Light After Death

# Week 1

# New Beginnings

The first week of IAT410 was action-packed as I went from a mind blank (coming off of summer vacation) to the beginnings of a game. After teams were formed, this first week was all about ideation. We met two times over the course of the week but were in contact much more than that.

# The First Meeting

During out first meeting we got to know each other and began spit-balling.

Some Ideas that I contributed to the conversation included:

  • A Game where you browse, collect and trade vinyl records
  • A game where you’re a teenager who has to sneak out of their house
  • A game where the player steeps various teas
  • A game about moths

During this first meeting we compiled a list including these and everyone else’s ideas. We did not pick a game in our first meeting but instead decided sleep on it and reconvene a few days later with our opinions.

# Collaboration Tools

We also setup various online services that we chose to use as collaboration tools

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# Discord

For real-time chat and video calling we opted to setup a discord server. We all had discord accounts already and the whole service caters towards gamers in general so it was a perfect fit.

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# Github

We then setup a Github repo which will house both our gamecode and the team / individual blogs for this project. I setup Vuepress (opens new window), a static site generator to build our blogs based on markdown files found in {Our Repo}/blog/. This gives is one central place where we can all dump our thoughts throughout the game development process.

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# Notion

Finally, I introduced (half of) the team to Notion, a super useful shared notebook-style service with features like calendar and Kanban boards to aid out collaboration.

# The Second Meeting

During the second meeting we settled on the Moth-game idea and worked out of the general game mechanics. We also came up with the name: "Light After Death", a play on the expression: "Life After Death".

# Reflection

All and all, we have been working very successfully as a group so far. This course has a lot going on and appears to have a heavy workload so I will make sure I stay on track. Since we're so early on in development, no issues have cropped up yet (luckily). Everyone is doing their part and the team has proved cohesive. I have high hopes for this game, and I think this semester will be a fun one with lots to learn and lots to do!

← Week 2 →