The NeighbourWoods Production Week 1

This week the main goal was to reassess our project, cut some content and update our plan.

In a way it feels like a big step back but it's very necessary. We did a pretty decent job of planning, last trimester but some things needed to be improved or altered and without a proper foundation(plan) a project is a lot harder to raise off the ground. So I'm glad we're taking the time to get a proper, updated plan in place.

I’m not so glad about cutting some of the content, though some of the content cut should have been cut even if we didn’t have to limit the contents of our project to what is feasible to us as they were either lacking or not that well thought out.

I updated our Flowchart after me and Issie decided upon what need to be cut and ultimately we decided on limiting the game to a snapshot of the intro, day 1 and day 2. In the beginning I was kinda upset with this but the more I’ve thought about the more I’ve accepted it.

Our cut-down Flowchart, the black line is the current end

I also worked on setting up and sorting out the asset list for our project.  I feel like I’ve set up a pretty good system that should work well for the duration the project but there are some things that still need to be refined and some discussions need to be had about what is needed for each asset. For Example not all assets need rigs and animations but with some assets it’s a bit unclear like trees and the leaves. So discussions and probably some research are needed to clear that up.

Our asset list

For the main flowchart of the story we used draw.io which is great because we can work on it at the same time (it’s integrated into google drive) and it has quite a few useful tools. However we decided that it wouldn’t quite be viable for writing out the dialogue; mostly because our overview flowchart is huge and it’s just an overview. Twine is what was chosen for writing out the dialogue. It’s just a bit better for in depth writing and just having more writing in general as it is built for interactive, non-linear stories, which is more in-line with dialogue trees.

I’m still getting used to Twine so just figuring how it works was what I mainly working on than actually writing the dialogue as I didn’t want to write any dialogue for it to then get cut. I did add in a skeleton structure of the intro/first day though.

So that’s what I worked on.