Pre-Sprint 1

What

Right before our first Sprint week, my group and I sat down and discussed how we wanted the game to be like. We already had a starting point: a well written concept document and a one page design that described in detail how the group that created it envisioned the final game.

We decided to keep the main key points of the game intact and start working on the game as soon as possible, as we didn’t want to change too much and instead tried to focus on what we already had and how to make it work. At the same time, this would leave us leeway to tweak some game aspects or fix possible issues later on without having to rush the development process. The first game aspect we discussed together was the visuals, how we wanted our game to look like and how we wanted to convey the game’s aesthetics.

How

In order to do so, we analysed the original concept document and agreed that a dark eerie color scheme would work well with the game’s theme: a boy falling through one of his nightmares and fighting his fears. In addition, we decided that a visual guide and color palettes would help us be on the same page in terms of envisioning the end game style.

Another important thing for us was being able to convey the sense of falling to the player, which we thought would be best explained through a parallax scrolling background and character animation.

Why

The main reason why we sat down and discussed the visual style early on, is because we all implicitly agreed that both aesthetics and visual style were the original concept’s strengths. We all recognized how important it was to convey exactly what the concept was (and still is) about, how the story behind the character’s nightmare affects the player and how the player is more likely to perceive the gameplay. In order to convey these feelings, it was important for us to envision how eerie the background, enemies and the player would look like, thus being able to evoke them in the player as soon as we had something testable.

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