Tuesday 1st, Monday 7th October 2019.
Paper Prototype - Sprint 1. Scrum Master: James Farrell
Overview
This week, we focused on finalising our idea, fleshing out our game, and beginning the development of our paper prototype.
Product
The main products of this week were:
- Scrumwise Setup
- Paper Prototype
- User Personas
- Technology Outline
Process
Scrumwise Setup
On Tuesday, Gerry briefed us on Scrumwise - he explained how to set up our first sprint. We decided that I should be Scrum Master for week 1. We also decided that we would rotate this position each week. We outlined our total hours, added backlog items to the project, and created our first sprint. We aimed to divide the workload evenly among each member of the group. We took into consideration external pressures (such as work and personal health) into consideration when assigning tasks.
User Personas
We decided to split our demographic into two major groups - primary and secondary targets. Our primary target is the older gamer, who grew up playing these games as a kid. Primarily male, aged between 28 and 40. Our secondary target is younger gamers, who are looking for an entry-point into dungeon-crawler games. This demographic includes males and females aged between 12 and 20. Of course, there are outliers to each group, such as females (group 1) and players that are currently younger or older than our selected demographic.
We decided that each person should develop two user personas, based on our primary and secondary targets. This would allow us to capture a broad range of users. These personas can then be condensed into two or three primary/secondary personas.
I developed a father/daughter pair of personas - the father grew up playing these games, but now has limited time to game. He looks fondly upon his old favourites, such as 'Rouge' and 'Sword of Fargoal'. His daughter, on the other hand, never played any of these games, but is looking for a way to bond with her dad. She hasn't played a dungeon-crawler game before but loves to spend time on her Nintendo DS.
Paper Prototype
Once we developed a strong understanding of our main idea, we could begin to work on our paper prototype. On Tuesday, we spent some time designing a map of our game. I explained to the group how our modules would work. Each module would be a 1x1 square on the grid, that would come together to build hallways and rooms. Each module would have a floor, a ceiling and zero to three walls.
We outlined a map of our game on a whiteboard. This would be our main point of reference while developing the paper prototype. We split our map into modules, covering 16 tiles on a grid. This means that we would essentially need to create 16 'rooms'. We begin to discuss the placement of weapons, enemies, and collectables on the map. We also added a locked door that prevents the player from progressing until they complete some objective.
We decided to build our paper prototype from cardboard. To do this, we would need to source some equipment, such as cardboard, newspaper, cutting utensils, and general stationery. I brought cardboard in on Wednesday to begin the development of our prototype. I also brought in sellotape, a box cutter and some general stationery (pencils, rulers, erasers).
We began the development of our paper prototype on Wednesday. I worked with Caoilinn to build the modules for our grid. We drew our map on a white-board and used it as a reference point. We labelled each room to help us keep track of our progress. This also allowed us to keep track of their position in the grid.
Technology Outline
Christian and I worked together to outline the main technologies that we plan to use for this project:
- 3D Studio Max - Environment Assets (Modules)
- Blender - Character Assets & Animation
- XNA - Game Engine
- Audacity - Audio Assets
- Photoshop - Textures & Image Assets
- Scrumwise - Project Management
- Daily Meetings for communication at college
- Discord Voice-Chat for communication outside of college
- Facebook Messenger for general communication
Issues
It turned out that we each shared a different vision of what our game was going to be. Thankfully, we realised this early-on and were able to fix the problem.
Christian and I were unsure of what 3D software we were going to use. Christian prefers to use Blender, while I am more comfortable with 3D Studio Max. Ultimately, we decided to work separately, agreeing to share our assets by exporting them in standard .fbx format.