Week 4 Dev Blog

After receiving 1/4’s feedback from faculty members, we came up with three new approaches to present to our client; not all of the ideas directly tackle the issue of gender inclusiveness and diversity, but we believe that that issue can be solved naturally by focusing on other aspects of character creators:

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Client Meeting

EA picked #2, which was based on an internal vote. Here are some key reasoning points for their decision:

  1. It would be interesting to see how the team can present different body types through UI/UX
  2. Easier to achieve in terms of uniqueness due to it being a less familiar approach compared to the other two
  3. Any game genre can adapt to this approach
  4. Approach #1 and #3 have some nuance and are narrower than #2
  5. #1 was actually considered as the most difficult approach

Week 3 Dev Blog

1/4’s

Below are some samples of the three-idea brainstorms for approach to character creators. We decided that the best way to narrow down our approach, is to have approaches that cover the three big areas of game development: art, design, and technical. Due to our team only being six people, we realized that our scope would be too big if we were to involve all three or even two of these areas.

We presented these three approaches during our 1/4’s to observe which one that the faculty were most drawn to.

Week 2 Dev Blog

First, based on questions from last week, we decided to have each team member brainstorm three ideas on interesting approaches to character customization.

Next, we landed on Tabula Rasa as our team name. It is Latin for “blank slate” which matches with our character creator revolving around freedom of self-expression and identity. Also, Justin started on the team logo design! Below are some high-level options:

Design must reflect a character creator in some way, but keep it minimal and easy to recognize

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Client Meeting

We were given many specific technical constraints regarding how EA develops, updates, and manages assets on their development side. But the most important take away from the meeting was that our target demographic was everyone due to the average age of gamers increasing overtime.

Week 1 Dev Blog

Meet the team and client!

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As the semester starts, we feel energetic for this project! Here is the team:

Justin – Our game and experience designer, also great in graphic design

Em – Our 2D artist, focus on hair style and costume design for this project, also our producer

Luka – Our solo programmer!!

Yukti – Our rigger, tech artist

Qisheng – Our 3D artist with focus on character

Sandra – Our 3D artist, general tech artist, look dev artist, co-producer working for weekly blogs

Since this is a six-person team, deciding our core hours was not too easy. However, if you want to discuss thoughts or ideas, find us in room 3426!

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Client Meeting

From our first client meeting, we determined some general parameters for the project:

  • It is about inclusion and accessibility; welcoming different backgrounds and experiences
  • Important to consider that each country has its own norms regarding non-binary culture
  • Our character creator must somehow add or expand to already existing games
  • Meeting times will have to be carefully planned due to time zone differences between the client, other EA developers, and the team.

For the next client meeting with Kate we plan to research and answer these questions:

  1. How do some games successfully achieve gender inclusiveness?
  2. For games that lack gender inclusiveness, what aspects can be improved on?
  3. What are some games with interesting or unique approaches to character customization?
  4. What genre of games does our character creator fit into?
  5. What do non-binary and transgender people think about character creation in games?

Our Team

Name: Yukti Gupte

Pronouns: she/her

Portfolio: https://yuktigupte.wixsite.com/website/demo-reel

Email: yuktigupte@gmail.com

Name: Sandra Xintong Liu

Pronouns: she/her

Portfolio: https://xintong1807.wixsite.com/myportfolio

Email: xintong4@andrew.cmu.edu

Close-up, abstract view of architecture.

Name: Justin Yook

Pronouns:

Portfolio:

Email: jyook@andrew.cmu.edu

Name: Luka Liu

Pronouns: he/him

Portfolio:lvh1928.wixsite.com/website

Name: Qisheng Chen

Pronouns: he/him

Portfolio: https://qishengc.artstation.com/

Email: qishengc@andrew.cmu.edu

Name: Em Tyminski

Pronouns: she/her

Portfolio: https://emilytyminski.wixsite.com/portfolio

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/em-tyminski-a08a0422b/

Email: etyminsk@andrew.cmu.edu