Alejandro Gonzales CAGD portfolio

  Nepo Society Sprint 1  Entering Sprint 1 as the lead designer role for the first time was a bigger challenge than I thought. Having the vision of a game is a big difference then making a quick pitch for it. The game selected was an idea now needing a full breakdown of the game took lots of thinking and planning. The first sprint me and my team decided to focus on a paper prototype and planning it out helped for a basic outline for the design of the game. My job was to have a rulesheet to explain to all playtesters how the game is going to be but only on paper.  I tried to make it so everyone could understand, but that made the rulesheet have lots of words for the player to read. During playtests the players would get confused on some of the gameplay mechanics due to a hefty amount of rules. The vision that I had was to bring the mobile game aspect into life, but unfortunately it wasn’t possible and led to a somewhat failure when it came to playtesting. The positive thin...

Blog Postmortem In the development process of the prototype game Soar, I started looking at the document of the lead designer and started making user stories to assign tasks to group members. Once all tasks were assigned for the first ever sprint the group and I were ready to take on the challenge. The first task was the level design for me so I’ll check in with the lead designer to make sure that the level sees the vision that he was seeing. When completed the first time the lead designer wasn’t happy about it, so how it would be at an actual company the producer would see it and send the work back to me. I started working based on the idea of the lead of building the level off a cubes size in the world of unity. I completed levels 1-5 and met with the lead and he liked it way better than the first ever one. Me and the designer agreed to make the 5 levels into one making a map where players will enter different levels during gameplay all in one go. We decided this to make the gameplay...

  Sprint Kickoff 4 Starting off the fourth sprint and almost done polishing up the prototype I worked on a goal menu and a winning condition. The first playtest for our game soar players had questions on what some UI was and also the stormlight on the map. So with the problem of understanding some of the UI or in game objects I decided to help the player and add the goals menu.  In this menu I provided the stormlight meter at the top left. This was something where players were confused so I wrote what the purpose for it was, and also to let the players know that they need to pay attention to it. It was something to consider as the first thing to explain due to feedback, but also to have the player know it's important to glance at it during gameplay. The second thing was to let the player know that the stormlight is above the platforms when you fly during the level. Playtesters were also confused on what they did when you flew through and picked them up. I put a picture of what...

Soar Kickoff 3  Sprint review three starts off with me the producer assigning work for the team so we can go in knowing what to do. This sprint we needed to have a build for the class to playtest so we can get feedback and solve the problems that come. The first thing that I tackled was the enemy models, even though we didn’t need art the lead designer felt like the game needed color and character builds. The game has three enemies: the sitting still, the follower,  and a forward enemy. I took the role of taking on the sitting still enemy and the forward enemy and then passed the models to the lead designer to texture them. I followed the guide of what the characters are supposed to be referenced from as best as my ability. Both characters took me around an hour and a half to create, UV, and color Id. I made the weapon for the main character, it being a spear that they will have all game. At first it was going to be a sword from the first sprint, but later was changed for it b...

  Soar Kickoff 2 Kicking off sprint 2 I assigned the group the tasks that they needed to complete for the two weeks that we had. I assigned myself with the UI of handling the main menu, pause menu, and the game over screen. The first thing that I tackled was the main menu screen so when people get to playtest the game they will be greeted with a screen with the name of our game, and buttons to either play, go to controls, or to quit.   I wanted the main menu to have a background to be something close to our game's gameplay, so I chose the mountains with chasms. During gameplay the player will be flying through chasms being met with challenges and being able to fly above and enjoy the view of the sky. I provided the player the option to look at the controls to have a clue on how the player controls work before going straight into the game. I provided pictures for the player with text explaining what each button shown on screen does. After I got the main menu down, I went to the...

  Soar In the first kickoff of the game Soar didn't start off at the time that we wanted. We were delayed 4 days after kick off started. We created the github and unity project to have the official kickoff with all tasks assigned by me as the producer of the team. The first level that I created was without the guide of the lead designer, but he gave an idea on how he wanted it. I went into unity and tried creating the level, running into issues that the pieces were too big for the world and having the world lag due to there being too many big items, and it will bug out to the point delaying the making of the level. I showed the lead designer and he told me to switch it up due to it not being playable. The lead designer and I worked on the level but he gave me an example of building a level based on the height of a square. I made walls both being size 50 on the Y scale having it look like a massive wall but in game it looked perfect without being too tall or short.    Then...