Weekly Sneak Peek - Week 25 (Patreon)

Since most of the week was focused on design sessions I thought it would be a fun change of pace to take you behind the scenes and show a bit of how we run things here in our little studio! ^w^

Physical Workspace

This is my desk, littered with sticky notes that we pushed around on the whiteboard to try out different designs for movement and combat as described in the companion roundup! And yes, I use an old shoe box as my tablet stand!

This is Null's initial brainstorming for currency name ideas. We have figured out currency and how it fits into the world we are building now, but he thought there are some cute and silly ideas on there that he wanted to share. His favorite being just "Moo-lah". And the bank's mascot would have been a cow!

Some notes on how swimming might work. We had a bunch of different ideas for swimming, but in the end, we decided to tone it down and make it a more puzzly part of the game. So there won't be any or  much upgrades for underwater stuff.

This is a pretty recent brainstorming on the notable village NPCs.

This is a photo of Tuesday's session where we overlayed the ability progression we came up with, with the story flow and big picture world design. I censored some cut ideas and major story spoilers. ^w^

What's going on here...

Digital Workspace

To stay organized we use an app called Dynalist internally. It's basically an outliner that can accomodate any kind of task or workflow that revolves around list making. Null prefers it over Trello and some other things he tried. It is a bit like a mindmap that flows from top to bottom!

This is our design doc which is set up a bit like a kanban board. Fresh ideas are dropped into the top Inbox. We regularly review any ideas we dropped here and either delete them or push them towards more formulated designs. A lot of these have companion folders in Dropbox because that's where Dynalist is weak unfortunately. Open Questions get discussed and added to until we either cut them or flesh them out. Once we feel an idea is solid and has found it's place in the game, it is moved to "Final Design", which is basically what you'd call a traditional design document. From there we plan what art and code needs to be made and add those to our task lists.

This is Null's document that he mostly uses for coding. At the top he has an outline for the rough development plan, a backlog where bug reports, features, improvements and fixes go, followed by a build roadmap and the rest is your standard Kanban setup!

That's it for this week! Next week will be more art heavy again, but we really needed to put our heads together to update the direction of the development!

Cheers,
Cookie&Null