Eggs With Legs Sprint 0 & 1 Reflection

This is going to be the first of my weekly reflections on how each sprint goes for my new team this semester, Eggs With Legs. This first week was mostly setup and coming up with ideas, although I did help my co-designer work on mechanics for one of the ideas that we thought we were going to go forwards with, although we did misread exactly what we were supposed to do, which I’ll discuss in a bit.

The first thing we did was we all picked ideas that we came up with over the summer and expanded on them to see which ones we liked the most and had the most ideas for. We wanted to get a better idea for all of the ideas we had that we liked before we just threw them out. Then we all actually decided to figure out what genre we wanted to work on, as we felt that it would help us narrow down which ideas we wanted to do. In the end, we decided that we were all interested in working on some kind of Rougelike, which I think will be very fun to work on and design levels for. We all listed what we were interested in doing, for example I wanted to work on character action, sandbox, exploration, and rougelike games. We all did this, and when we tallied everything up we saw that most people wanted to work on a rougelike, which was great because I wanted to do that too. We then started building off of an idea that Max, the other designer, had already come up with about a post-apocalyptic library that the characters had to search through to find information to save themselves. However, this is where the misreading came into play. We thought we had to come up with three different systems for this game, and prototype them on Sprint 2, but we actually needed three game concepts with different prototypes. Luckily, we already had a lot of that done since we had already built out the ideas for the other games before focusing on the rougelike. One of the other game concepts that we didn’t originally choose was a game about controlling time and time dilation stuff, which I was super excited for, but we didn’t end up picking it because more people were interested in the rougelike. Now, I’m going to be making a prototype for it for this class, and then I’m going to use that mechanics prototype and work on levels for it for my Level Design 2 class, so it’ll save me some time making a whole new game for that class, too. I’m excited to work on it as well, as I’ll be working in Unreal for it, even though we had originally discussed working in Unity. I really wanted to work in Unreal so that I can learn how to use it for level design, but the rest of my team wanted to stick to Unity since we already all knew it better. I cleared it with my team, and since we aren’t likely to continue with this idea after the prototype, they’re fine with me making it in Unreal. Our final idea that we’re working on is a Shop Simulator/Boss Rush/shoot-em-up/something or other junkyard robot building game that Max is going to be working on the prototype for. I’m excited to see a bit more of it, as well. These were all ideas that we had originally cut due to the fact that we were all collectively more excited to work on a rougelike, but I’m happy that these other two will see the light of day, at least somewhat, and have prototypes of them.