creativity, sense of curiosity, and the ability to collaborate. Let us spark innovation by teaching these core principles!
Until next month, The Tempest Game Studio team
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Wait, What is This?Hello, and welcome to our very first blog post! We are Tempest Game Studio, a brand new game development team devoted to the promotion and installation of Creativity, Curiosity, and Collaboration within our members. We aren’t here just to make a cool game, we’re here to teach each and every student valuable skills that can be applied to their lives beyond TGS. What is the Oregon Game Project Challenge (OGPC)?We have now signed up to compete in the Oregon Game Project Challenge (OGPC)! The OGPC is a game development competition for middle and high schoolers alike. Each fall, the OGPC reveals a new theme for the year's competition, which is to be incorporated into a game created over the following months. In May, competitors from around Oregon gather together to play each-other's games, hear from guest speakers, and mingle with the expansive game development community. This year’s theme was announced on November 7th: Cycles! BrainstormingThe whole team met after the theme of cycles for this year’s challenge was released. This meeting lasted for many hours, where we threw around numerous different ideas that had been thought of beforehand, or were just come up with on the spot. All of our ideas at this meeting ended up falling prey to various issues, such as a game centered around migration that was too centered on story rather than gameplay. The issue that came up in many if not nearly all of our suggestions was the problem of scope. For the OGPC, a game must be created in a mere six months, and considering this is our small team’s first game together, any game proposals must be viable to create within the time frame. Although the brainstorming session did not yield any final game contenders, the numerous cycle implementation suggestions gave the team ample fodder for brainstorming until our next meeting, where we hoped to settle on an idea. During this time, Paul created an outline for a fascinating rogue-like centered around astrology cycles, which ultimately found itself beyond the scope of what we could create. The idea that we’re currently prototyping came courtesy of Noah, who first workshopped the idea along with Quinn and Nico. The three of them created an outline for a game that centered around a robot who must sneak their way into the depths of a factory. This game contains numerous cycles, from the repetitive nature of the robots’ work, to the conveyor belts used in the factory, to a day-night cycle that features prominently in the gameplay. It is also perfectly designed to meet our scope as the layers of the factory allow us to create more or less content depending on how long things take, while still being guaranteed to end up with a finished product. Department Updates!ManagementAs we’re starting off this project, we’re thinking a lot about how to organize ourselves as a team. First off, we have weekly meetings (every Wednesday morning), where all members show up to share, give updates, and learn more about general game design and development skills. These meetings are not only for our competition team members, but also for our broader community of independent game designers, who all come together to learn and have fun! We have longer meetings spaced throughout the week, sometimes during Lunches, sometimes later in the afternoon intended specifically for TGS members. Outside of these meetings we are also communicating using a messaging service called Slack, where we can share ideas, work, and department announcements. It also serves as a great way for team members to have fun with one another outside of our weekly meetings! The task managing service Trello is also being used by each department. Members are able to establish timelines, track progress, and create long-term goals. Github is also being used to save snapshots and code from different points in time, and it allows different people to work on different parts of the game at the same time. Game DesignAfter we had decided on a topic, it was time to jump straight into game design! We had two long brainstorming meetings, where we figured out the direction we wanted to take the gameplay, and some of the specifics of how that gameplay would function. Our brainstorming ranged in scale, from the genre of the game to individual obstacles, and many thoughts and ideas were proposed and debated. In the end we settled on a few of these ideas that we truly believed would work well in the game, but although we have decided on initial ideas, prototyping (and the many following stages of development) will undoubtedly cause major changes and improvements to the game design. Story WritingQuinn, our primary story designer, created an initial outline of the story and plot that the player will see, as well as a deeper description of the full lore. At a game design meeting we discussed this document, giving feedback and making suggestions to the initial ideas. Based on these suggestions, revisions on the outline were made, creating a first draft of the story of the game which the team is proud of and excited to see realized. The story will be subject to minimal change in the early stages of production, because of the game development needed before the story can be effectively evaluated. Despite this, the story will not be forgotten, and we will continuously revisit and consider it when making decisions in other aspects of the game. ProgrammingAs we’ve started the process of programming and prototyping, we have taken a very intentional approach when it comes to scalability and readability. Scalability is all about the bigger picture, even with a small project. If there were 100 more of x, would this feature still work, and be easily usable by people that haven’t seen it before? This also tends to push people in the direction of writing cleaner code, and it makes interacting with things much simpler. Readability goes hand-in-hand with this, where it becomes important for all the programmers to be able to change and add on to code. So far, we have been working on building up systems that will be present with whichever game we decide to go forward with, including building a robust audio system that has adaptive music and sound effect controls, a game management system that can manage pausing, UI (User Interface), and a level manager that can automatically unload, transition between, and load levels. We are just now starting to do work on the main game loop (the player controller, obstacles, etc.). Art, Sound, & MusicOur music department has been hard at work behind the scenes as the rest of the team has begun programming a working prototype. That said, the lack of content has created substantial difficulties for the team, and it’s difficult to get a grasp for how to write the music beyond “robots” and “day/night” themes. That being said, Paul, our Music & Sound coordinator has begun work on a nighttime style song that makes heavy use of the iconic glockenspiel. Being given a lot of unfamiliar tools and applications, the team has been dedicating this early development stage to prepare for when the game design and art teams start to get a more concrete idea of what the game will look like. At that time, our incredible team of artists and musicians will be ready to compose a masterpiece. MarketingOur marketing team has faced a mountain of work in these first few weeks. As a brand new team, we’ve needed to establish a public image, and we’re still figuring out how we want to present ourselves to the world! Ari, our Marketing and Publicity manager, has worked hard along with our Marketing team to set up our website and social media pages, and has been working on a special team introduction video for our loyal fans out there (hey, that’s you!). We’re still learning the ropes, and we’re still thinking about our core mission, and how we can share that with our audience. Final ThoughtsLooking forward into the coming weeks and months, the entire team is excited to jump headfirst into this work of the early stages of game design. We have some great ideas about where to go next, and a lot of great work has been put into setting us up for success (yay)! Cya Soon!
- The Tempest Game Studio Team |
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