Design Meeting

As this is the first blogpost I will start with an introduction of me and the game we are developing. I’m Tim W Johansson and studying Game Design at Uppsala Univerity at Campus Gotland.
The game we are currently working on is a “Shoot em’ up”-game or SHMUP for short. And we are creating the game with the concept of our peers that’s called Umibozu where you control a ship in misty condition and your only way to see in the mist is to make use of your floodlight to see enemies and environmental hazards.

So this week as the lead designer, I called for a design-meeting. As we have come further into the development of the game, now with an actual player sprite to steer and move around the screen with. In the meeting we needed to decide on the upcoming features that will take the game to a next step, to be ready for the alpha.

I had prepared the meeting with certain points and question I wanted to bring up and get input and answers on, stuff that needed to be decided upon, so everyone works on the same project rather than their own thing without collaborating. For example, we decided the first enemy’s exact movement and attack. So both the programmer knows what to code and the artist knows what to draw as concept art, so when we test it we will see if it works or not.
The meeting was done so that everyone is on the same page and agreeing on what direction we are taking the game in, so that there are no misunderstandings between pipelines and that the concept feels coherent and stick together in a good way. And that the aesthetics of mystery is still the focus. As the meeting progressed I wrote down notes on all the things we decided on.

I think I was a bit too relaxed about this meeting and in the future I would change it up a bit and be a bit more formal and structured about it. For example, I only told the team about what meeting I wanted to do and a possible time for it with a conversation in a standup-meeting. It worked well for this group as we are only four developers. But with just a little larger team this would be more confusing, and information might get lost over a weekend. I would also write down stuff we mentioned and crossed out and decided not to use. Because there might be something there if what we agreed upon right now doesn’t work out as intended or how we thought it would.

So next time I will write an e-mail that’s send out to everybody that needs to attend the meeting.
With definition on what I want the meeting to be about, what decisions we need to take and so everybody has some time to think beforehand and have something ready to go at the start of the meeting. And after that send out an e-mail on what we discussed and with the decisions we made and what the next steps should be.

Another thing would be to be more visual and not just talking, because sometimes the saying “a picture is worth more than a 1 000 words” hold true and sketches and pictures can describe things much clearer than words.

About Tim Wergeni Johansson

2017 Game Design

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