Alternalien Development Part 3: Market Value

We did an exercise today where we came up with all the possible features that would go into this game.  It was everything from the high concept of platforming to a single floor tile.  We were then given Monopoly money to assign what each of us thought the value of that feature was.  The highest was the concept of movement as a basic need with a score of 3161.

After we returned from that, we immediately got into planning for the first sprint with three teams.  Two were designing two arctic levels, while my team was completely animating the Crusher.  Our first sprint begins next week.

Alternalien Development Part 2: The Cave continued

After sleeping on the problem of huge, detailed matte backgrounds.  I came up with a solution that I brought to the PO.  Instead of using painting for the backgrounds, I suggested we use tiled backgrounds.  This is one I made for the Base levels.

This is much better for a few reasons.  It allows for a lot more variety, instead of relying of the artists to take hours to make three or four backgrounds, the designers can make their own custom backgrounds.  Plus, it stylistically fits in with the art style; simple and minimilistic.  The PO liked this idea and has now tasked the art team with making tilesets for all four biomes.

Alternalien Development Part 1: Jump Free

We continued to plan for Sprint 1 by doing planning poker.  Planning poker is an agile technique that uses numbers in the Fibonacci sequence to give effort scores to various features.  Being the Art Lead, I put all the various sprite an backgrounds and we voted on their values.  Usually, floor tiles take the least amount of effort, while characters and backgrounds take significantly more.

These are some example character sprites that took around 30 min - 1 hour work.  They may not look like much, but most of the work went into tweaking them just right.