SIP Blog: Charting the path – 6/20/23
Charting the path
By Jacob Czerepica, Clark University ‘24
Leaping off the back of our dirty builds, it’s time to get serious and begin working towards our final products. Over the past week, the SIP23 teams have begun to map out where we’re going for our games, finalize certain features, anticipate obstacles, and generally pave the road to production. We are wrapping up our pre-production phases and are beginning full production on our games. We learned the last bits of information we can from our dirty builds before tossing them aside to create a new and better product. Everyone on every team has begun the hard work to build our systems, frameworks, and workflow.
In this early stage, we are making sure we create good frameworks and systems to help ensure development proceeds smoothly going forward. After our dirty builds crawled, we are using the lessons we learned from them so that our final game can run. Laying our development plans on the table, we’ve established the big systems we will need to tackle for each of our games and how to best approach them. Knowing these systems ahead of time allows us to plan our workflow so that we can identify potential stalls in our development early, giving us an opportunity to mitigate their impact or avoid them entirely. My team has mapped out our big systems and practiced our workflow over this past week.
For my art teammates, we have written out our development pipeline. Using this pipeline, our art assets are passed from one artist to another to best capture each of our artist’s strengths and maintain consistency. This pipeline has some issues which we have identified quickly in our testing. Despite these issues, we’ve adapted and created a system that does well to emphasize the strengths of each artist and help with the game’s development. It also offers us time to work with other artistic elements of the game that wouldn’t necessarily go through our established art pipeline.
On the design side of things, a large portion of the work here has been finalizing our game’s features and creating mockups of what the game will roughly look like. Most of the work here has been to help the team visualize the same game and make sure we are all cooperating toward the same product. We, the design team, have also created spreadsheets for later use. These spreadsheets will help us track values as they are added to help with game balancing, which my team identified as potentially a large issue for our game.
Finally, we look to my team’s programmers for the tasks they’ve been working on this week. They have been communicating with teammates to ensure they are developing the game according to the team’s shared vision, and creating appropriate frameworks to make development much easier down the road. They’ve been creating the foundations for our game and ensuring that development goes smoothly. On top of building the core gameplay features, they also have worked on other important aspects of the game, such as UI scaling for multiple aspect ratios of devices.
Overall, we are beginning to create the vision of our games and laying down the necessary roadwork for the work that lies ahead. We have mapped out the routes of our development and built the necessary tools to ensure things go as smoothly as possible. The work we did last week should hopefully keep us all well prepared for when obstacles inevitably show up. SIP this year is off to a fantastic start and after much preparation, we have finally embarked on proper development. We will likely learn a lot this summer if we haven’t already, but I believe that every team will come out with a fantastic game to share with the world once we’re done.
