Ok, so as you may have already discovered by ^ this line up here, my views on the current project are good thus far. Not only am I happy with the project and the criteria, this is the first group project I've managed to maintain my enthusiasm after receiving my group (No offence to any previous team mates! I just usually work better solo!). Right so now we have my initial reaction out of the way lets get to the real stuff.
The Project
As mentioned earlier the project is a team based collaboration between the designers and the artists. As the current ratio sways more in the favour of artists to designers, the teams are set as 2 artists per designer. The project itself is to create a single game level that includes narration/ general story telling, triggered events, and level creation. The idea is that the designer plans out the majority of the things whilst having the artists create assets for the map itself. This is how each of the individuals will be assessed and graded, so your grade is only as strong as your contribution; this I'm happy about from an individual perspective, however when I play properly, I play to win, and I'm a strong supporter in the idea that a team is only as strong as it's weakest link. That being said it's been a group decision that both artists also provide increased support in the designers work, even if it means we don't get credit in our individual criteria. I was a bit unsure at the beginning of the year which path I should choose, as I feel like my 'design' side is stronger than my art, so this gives me a chance to experience both which I'm more than happy about.
The Plan
So yesterday when we found out that our groups had been fixed, we got straight to it, and this is how we've decided to break up the work load:
Week 1 - Ideas generation, Research, Basis of our core idea. This will include all of our early ideas, and getting onto the same page as a group, so we're all aware of the direction we want to go. From previous experience this is usually the most underrated, yet most important part. As the days go on with little communication a team generally starts to go their own way with the story and the plot falls out of sync.
Week 1 - Ideas generation, Research, Basis of our core idea. This will include all of our early ideas, and getting onto the same page as a group, so we're all aware of the direction we want to go. From previous experience this is usually the most underrated, yet most important part. As the days go on with little communication a team generally starts to go their own way with the story and the plot falls out of sync.
Week 2 - Continued research & Pre-production. This is the time where we really want to make sure we have as much reference as possible before diving into map head first. This is also the time where as artists we should be throwing out some rough sketch ideas for what our assets are going to look like, whilst trying to keep in sync with the other artists style.
Week 3 - Production. This is where we really want to start working predominantly on our individual work for assessment purposes, yet maintain in and out of each others work, to ensure the group doesn't go its own ways.
I'm not going to bother put anything up for the following weeks for 2 reasons. First of all I've done it before and haven't strictly stuck to it! But the second and probably more important reason is that we don't really know how quick the group pace will be.
