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For the first week, we grouped up and had a discussion on the kind of game we as a team would like to make and I first gathered a bunch of games as inspiration and made a few first draft mockup of the gameplay screen.

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Had a meeting to further flesh out the mechanics of the game pitch and decided upon the art direction and general moodboards of the game. I made another draft for the gameplay mockup, plus decide on the name All's Fair for the game.

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Assigned to our respective teams and did not manage to have All's Fair in the selection for further development :/

Decided to join Rune Run team and started brainstorming some concept art and designing the world the game would be in.

We had to brainstorm the narrative premise for the game to establish what kind of game we would like Rune Run to be. I collected some references of tactical games and also came up with a base story idea and build the world and everything around it.

Potential Story Idea:
You're the rock that held and safe guarded the Excalibur for centuries, suddenly some guy called King Arthur took it away from you without asking and now you are fighting against the Knights of the Round Table to get it back.

Bosses for each level would be the Knights of the Round Table, eg: Lancelot, Galahad, Gawain, Percival, etc.

The BBEG is Merlin, who destroyed all the rock people and stole their powers for himself.

Further Story Details: You're not actually a Rock person, you're just a piece of rock that gain sentience due to Excalibur's magic seeping into you for centuries, this explains why you can wield all kinds of magic

In the end: After getting Excalibur and sticking it back into your head, you go back to your little cave, settled into your little spot and go back to sleep for another few centuries... until some other King Arthur comes and disturbs you once again :'D

Character Art Direction
- Pixel art style with black outlines to distinguish them from the background and gives off a cartoony look
- Blocky stacked rocks would be cool concept for the main character

Main Character:
Rock with a slit on top of its head where Excalibur was suppose to be

Enemies:
Wooden-Puppet Knights

Potential World Setting:
Post apocalyptic world after Humans have destroyed themselves by their own power struggles and Nature / Sentient Wood People took over.

Environment Storytelling
- World is covered in mossy green plants and trees
- Trees grow from crushed rock to symbolized the Wood People taking over the Rock People
- Rock people reside in ruins of ancient Human buildings (because buildings are made of cement and rocks)

Environment Art Direction
- Main battlegrounds are floating islands
- Isometric, God view for the player camera
- Pixel art style seems the most fitting with the game genre
- Having elevation in the level would be nice, but to keep the scope down, just plain flat ground with buildings (like Metal Slug Tactics) works as well

Trees grow and absorbed the magic within rocks. Their canopies grew so large that they plunge the forest floor into perpetual shade, small gaps between them allow some light to shine through.

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Had multiple discussions within the art team on conceptualizing the assets for the Art Prototype. I also created a framework on photoshop and Unity for the isometric tile environment.

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Since scrapping everything, we started from scratch again for the art team. We held meetings and decided to establish an art bible since no one wanted to be an art director or didn't want to have an art director in the team. I made a preliminary agenda for the art bible meeting to keep everyone on track and keep the meeting productive by bringing up topics that we received during the playtest evening.

I did more character sketches and also made some suggestions before the meeting to help everyone have an easier time starting from somewhere with a simple question of what they'd like the art style to be and what they don't instead of asking for everyone to come up with their own art style.

More meetings were held and we finished the art bible by the end of the week and had a consultation with Florian (Art Professor). We continued to refine the art bible after the consultation and continue to add visual references towards it to really explain the look and feel we want to go for the game.

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This was the week for A MAZE (gaming convention in Berlin) and I was incredibly exhausted from volunteering and networking that not much work was done in this week :'D

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The entire team came together and held a 7 and a half hour meeting after class to fully establish the direction for the game with everyone as we realized each of us held different views. I kind of took it upon myself to be the note-taker of the entire conversation just so that we can keep everybody on track on what we had discussed and what we're currently discussing.

I took it upon myself to write down and illustrate all the discussion the team has done on whiteboards in the classrooms.

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This week was purely working to create the visual effects for the art prototype. I should've had a discussion with the design team on what spells are being created but they were also designing it at the same time and I thought it wasn't wise to do nothing and wait for the design team, so I basically went into creating VFX pretty much blindly and focused on creating distinct elemental spells.

I started out by planning on how I would like to approach the spellcasting and did a little sketch on how it should look.

The I decided that sketching wasn't really necessary and so I worked solely in Unity to create the effects.

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This week was a week of research on my end. I was introduced to FMOD, an audio middleware that has many functionality to implement SFX and Music in our game. I was interested in using this tool to help smooth the process of audio implementation.

After some research and looking into how its implemented, it felt a little too much for the current scope of the project. So we decided to scrape it and went to implement audio and sfx by triggering them through code.

I still tried my hand at implementing the sfx and music into the game with this program along with some custom scripts, but ultimately all of the work was scrapped.

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This week was a rush to get everything ready for the last playtest evening of the semester.

I continued refining on the visual effects and trying to solve issues of them not showing up within the scene when played.

I have to admit, there was a lot of wasted time here as I was mostly waiting for the design team to finish compiling their list of spells so I could create a visual category for all of them to reduce the amount of VFX needed for the game.

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Due to the team's complaints regarding the UI and how it does not reflect well upon the gameplay and how it is incredibly important to the experience of the game in itself. I decided to take it upon myself to completely redesign the main UI elements of the game and implement it all in the span of 1 day to make it in time for the playtest evening (11th June).

On hindsight, it wasn't an ideal situation as I really strained myself to finish it on time while also having to keep my share of the workload at the same time.

We had a meeting on Thursday (13th June) discussing the feedback we've all gotten from the playtest evening. It was generally well received from play testers and many liked the look of the game. There was a specific comment about how the game did not feel strategic to play, the lack of satisfaction to make strategic moves should have been a major flag. But due to it being mentioned by only two different people in the whole evening, it was not reviewed in the meeting.

I am not entirely certain if this was the right choice by the team but due to the time constraints, I guess it was the most feasible choice to make.

I made several options for the UI and the team voted on the bottom right and that was ultimately implemented into the game.

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The week started off with me being sick and unable to attend Monday's class.

I proceeded to add more visual effects to the game as there were new spells that didn't quite fit the existing roster of effects and also took some suggestions from the team about having an effect for the Player's board corruption.

All in all I made a total of 24 visual effects assets for the game and I'm rather fond of the results I managed to achieve throughout the process of this game's development.

I've also made decorated our game's itch.io page as well as some banners to visually promote the story of the game. I was inspired by the banners games have on their Steam pages and thought it would be nice to have it for our game.

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In this semester, I started out with a clear goal in mind regarding the role I would like to be assigned as and the task I would like to take on, and I think I managed to accomplish it fully in this particular course.

I started out with a goal to be a Technical Artist, mainly working with shaders, materials and visual effects. Though the start of the course was rather rocky, as the team had only one coder, I had to take on the role of implementation for the art prototype to lessen his burden. There was not enough time to really dive into the visual effects of the game as its usually a kind of "juice" reserved to the polishing phase of development.

I think from the start of the 2nd prototype development till the end, I was able to fully focused on my desired role and tasks and I personally enjoyed it very much. Audio/ SFX design and implementation was also an interesting discovery I never thought I'd dabble in at the start of the project, but I did enjoy learning FMOD and its implementation in Unity even though it was never used in the end.

I've also surprised myself by making decisions where I refrain from straining beyond my limit to deliver/ fulfill tasks. There was only one particular incident where I went against my better judgement, which was the task to create, design and implement a completely new UI board for the game in a span of one day. It felt necessary at the time, but I have become more aware that I should curb this bad habit and after looking back at previous projects, I think I'm heading in the right direction (hopefully :'D)

There were many pitfalls throughout the development process of this project. On hindsight, it is inevitable for such a large team to encounter communication issues when working alongside each other. I think the whole team is mature enough to not let disagreements get in the way of developing the game, but I would be lying if I were to say that the tension caused from those arguments doesn't sour the team's spirit and make working together much harder than it initially was.

I fortunately wasn't directly involved in any particular disputes that happened in the team and mostly rescinded myself to watching it explode on the sidelines. I do have some regrets in not personally stepping in to quell the flames or bring this up towards the attention of the lecturers, but I guess the fear of making things worse and not feeling comfortable discussing about a team mate in a negative light stopped me in my tracks.

Despite everything that has happened, the team managed to pull through in the end with game that is received moderately well by playtesters. I do believe the good and the bad are all necessary experiences to go through and can be learned from to do better next time and I have definitely learned quite a number of things, not just about myself but also about working with a bigger group of people and knowing how to communicate with one another in a more effective manner.