Today is our first meeting of the Winter Quarter! Because of that, we have a lot of announcements for you regarding the upcoming quarter and some fun events! Let’s start of with some announcements!
Department Meeting Times!
New quarter means new timings for all our departments! Below are all the meeting times for our departments.
Art meets on Mondays from 1:30pm – 2:30pm. This meeting will talk about Lineless Art: Raster and Vectors.
Design meets on Mondays from 3:30pm – 4:30pm. This meeting will be learning about Design Docs.
Production meets on Wednesdays from 1:15pm – 2:15pm. The goal of this meeting is to expand on the development plan and set up the GitHub Projects.
Programming meets on Saturdays from 1pm – 2pm. They will be covering Refactoring and Designer Friendly Scripts.
Sound meets on Tuesdays from 7:30pm – 8:30pm. This meeting will cover Style Guides and Music Research.
Writing meets on Wednesdays from 12:30pm – 1:30pm. This meeting will cover something epic 🙂.
PLEASE NOTE: Programming meetings do not start tomorrow, but instead next week on the 21st. Also, the Art and Design departments will not be meeting this coming Monday since it is a holiday! Finally, all meetings are remote EXCEPT Art, which meets at DARC 230 (this is the same place that we meet for our general meetings except one floor down).
Global Game Jam!
Global Game Jam is a game jam event that takes place throughout the globe in several different locations over the course of two days. For those who are not aware, a game jam is an event where a group of developers come together to make a game in a short amount of time. This event is 48 hours, from February 3rd to February 5th. GDA will be hosting UCSC’s part of the Global Game Jam! More information on this will come in following weeks, stay tuned for that!
Taco Cat Discord!
For those who didn’t know, Taco Cat won our vote for GDA’s Mock Studio game! It has been a while since Pitch Night, so if you want to refresh yourself on the specifics on the game here is a link to the game’s pitch slides, the game’s written pitch, and the game’s live pitch during pitch night! Since it is our Mock Studio game, we have a Discord for it to help facilitate development. Make sure to join here if you are interested! Speaking of Mock Studio…
Mock Studio Development!
Development is about to begin on our Mock Studio Game! Here’s an overview of our development plan!
Timeline
Our development will take place over eight sprints, which are groupings of two weeks that are focused on a particular goal or set of goals.
Winter Quarter
Sprint 1 takes place during weeks 2 and 3. The goal is the establish the core foundations of the game (more on that later)
Sprint 2 (weeks 4 and 5) is about the development of primary prototypes
Sprint 3 (weeks 6 and 7) is about developing the secondary prototypes, building off the feedback of last sprint.
Sprint 4 (weeks 8 and 9) is the last sprint of the quarter and is focused on creating a vertical slice, which essentially is the process of making a portion of the game where all the aspects of the game are at least partially integrated with each other.
Spring
Sprint 5 takes place during weeks 2 and 3 of Spring. At this point we work on refining the work from the last sprint, making new additions if needed. There also may be merch (stay tuned for that)!
Sprint 6 (weeks 4 and 5) is PLAYTEST HELL! As the name implies, we’ll be doing playtest on playtest on playtest. We’re getting close to the end of the dev cycle at this point so it’s important to get all this feedback for the final sprints.
Sprint 7 (weeks 6 and 7) is about polishing the final build, doing more playtesting, and doing some marketing for the game!
Sprint 8 (weeks 8 and 9) is all about prepping the game for the final games showcase, where you get to show off all of your hard work!
Sprint 1
Sprint 1 is coming up, so let’s go into more detail on what that entails. Our goal here is Core Foundation Ideation. The goal is to discuss ideas and lay the foundation for all the work we’ll be doing moving forward. Every general meeting, we’ll be discussing what tasks need to be picked up and brainstorming next steps to take. Most of the brainstorming happens in the first week of a given sprint. We do this to plan out the tasks for the rest of the spring. If your interested in taking on more of a leadership role, consider applying to be a department producer! As a department producer, you’ll help manage the progress of the departments as well as work with other department producers to facilitate tasks that work with multiple departments.
What Will Officers Be Doing?
So far we talked a lot about how these sprints will be going for you all, but you may be wondering how the officers will be involved with development. We will help lead discussions on the core foundations of the game, help assign tasks, provide advice on best practices, and help guide members on who to ask for a given task for help. In short, we will help guide development but will not as much of an active role. We will not do any tasks for you and will not make any major decisions without input from you all. Ultimately, this is your game and we want it to feel like that. That said, do not be afraid to reach out to officers for help. Speaking of officers…
New Officers!
We’ve recently added two new members to our officer core! Celine Lafosse will be joining as a new Writing Department officer, and Jane Grantham will be joining us as our new Mock Studio Coordinator!
Next Meeting
Next meeting is our annual Unity Night! For those who don’t know, Unity is a popular free to use game engine that we make our games with! Because of this, all departments will be working with Unity at some point during development. It is important for everyone to familiar with Unity’s basics, so next week’s meeting is all about getting familiar with Unity! It will be hybrid, hosted in person at DARC 308 and online on Zoom.
That’s it for this meeting! Feel free to refer to the meeting recording and the slides if you want to get all the details! See you next week!