Hi, my name is Jan and in this series of dev logs I will be going through the process of developing a indie game with a team. These posts are going to be released weekly and they will showcase what me and my team did the past week.

During the first week we separated our team into 4 groups, Design, Programming, Art and Music and two leads. The leads work with each of the groups and tell them what to do for the next week and I was assigned to be one of the leads.  During the first day we also created a Miro board to share our ideas with the team.

On this Mira board we started to brainstorm what kind of game we wanted to make and in the end we decided on an 2D survival horror side scroller where your main objective is to escape from a Psych ward.

That's everything we did on the first day and we where given things to do for the next time we meet, me and a few others were assigned to create puzzle ideas for the game, here's what I came up with:

My Puzzle idea was to be able to move furniture around in some of the rooms so that the player can access and climb into the vents, I felt like this was a realistic way of trying to escape an psych ward instead of just going around the building picking up keys and flipping switches. The reason why I have a picture of the board game Rush hour is because that's how I wanted the puzzle to get the furniture to work, the player would have to move boxes and obstacles that are in front of the furniture so that they can access it and move it to the vent. I thought this also made the main character seem intelligent which added to the plausibility of him escaping.

When we next met up we presented our ideas to each other and received feedback. We scaled back my puzzle idea to just being able to access the vents at all times because recreating a puzzle similar to rush hour would just not be plausible with the perspective we are creating the game in. The pushing mechanic was also been kept, this feature will allow the player to move boxes around to solve puzzles and hide from the guards with. While you're in the vents you will be solving puzzles in there and running away from enemies, the vents will also be used for moving between the different floors once you have reached them.

Earlier in the day we created a Trello Board where we can see what tasks are done and which ones are still needed to be done.

In this Trello board we gave the 4 teams (Plus a business one) different sections where they can see what their specific group has to do, in the first day we came up with over 100 tasks to do.

At the end of the day I filled out the Scrum sheet, this is a document that explains what each team member did for the past week, what they need to do for next week, the overall state of the game at the moment and what milestone we want to achieve next week. We decided we would have a playable movement demo and a layout of the first level with some UI designed ready for next week.

That was my first blog post for our indie game and thank you for reading!