Week 6

So far, the group has updated sections of both design documents and continued with practising of Unreal Engine. However, we have decided that more practise is required before commencing with the development of the prototype.

We will maintain contact with each other as we practise using Unreal Engine, and continue with the prototype when we are able to do so.

Week 5

All members of the team agree that we had been relatively overambitious with the tasks that we set out for ourselves prior to our last meeting with the producer. We have successfully caught up with all unfinished work from last week and are making steady progress towards completing new work for this week.
With each of us having completed an Unreal Engine 4 tutorial, we are all ready to continue developing the game design and technical design documents.

Although it was only a small part of our schedule for the week that remained to be completed, our meeting with the producers made it clear that we must ensure that all work for each week is decided upon prior to that week’s meeting with the producers. After our last meeting, we immediately created our plans for the work to be done for this week, as this seemed to be the most urgent of tasks to be completed.

Two members of the group have made good progress with level design, having made storyboards and now moving on to documentation work. The other member has spent more time completing tutorials and using what he has learned to help with sections of the technical design document.

Week 3

Research

We realise that the level of research that we have done so far may be somewhat insufficient in completing some of this week's tasks within the allocated time frame. We have decided that our top priority for this week should be to improve the design documents. As a result, we may have to assign extra time after our next meeting to accommodate for this miscalculation.

We decided to play a lot of games in the ball roller genre as we thought that this would assist us in the creation of our competitor analysis. We also subsequently found that the more unique games that we played gave us inspiration for extra modes which we could potentially include in the later stages of the project, if time permits.

Design Documents

We also have come to realise that completion of the design documents will require a more extended period of time than we had originally anticipated. This is mainly due to us having developed our ideas for more complex game mechanics and level design, requiring a greater deal of elaboration within both design documents. By taking these things into account, and adapting our plan accordingly, we foresee no problems in completing tasks relating to either of the design documents.

Conclusions

Having played through a number of other games within the genre, and having briefly experimented with Unreal Engine 4, we have noticed that a possible issue which may occur during the game's development is that of game physics. The movement of the ball in UE4 feels very different to the way that the balls move in many of the other games that we have played. Due to our inexperience with UE4, and 3D environments/physics in general, we are unsure how much time and experimentation it will take for us to fine-tune the physics of our game to a satisfactory level.

Week 4

Some of our puzzle ideas were inspired from 2D games but designed to work in a 3D environment.

One such inspiration is Paganitzu. Paganitzu  is a tile based 2D puzzle game with a top-down perspective released in 1991.

The object of the game is to collect all the keys in a level to unlock the exit and try not to get killed by monsters and traps.

Rocks can be pushed around by the protagonist. Rocks pushed into water, lava or slime turn the spot into solid terrain.

We use the mechanic of the player being able to push objects around in our game and incorporate it into our puzzles.

We also incorporate geographical elements such as water and lava into our games puzzles.