Week 3, E.R.A, Daniel Svensson

This week has been an unrelenting wait for our internal Alpha to be completed. It is hard for us to continue in our design process before we have something playable and to that effect I have focused more on the production side this week except for one thing (see below). 

During our pre-production I decided we would update our Agile working method by using two new tools, Trello and Microsoft project. These two tools in combination would handle the macro aspects of the production and micro aspects respectively. 

Unfortunately I am not familiar with Microsoft project so I spent a couple of hours this week to watch tutorials on how to use it, just to get familiar with the tool. I thought it would be faster to get into but it feels like an extensive tool to learn how to use, although really useful.

Trello however is very easy to use and work with it is so intuitive for software development I can’t see myself advocating anything else at the moment. 

On the design side there was one thing I had to do this week, work together with our lead graphic artist (Henrik Rosenborg) on creating our background/history for the world E.R.A takes place in. It was hard for the graphical team to design buildings and other important details without having an background to fall back on, this ties into intelligent design because we feel we need to be able to argue for the presence of all the features in the game.

One of our key features is that we have an heavy emphasis on narrative and this needs to be reflected in our design work. We spent an entire day, just discussing how we wanted the world to look/work we spent a lot of time on the gods because they are the catalyst to most of the major events on our world. 

I also spent the majority of my time looking at the progress of the various elements of the game, Hopefully we have our first playable alpha by the end of today.  Who needs a vacation right?

Until next week!

/Daniel Svensson

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