BSA702 14/7

 arrays and lists

Quick and Easy Galaxy painting great tutorial I found when I was looking for a background for my pitch tomorrow. I want to incorporate this kind of background into my game too so this will be handy.

Quick 20min play around image

BSA702 7/7

 Game Design -Pipeline and Planning

This is taken from the assessment point of view, not accurate to real life.

Three main phases to the pipeline

• design
• concept
• production

Proposal 

• Elevator pitch(what makes ur game unique)
• Brief synopsis (more lore and gameplay loop info)
• Visuals(concept art, character art, mechanic visualizations)
• Research(similar games, steamspy.com for sales statistics, target audience - how big, where are u going to release it)
• Budget(how are u going to spend it?)
• Schedule of execution(key dates)
• Key Roles
• Gantt chart
• Marketing pipeline(how are u going to market during development, not just when complete)
• Health and Safety
• Risks(any parts of project that can cause major delays or non-completion, identify these early and have multiple plans of action as backups)

Pre-Production

• Building our concepts
• Take everything we just said and start developing it
• storyboarding(map out the rough steps you want the player to take from start to finish)
• Asset lists(working document to track progress of all art and audio)
• Whiteboxing
• Build elements to correct world scale
• Character whiteboxing
• How the character interacts with the environment
• Core mechanics(start coding asap)
• Get the core mechanics working asap(during pre-pro unless mechanics are complicated. good chance to discover if they will be possible or not
• Document everything(scale, settings, art pipelines, audio pipelines)
• end of pre-pro should have the narrative completed, core mechanics, core game loop, core whitebox and character movement(no "character will double jump but ill code it later")
• By now game should be in alpha state - playable

Production(development)

• start building the actual game for the expo
• by the expo we should be in beta(feature locked and moving onto polishing)
• make sure to have a priority column in the asset list for things u want ready for the expo
• Art(elements should be designed and rendered, by week 14/15 all assets should be ticked off)
• Code should be completed during whiteboxing stage
• bug fixing will be happening when final art assets are brought into the game
• Audio(game audio tells half the story, sets the tone and atmosphere, not as important for the expo but by week 15)
• UI(inviting main and pause menu ready for the expo, all menus and HUD done by week 15

Release

• Everything building up to week 16 handin
• Dot forget marketing (sshots and video clips as much as possible, twitter and instagram are must haves, twitch youtube facebook and reddit as secondary)
• Interact with your posts, be genuine dont act like a pr machine