First Meeting - Planning

Chris and I are working on a Beat Em Up game for the web browser. He proposed the idea by sending me a game design document for it a couple weeks ago.  We've had two meetings since then, and I just got back from our first code sessions, so today is a good day to start our dev blog.

So, Chris is a DigiPen graduate and game industry vet. For posterity, I'm very interested in documenting his battle-tested game development process.  So I would like to write about what we talk about and how we progress.  Here's what we talked about in our first meeting.

Motivation

We decided this was primarily a hobbyist project, and secondarily an experience builder and portfolio piece.

Distribution of Sales

We decided we would split any sales by 50/50, with a contract for art assets.

Choosing a Title

Just call it something for now (Raging Atoms). Design the mechanics of the game, use placeholder art, then allow artist to decide the story, look, and feel for which the title will be based.

Specifying Required Art Assets

When requesting art, decide how many frames, the framerate, and the frame sizes for all the assets we need, then send that spec to the artist to implement in a desired format.

A note about Placeholder Art

As a rule of thumb, placeholder art should be ugly, lest it be shipped. If a developer's motivation relies on a pretty prototype, motivation needs to be found elsewhere.

Choosing an Engine

Need an engine with 2d sprites, alpha-blending, cheap, and works in the web browser, with an added bonus of mobile support for distributing in app stores.  We decided on impact.js due to its popularity, cheap price, good docs.

Goals for first coding session

This will be setup day. Setup environment for the engine so we can start coding, and setup version control to track and synchronize our changes. We will be pair-programming to get a picture moving on the screen with the arrow keys. Some "stretch goals" are to get it working for mobile devices.

Choosing roles

Chris and I are both programmers, but there are higher level roles to be filled. Technical Lead is one who makes decisions about the general architecture of the code base, and other technical things. I wanted Chris to take the lead so I could learn from his arch design. Lead Designer is one who makes decisions on the general design of the gameplay, so I wanted him to take that as well since this design is his idea. I will be taking the Producer role which seems to do everything else by default.