Darryl Long

This Dev Diary encapsulates the second half of the first week of studio and the development processes that I have undergone in these last few days. After my initial Dev Diary about the studio pitch, there were a number of things that were apparent in the feedback. The lack of images or screen captures of what my game would look like really hurt my presentation, an increase in GIFs or images/sketches would have really helped with the audience visualising my idea of the project. The combination of having text to read, attempting to visualise the game and listening to my descriptions meant that people were overwhelmed when listening to my description of the pitch. The main takeaways for this pitch are to:

• Show don’t write – using images and sketches of proposed ideas are a much better way of getting the audience to visualise my ideas.
• Make sure that necessary information is included – don’t include unnecessary information in the pitch as it will distract or bore the audience.
• Step By Step – Inserting layers into the game sketches could help the audience to focus and see where each piece of the game would go.

Although even after the somewhat subpar delivery of my pitch I received some very useful feedback that I could work on and think about on implementing in my next delivery of the game.

• How is the player meant to feel while playing? (Tony) – This is an interesting question to address, on one hand, missile command is meant to give the player a sense of challenge and hopelessness as missiles continue to fire down onto the world. On the other hand, Bridget Riley’s artwork has been said to give the viewer odd sensations such as skydiving or sea sickness. The sensation that I want the player to feel is something that I need to explore and define in order to have a complete vision for the game.
• Could the game run on a grid/geometric thing with implied movement rather than objects? (Penguin) –  This is an idea that I have thought about and am considering placing back into the game. This is a really cool idea for a surreal type of experience for the players I just need to flesh out the fully realised idea of the purpose of the game and how I want the players to feel when playing the game.

The next stage of the development process was to write up the feature specification document and the technical design document. Writing up the features design document was a really good development process as it allowed me to fully flesh-out ideas that I had for the game and write it down on paper. The technical design document allows me to write up how I would implement the assignment in the actual project. This allows for thinking about the implementation of lower level concept ideas and actually helped me with the feature specification as well. There were a number of changes that I made while writing up these documents which I consider to be improvements to the game:

• Missiles now only move vertically downwards
• The background pattern on the wall is a horizontal black and white pattern
• The same pattern is prevalent on the missile
• The counter missiles can only have one missile fired per pyramid at a time but have an unlimited amount of counter missiles able to be fired.

This feedback process was extremely useful in the development and so was being able to write out my ideas in a document and realising how I would actually implement these changes allowed me to iterate on my ideas and hopefully improving them.