This post was published 3 years 9 months 11 days ago and as such probably does not reflect my current opinions, knowledge or ability.This week I’m taking part in Next Level Dundee. Next Level is a digital media collaboration project, which basically means I’m meeting some new people and developing a game with them in a week. Scary idea.
We pitched our games to the other participants on Friday, having only just managed to meet up the morning beforehand. Luckily we’d managed to agree on a game design through online meetings on Skype, but there were elements that we didn’t fully decide upon until we met face to face.
This morning (early this morning) we got together in Whitespace to actually start work. The team is composed of two programmers, two artists and an audio producer, and while we have roles and some idea of what we each need to achieve it’s hard to know exactly what we will end up with until we get to know each other better.
Waj, the other coder, and I settled into development over the weekend before by developing a particle system manager and a flexible 2D game framework respectively (we, of course, couldn’t start work on the game until today). Luckily, we have XNA at our disposal which should make a big difference to what we can get through in the timespan. Today however, much of each our time was spent simply merging code: lacking an SVN client on the university computers we were attempting to simply use Dropbox. Scary, and time consuming. Hopefully tomorrow we can make use a portable command line SVN client to keep track of changes.
Another issue we’re facing is in terms of work distribution and each having our own coding standards. As you might imagine, most of the problem is with communication – to a small extent because we don’t know each other, but mostly because we barely had time to come up with a game idea, let alone come up with task lists and naming schemes. We’re working things out the best we can as we go along though.
So, hopefully on friday we’ll have a simple top-down 2D game to share! Wish us luck.