Week 1

We started with our instructor meeting on Monday, 26th August 2024, and discussed everyone’s personal goals and understanding of the extreme pogosticking sport. Additionally, we also discussed about the project’s scope and expectations from the professional pogoers at Xpogo. 

After that, we went on to draw inspiration from videos on YouTube from competitions like Pogopalooza and tried to identify the spirit of pogoing. We decided our core hours as a team and divided the duties and responsibilities amongst the co-producers of the project.

Here is a list of the team members and their roles on the project:

• Henry: Tech art (effects, shaders, materials) + Gameplay programming
• Ryan: Level design + 3D Art 
• Cassie: UI/UX, User Research, Sound design
• Rushil: Level design + Mechanics Programming + Producing
• Jesse: Tech art (rigging, shaders, prop modeling) + Programming
• Bella: 3D Art + Producing + Character Modeling and Animation

We also had a meeting with Will Weiner, CEO of Xpogo to get into the mind of a professional pogoer and someone who has a significant knowledge of the sport and the people in it and to know about his expectations from the game. We got several helpful insights from him which we could use for our game. 

After an initial discussion, we decided that we would settle for a PC game, keeping in mind the requirement for a ubiquitous/highly accessible platform and also the computation-heavy physics simulation and visual effects we wanted to have in the game based on our team’s skill sets. We decided to use Unreal Engine 5 to create the game as it provides great support for all of the above features. 

We started discussing ideas for the gameplay, created a few mind-maps and a composition box, and started working on creating a tech demo in Unreal for showing during the Quarters presentations in two weeks. Here are some images and screenshots of our planning: