First week of production

This week marks our first official week of development on Ascend! It's been a great productive week and I think we've made a good start. Everyone has come onto this project ready to work and with a dedicated attitude which is all I could ever ask for from my team.

Pre-production

Last Wednesday we started to tie up all of our pre-production work by creating a basic level blockout to start playtesting how the level feels in terms of scale and pacing and allowing us to have another chance to run through our ideas for mechanics. We also took a nice team trip to the Peak District to walk through wooded areas and gather reference - lots of weird and wonderful trees and rocks make for perfect reference!

Our own little Yggdrasil! 

Thanks to our two exploration greyboxed levels which we finished before the end of last week, we had a very strong starting point for the official development start date. Adam, being our animator, currently doesn't have animation work to do since we've only started working on final assets and characters, so he has been our game designer and has worked on our final level greybox. He's been working on it throughout the week and making smaller improvements, but this is the most valuable thing we have because it's playable and means we can get feedback, even though it is so early into development.

In regards to our art style, all the artists did an art test using the same tree asset to see whose technique we thought would be the most suitable for our production pipeline, which is vibrantly coloured stylised pieces, and also efficient in regards to production time per asset. I prefer this method of making key decisions because involving the whole team means that no one feels left behind or uninformed and it gives everyone an equal chance to bring new ideas to the table.

Work produced this week

Myself, Declan and Andrew have begun by working on the priority environment assets which need completing so that they can be incorporated into the level. We have a deadline for the first art pass to be completed by June 21^st, which is when we attend a Tranzfuser event and we want to be able to show our progression and receive as much feedback as possible. Declan, as our lead artist, finalised the visual style of Ascend before production and has created a production pipeline which all the environment artists have been following. 

Here are some of the assets we've been creating this week (note that these may change later in production):

Andrew Weir- tree

Andrew Weir- grass

Eleanor Cunningham- shrine

Eleanor Cunningham- rock

Declan Hart- Gate

Declan Hart- tree

Declan Hart- assorted rocks

Jord, our character artist, has been developing our main character's concept and with a result the whole team is happy with he's now onto developing a basemesh. Every asset we've made has been scaled to the character's height so that we don't need to make any edits within engine which will help with time efficiency. This week he's been getting the character to a point where she's quite similar to the concept so that our animator Adam can start experimenting with cloth animations.

Jordan Best- Warden concept

Jordan Best- Warden early blockout

Feedback and progression

A primary concern of ours right now is play testing and getting feedback from others. Adam has been working hard to produce a very early (pre-alpha early) playable version of our prototype with the basic mechanics working and a basic geometry visual layout very similar to how we want the final version to look. This has meant we can play our own game and give internal feedback to make small tweaks but also Friday night was our Games Design graduate show, so we were able to get both people we know and random strangers to play our game and give honest feedback. I found the most useful way of collecting information from playtesting is to observe first what the player does, taking note of how long it takes them to do tasks, what they generally seem more interested in (e.g. exploring vs speedrunning) and where they seem to get most confused. The information we've collected from this, while it's still early days, has definitely helped give us a direction in small changes we need to make for clarity.

This next week we're focusing on progression- artits will continue to tick off the list of key environment assets, Jord will continue working on Warden's basemesh, and Adam will now start having things to animate so he can start on that. The whole team will also work on developing the level prototype and making the changes needed based on player's feedback.

We're looking forward to the next week ahead!