Fridays Meeting

Each Friday lunch time me and Leilani meet up for lunch and discuss our current task list, we also get to discuss important things that have turned up in the week since the last Friday meeting. Important things can include reworking ideas for things not quite working out well this week when I am trying to implement them. This is also the time when we discuss any big ideas that have come to us during the week.

Friday (yesterday) we had one of these meeting and I had several items on my agenda... yeah, I always like an agenda when doing meetings, for my day job as well as this kind of development.

The image above is the major notes page we created. Notice at the top (ok, as I ran out of space on the page I ended up using a few extra lines at the very top).. I digress..... So near the top is the major meeting agenda, and it has three items. We pounded through these items pretty well making notes for what we decided on along the way. So we now know how the Trader inventories are going to be restocked... now I need to write that code.. haha

We also got down a new minigame task, which I felt like we needed to round out this area of the game. Well this new Arcade Task will go along with something else we came up with.. more on that later. The last major thing we discussed is the Trader UI.. as I have been feeling frustrated with part of it just not matching other parts. So after a good discussion we analyzed which bits I dislike and then re-designed them to match the parts I did like. Just gotta code it now of course. Leilani also came up with another modification to the Trader UI, so that was good.

Lastly we touched on the aspect of tools and needing more in the game, along with the fact we have a Gem trader who has no gems AND we need a bit more in game area to explore and hide stuff in. We ended up with this answer...

You can perhaps see that this is a new scene, or set of scenes to be more exact. These scenes are all 2D and are a cave system with various levels. This also opens up two new tools, a Lantern and also a Pick. The Lantern to light your way in the caves and the Pick to collect precious rocks with for the Gem collector. This area is now also designed to be opened up later in the game after you have gotten the Sledgehammer, and yeah, the new Task is related to the opening of the cave system.

It all came together and it is interesting that we discussed a Cave and Pick 18 months ago at the start of this game design. Everything has come full for this I reckon.

Laters

Da Voodoochief

p.s. I will try and update the blog at some point with why I have not blogged in quite a while, just a lot of frustration with some aspects of games from the past. At some point Ill be ready to write about it.