Devlog #1: Getting back on track

Hello everybody, it's the Paper Park team here, and we've got some news to share with you! Starting today, we plan to have a devlog every other week, to keep you informed of our progress with the game. It's not only a tool to motivate fellow Gamedev Técnico members to join us but will also help us have a greater sense of progress and stay on track.

Our goal during these last two weeks was to prepare for regular updates, refocus, and look at our game's scope. A question we've heard about Paper Park is "how long do you intend to develop it for?". While we have various levels planned, the fact of the matter is there is no active development planned right now past the Fairy Glade level. As we are a project being developed inside a student association, with people who may leave and pursue a professional career, it's hard to even imagine what development might be past that. Because then it has to evolve from an effort from a handful of hobbyists working on their spare time to a bunch of people working on it full time to develop a real game (unless we want it to take 10 years). And who knows, that may happen, but for now, we'll reiterate: the current goal of Paper Park is to finish the Fairy Glade level. After that, we will evaluate our release options and whether to continue developing the game. That level is already a big chunk of content and a big challenge for a small team like ours, as well as a great portfolio piece. So to those who think we went a bit insane because we had 9 levels in our game design document: we're not insane, we're just dreamers who like to write down ideas.

As such, we are ditching our original milestones, which were not fit for a team as small as us, and pledging something more feasible: finishing the Fairy Glade by the end of 2023.

To do that, we're making several adjustments to our workflow. For starters, we created Epics in JIRA for just about everything we're doing next: working on Kiri, Kami, the UI, the Fairy Glade itself, as well as individual Tickets (the major collectibles) of our game. And we already filled a bunch of them with tasks we know for sure will be necessary, though we're sure more will be added in the future. We're gonna create tasks in advance and review everything frequently to ease our work. This helps us because we've been a bit focusless and sometimes it's been hard to decide what to do. Given our Epics are already sorted by priority, it becomes much easier every other week to just pick a high-priority task in the backlog and do that.

We're also resuming using story points, which we had carelessly abandoned after a hiatus we had, and we plan to be more strict on setting tasks in progress and done. This is so we can have a more accurate burndown chart, and so we can train ourselves at estimating our workload, which is very important given how busy some of us are.

Finally, we're gonna make even more efforts to expand our team from only 6 people. A lot of new people just joined Gamedev Técnico as newbies, so there are a lot of fresh faces. And even disregarding them, we've met someone who might be interested in being our level designer. We had presented during the January Monthly session, but to be perfectly honest, it did not have the turnout we were hoping for or inquiries about joining the project. Guess a lot of people are already busy with other long-term projects, so we hope the influx of newbies helps us. We're just a bit of a small team for what we're trying to accomplish, and we've been seriously considering changing the game from a very open to a more linear 3D Platformer if the team cannot be expanded. But we have faith.

So here's how we're breaking down our milestones:

1. May 31st: Core game and testing concepts (3.5 months)
   1. Finish animating Kiri and fix major bugs, to have a fully playable character
   2. Add Kami to the game
   3. Have at least 5 tickets prototyped, as in, playable but without final graphics
   4. Expand the team as much as possible
2. October 31st: All Fairy Glade content in the game (5 months) 
   1. Level playable from beginning to end without final graphics
   2. So, for each ticket, create concept art, prototype, and implement it in the map
   3. Add NPCs, even if they aren't modeled/drawn yet 
   4. Begin producing final assets
3. December 23rd: Final art and polish (2 months) 
   1. Switch all placeholder art with the final art
   2. Add lighting and particle effects
   3. Polish the game overall

We feel these milestones are attainable even with our small team IF we get a level designer. If we don't have one locked down by the end of March perhaps, we will seriously need to reconsider this project, as no one on the team is qualified or has the time/passion required to build a 3D world this big. We thought we did, but some of us had some, revelations, recently.

So what are we planning to do these next two weeks:

• Add more animations to Kiri (depending on our animator's workload)
• Create a logo for this page
• Overhaul the GDD with the new milestones and fix a few tiny problems for publishing
• Create a combat section of the GDD. Our combat is meant to be simple, but it still needs to be properly defined/explained, as well as define the enemy roster
• Start writing Kami dialogue

We'll see you two weeks from now to let you know how it went. This is the Paper Park Team, signing off!