Bomboy - Dev Team Weekly Update 2/5

Every meeting my team has, we type a basic outline of what we discussed. Our topic of discussion involves going over what we accomplished the past week and then we usually delve into game concept and story. Here's the notes I made this meeting and I will elaborate after:

• FINN - Storyboard for Title (In Project Workbook).
• SKYLAR - SLACKER. Jk.
• AUDREY - Knight Animations (Found in Discord). Still in progress.
• ANTHONY & DAVID - Level Design (Found in Trello).
• Lots of metaphors and multiple concepts.
• In all: the Knight dies and the sword itself frees the Princess.
• Issue: Knight dies before supposed to (lots of health?? = symbol?)
• Ridiculous Health Bar
• Armor disappears from damage. Really not as powerful as thought. Dies.
• At the end of the level, knight has no armor and therefore dies really quickly from boss.
• Intro: Memes.
• CHARACTER TRAIT: Princess never picks up armor because she doesn’t need it and tosses it aside.
• Have Princess learn a ranged attack. Meets Wizard and learns fireball spell.
• EVERYONE GET Game Maker version 1.4.1763
• Level Flow: First part of game should just be inside the castle; there should be a boss before she leaves. Knight chasing her to get honor of saving her? 
• Princess needs to save childhood friend whom is stuck in another castle
• We should write the story first

As you can see, we discussed everyone's accomplishments, where they could be found, and some notes on how they got to their conclusion and other people's comments on how to fix it/make it better. You can also see most of our discussion this time revolved around the level design. This is because we do not have a fully written out story and we are trying to find the best story to create the best gameplay (long, fun, and makes sense). We threw around a bunch of ideas and basically concluded that before we can really make any gameplay, we need to finish the story so we have a direction. However, this time we could not finish the story because two of our members were not at the meeting. Below I am going to post pictures of everyone's development (except mine because I'm about to go change stuff anyway, just know I made three knight sprites):

This is the storyboard Finn worked on for the intro screen. There is going to be an animation where the title appears incorrectly, so the Princess leaps up and slashes the wrong part away to reveal the real title of the game and then the options. We are in discussion on how we are going to make the animation and who.

And here is just one of the concept level design docs Anthony and David made. I am not posting the others because they are really repetitive. This is basically depicting how the game is just going to start as the player being a Knight in the last main boss battle, which is unusual because this is the start of the game. They are almost going to defeat the boss when they die, and their sword flies down and frees the Princess. Suddenly, the player is now controlling the Princess and the player realizes all of the previous gameplay was a metaphor and they must now escape as the Princess. We ran into some changes during the discussion and Skylar this week is going to make a real layout with the actual environment sprites.

Our audio guy was not at the meeting and therefore did not give us his 8 bit music he is working on.

In all, we discovered that while we are doing important work currently, we need to discuss and finish the story with the group first before we are going to get anywhere productive with the game.