Devlog 04

This past week my team has been working towards finishing up our GDD, making our Creative Brief, and putting together our presentation.  I think we may have underestimated how much work we had to do coming out of Design Week and perhaps should have pushed for a meeting sooner.  What I thought was going to be a four hour meeting, tops, ended up taking all day.

As we were adding and revising the GDD, many questions and misunderstandings came up.  We discussed a lot about our resource bars, what each one should do when they run out, and how they should interact with one another.  A point was made about the hunger bar and how it should represent a kind of health bar because we did not have an actual one.  The reasoning was that often in games, players consume food to restore their health bar when there is no separate hunger bar.  The other side of this was that we would lose some realism, as we are making a serious game and it would be more realistic if the thirst bar were to kill the player before the hunger bar would.  We ended up making a compromise where if the thirst bar reaches zero, that it would make the hunger bar deplete faster.  This way we keep the association that players would have learned from other games and have it be a little more realistic in that being incredibly dehydrated will kill the player.

What I learned from this experience was to give extra time for the group to work, where possible, even if we may not need it.  That way if unexpected questions pop up we have enough time to deal with them and don't have to exhaust ourselves by working a full day; we would have the ability to break it up.