Timeline:

• Friday Jan 19th: Team assembled! :D
• Saturday Jan 20th: Game jam
• Monday Jan 22nd: Meeting to discuss ideas and prepare for pitch
• Tuesday Jan 23rd: Pitch presentation
• Thursday Jan 25th: Meeting to discuss game direction and creative brief
• Friday Jan 26th: Creative brief document finalized

Synopsis:

After the team was assembled, a lot of the first game jam as a group was spent discussing ideas and hashing out some things that the initial game idea proposal couldn’t include. We also tried to establish a development workflow with Unity and GitHub, trying to integrate assets from other art and music tools in a natural way. 

We ended the jam with this build, which includes the ability for the player to walk around an environment and interact with an object in it. We also had footstep SFX and background music. The environment was mainly based on images from the Elan School. We also continued to generate ideas and determine tasks that we will need to accomplish over the next couple months. 

Preparing for our pitch involved figuring out the key points of the game. We finalized the pitch deck and what we thought was most important to communicate, which included core game mechanics, aesthetic features and inspirations. Among the feedback we received (so far), two things stood out: the communication between the players, and the narrative basis of the game. 

Owing to the feedback we received and reconsideration of the goals of the game, a big change took place between the pitch and the submission of the creative brief: the switch from multiplayer to singleplayer. We thought it would provide a needed focus on player experience and communicate the point of the narrative more effectively. Incorporating this change into the foundations of the game, we made the creative brief document. It includes everything communicated in the pitch, with more detailed descriptions of many things we had to gloss over during the presentation.

Looking ahead, the next milestones to work towards are the tech demo and the game design document/presentation. The tech demo is an important step to prove the technical aspects of the game are feasible, and will likely draw a lot from what we made in the game jam. We plan to include the ability to switch between playable characters and a simple puzzle as proof of concept. The GDD will involve detailing everything we plan to have in the final game, breaking those down into atomic tasks and delegating them.