The first week was getting to know about each other, the instructors and to decide what everyone on the team is going to do for the semester.
We had our first team meeting on 16th January, 2024 during which we decided who our producers will be and gathered some resources on what makes a good level along with answering some questions that our instructors had sent to us beforehand.
After that, we had a meeting with our instructors on 17th January, 2024 and got to know more about each other’s expectations from the project. 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:
Rushil Sojitra: Level designer + Producer
Tingyu(Polly) Yan: Level designer + Producer
Jiayi (Louise) He: 3D + Lighting Artist
Xun Zhang: 3D + VFX Artist
Tianyi (Henry) Lin: 3D + VFX Artist
Jinyi Dai: Gameplay Programmer + Game Designer
Mike Xu: AI Programmer + Game Designer
In addition to this, our discussion with our instructors led us to started planning on working on a golden spike for our project where we can make a small level to showcase our skills as well as figure out a pipeline for the project. The team decided to use Unreal Engine 5 as it is a tool widely accepted and in-demand in the industry. We also started discussing potential ideas for the theme of the game in which our level will be situated. We started by making mind maps and figuring out themes, mechanics, story ideas that our team members liked and made a FigJam board to keep track of all of it. We had a meeting with an expert to figure out the best version control tool for our team when using Unreal Engine 5 and we decided on using Perforce. For the production process, we decided to use Trello to assign tasks and Google Docs to keep track of meeting notes and other documentation.
Things for next week:
- Flesh out details of the themes for main level
- Have a meeting with our SME
- Plan details of the golden spike for our quarters
