Good day everyone! This is the first official Slime Crime devlog, recording our progress, problems, thoughts and more over the past few weeks. The first two cover a 2 week long period - Named a Sprint as part of the agile method we use to work - But will be weekly in the future.

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Sprint 1 - Devlog - 21st September to 2nd October 2020

Progress:

Sprint 1 marks the beginning of our projects pre-production period, a very important stage for prototyping and concepting. Our team had a very strong start to begin, with the aim of achieving a playable prototype showcasing the core game ahead of a critique session with another student team half way through the next sprint (October 9th).

Reaching the end of this sprint and with a week to go -  Jake has been hard at work steadily implementing features. The main focus has been around the recipe system, where players will have to memorise the pattern of preparation needed to make a melody of 21 different drinks. This naturally requires quite a lot of depth and an effective system to simulate.

Moving to the art team, they have also been hard at work piecing together concept art, models and more to take part in future prototypes and builds. Jemma has been concepting the café scene itself - where the bulk of the time will be spent as a player.

The player will spend a bulk of their time here - With the "shift phase" making up over half the gameplay. Here customers will enter the café and request drinks that will be prepared in the melody of machines available to the player. From a large list of recipes, customers may also request additional extras to keep you on your toes! Ensuring the aesthetic of the café and its models is coherent among artists is very important, so concept art is a critical stage in this.

On the topic of ensuring artistic coherency, both Sapphire and Kathryn have been working tirelessly to create a clear and consistent art style for customers, UI and the world as a whole. Cooperating, they have been building a detailed bible and style guide to help keep the games visual style as consistent as possible even amongst multiple artists. Their main focus has been the customers themselves - using this style guide to dedicate resources more efficiently to character production in the future.

Looking to other departments - In design Warren has been piecing together a wide variety of things, ranging from gameplay layouts, minigames, marketing goals and more. Building on a wide pool of research and creating clear, concise diagrams of his findings will help inform the teams decisions as a whole as we progress through development. These might include things such as character personas, marketing budgets, writing styles used to communicate within a team etc. All of this material is not only helpful to the team as a whole, but will also give us a nice advantage in presenting our concept to the other team in sprint 2.

Over in writing, Myself and Kim have been at the world forge creating and expanding upon the universe Slime Café exists within, the dangers that exist and the way society has shifted as a whole with magical beasties roaming through the wilds. My main focus has been documenting these discussions and ideas - Using a tool named Tiddlywiki to create a clear and accessible internal wiki that can be referenced by anyone in the team.

Much of this sprint has been setting up Tiddlywiki, learning how it functions and establishing the basics of the world within it. Kim however has been focused on expanding the worlds lore and the characters within it - and that isn't just kept to the important ones the player interacts with on a deep level. Kim has been developing the voices of the many different customers that might come through your door.

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Difficulties:

As with any development process, especially this early on, there has been a collection of issues.

One of the most notable issues we faced was near the end of the sprint - It became very apparent in a routine discussion that some team members had very different ideas about a core gameplay feature. There was no serious problem caused from this, but it could have quickly grown into one due to a simple difference in visualisation as to how drink making itself would work.

This would have caused massive issues further down the line, causing lots of rewriting and re-planning so catching it this soon was very helpful. The issue was simple to resolve as well, Jemma as the vision holder of the project and Warren as the lead designer both went away and designed their own understandings of the systems and put them in easy to read diagrams. Bringing these to the next morning meeting, both were presented to the team as a whole and we discussed pros, cons and more. Eventually, the two systems were combined and a master diagram was produced to make the gameplay simple and apparent to the whole team.

In only one hour we had gone from a potential development disaster to a clear view of the gameplay loop - With the whole team communicating and being honest about their achievements and abilities, a resolution was easy to find.

With a clear design in mind, development could continue with ease.

Other minor issues also occurred over this sprint, largely due to the ongoing pandemic, personal health and more. But none of these had a major impact.

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That wraps up our first Devlog of this project - Everyone here at Slime Crime remains dedicated to this project and we are eager to see what the next sprint and the rest of the year will bring! With so much going on in the world - Stay safe out there.

Till next time!

- Dan Baker: Producer, Supporting Writer and Scrum master for Slime Crime