I am back now for the second unit of my course, titled ‘Co-Creative Design & Development Practice’ and this unit will consist of a team project.
For this project, I have joined a team and we call ourselves The Cake is a Lie, which is a reference to Portal (Portal, 2007) and the meme which originated from it (Davenport, 2017). The team consists of several of the people I worked with during the Ludum Dare game jam, plus a few new people.
We have had three team meetings over Friday, Sunday and Monday. In these, we began the drafting of our Team Charter in which we outlined the following:
- Team Composition
- File storage / Version Control
- Communication Strategy
- Individual Schedules
- Group Schedule
- Tools and techniques
- Performance Goals
At the time of writing this, we have not gone into a huge amount of detail with our team charter, as we are still working out a lot of points about how we are going to work.
We have initially agreed to use Google Docs for file storage and a Github repository for version control. We will also use Discord for communication.
We have all given their availability and we also came up with some proposed group meetings that we could have on a weekly basis which are loosely based on the meetings that take place within the Scrum framework, including the Stand-up meetings, the sprint review and sprint retrospective.
However, we are likely to modify this to combine Scrum with the Kanban framework. To manage the project visually, we will be using a Trello board. We have not yet finalsied this workflow, but we will in coming weeks.
We have discussed possible roles in the project. I have put myself down for the following:
- 3D Art
- Animation
- Level Design
- Unity Programming and Editing
We have started brainstorming ideas which we are documenting using Miro (Miro, 2021). We have not yet finalised an idea or a story, but we are considering a first person 3d game which will have several levels and the user will have the ability to hack into the levels to change elements in order to complete the game. We have also bounced around ideas about being able to ‘hack’ into time or across different alternate realities.
We will continue to develop these ideas further this week.
References
Davenport, J., 2017. ‘The cake is a lie’—the life and death of Portal’s best baked meme | PC Gamer. [online] Pcgamer.com. Available at: <https://www.pcgamer.com/the-cake-is-a-liethe-life-and-death-of-portals-best-baked-meme/> [Accessed 4 June 2021].
2021. Miro. San Francisco, CA: RealtimeBoard, Inc.
2007. Portal. Bellevue, Washington , US: Valve.