The vertical slice

Not too far in to January we had formed teams for the vertical slice. I was with Max, Ed, Ben and Joe, then later Nik joined us. The first part of our job, aside from handing out roles was to decide on an idea for our game, both game play and concept/theme.

I quite quickly too the job of Game Designer and Coder. The rest of the jobs got divided out, but that was the easy part. for the game idea we went through many different ideas, the only thing we settled on quickly was to do a platformer, which we later decided should be 3D.

Of course deciding that does not specify much, we thought about many different game play mechanics, game pace, whether to have it open world, character abilities, the theme of the game, story and much more.

Then everything started to come together, Ed and Max suggested a Voodoo/Hoodoo theme, we eventually decided on the character and the game play mechanics we wanted to have. This was a lot of fun, even though there were a few disagreements between us.

We then looked at our different tasks and what we would have to do, I looked at how ambitious we were being with the game and decided we should split the code into iterations and levels. Still, it looked like there was a lot to do.

My job I knew I was going to enjoy, and I have. Taking on game design I was confident with, but coding I wasn't exactly a master at so I knew I would have a lot to learn from then on, especially to code most of a game. I knew Joe was going to help me but I needed independent knowledge as well. My job was big and early on I wasn't sure how much I would be able to do.

A fun thing about this project is that at no point I was able to say "Yep, that's done", I was always going back to things, tweaking and changing them. Unfortunately there is no way I am going to have the time to blog about every little detail of what I did and get the game completely visually finished off in the last few days, so I will just need to find the right balance.