Capstone: Month 1 Week 2

Today marks the end of Week 2 of our Capstone project. Our team consists of myself, Krystara Savoy, and Brian Smith. This will be the first in a series of weekly posts on this project.

Game Background

We are making a Metroidvania FPS that was originally pitched by Krystara. Truthfully I have never played any Metroidvania game, FPS or otherwise. At Krystara’s reccomendation I did pick up Recore on Steam, but I haven’t had the time to try it out yet. From our team’s conversations, I do now have a general idea of what we’ll be making, but it’s still not exactly clear to me what the vision for the game is. However, Krystara seems content taking the (unofficial) role of ‘Lead Designer’ on the project. I am happy to give input where useful but I’m not a designer by any means.

What We Accomplished This Week

While we currently have no formal roles, I have somewhat taken the (once again, unofficial) mantle of ‘Lead Developer’, as I have the most experience with Unity and am confident in my coding skills. Thus, I fairly heavily focused on the technical aspects of the project as opposed to design or gameplay tasks.

Game Design Document

In the GDD, I created a few tables based on the ideas of my team, such as:

  • Controls list
  • Weapons list
  • Abilities list

However, due to everything I’ve mentioned so far, I primarily focused on the technical aspects in the GDD this week. Thus, the majority of my contribution to the GDD is the “Technical Design Overview” section. There, I wrote out many important plans for our project, such as:

  • Purpose for our GDD
  • GDD data organization
  • Asset checkout system
  • Code review plan
  • Integration plan
  • Rollback plan
  • Testing plan
  • Project folder hierarchy

Research

This week, we also created our Git repo. Before any work could start, we had to officially decide which engine version we were going with. I decided our best bet would be the latest stable Unity release, Unity 2021.3.0f1. The team agreed and we locked it in. After that, I created our initial Unity project in source control in preparation for coding to start. That being said, however, I decided my time would be best spent planning ahead in a personal ‘testing area’ project, rather than the real thing. I proceeded to spend a considerable amount of time tearing apart one of Unity’s demo FPS projects to see best practices for things we will need to implement ourselves. I feel like I have learned a good amount from this process and am ready to move forward and start developing the first prototype of the real thing.

Blog

As the final task for this week, we were assigned to create a blog (the very one you are reading now). Rather than using a simple one-click solution blogging platform, I decided to use this as an excuse to learn a new framework. This blog was created using the Node.js blogging framework Hexo with a custom modified version of the Fluid Theme. This is all hosted statically on Vercel. Hexo was fairly simply to learn, and allows me to write posts in Markdown language.