Designer_Devlog_1

Hello, my name is Diego Grau and I am the Lead Designer for Crop Undercover. Our first sprint of development did not go as smoothly as it could have, as is typical with first sprints. It was a process to try to get the whole team on the same page and started on their work. With this many team members, we had to make sure that everyone knew what task they were working on and we had to take extra care to prioritize certain tasks first in order to avoid them blocking other developers down the line.

From a designers perspective, I believe the sprint was a decent success. Everyone on the team seems to have a grasp of my vision for the game and the general look that I am hoping for the game to have. I was able to get a design document shared with my team, as well as UI/UX wireframes and an asset list. Each of these items will help developers know more specific details about the things they need to create in hopes that everyone's work matches the same overall style and theme, as well as fulfilling the vision.

Overall I am very happy with the work my team completed this sprint, especially considering that it was our first one as a team. Our 2D artists submitted very nice concepts for character designs and environment work, which allowed our 3D modeling team to get straight to work on low poly versions of the models which in turn will allow animators to rig them and get to work on making their animations. Everyone is putting in good work, is easy to reach, and is willing to take the time to understand what is needed so that tasks are done properly. Our programmers were able to implement 4 person individual control and get the AI behaviors working and progressed.

One of the things that went well this sprint was keeping constant communication between the developers on what needed to be done and what was next. Everyone also did a great job maintaining the same theme and style in their work so it seems that everyone is grasping the vision I have for the game which is really great to see. Some of the difficulties we had this sprint were finding the right tasks for the animators to work on without characters to rig, and getting everyone's tasks assigned by order of importance. It was tricky to decide which tasks would be most vital toward getting our first prototype ready. There are so many different things that could be worked on that it was a difficult process to decide which ones are the most vital for our prototype. We also wanted our animators working on character movement and attack animations, but we quickly realized that they do not have proper character models to rig, so we had to find different tasks for them that were also important.

Overall I am very proud of my team and the work they did this sprint. For our first sprint as a team, it was good to see everyone communicating and reaching out whenever they had issues that needed solving. The work that was submitted was just what I was looking for and I am very happy with the teams cooperation throughout the chaos of the first sprint.