First of all, apologies for the short and unplanned hiatus from these DevLogs, and I hope you didn’t miss your Wrestling Forever updates. Hopefully these will be back to their regularly scheduled programming from now on.  

            This week we are going to have a more general look at the process of making the game, rather than the in depth peeks into the process we’ve had previously.  

            There are a lot of moving parts when it comes to making a game, it is in no small way a miracle that any games ever gat made after all! One of the hardest parts of working on a project of this size and duration is making sure the whole team know what they are working on from week to week. After some discussion and trial and error myself and the team settled on using a Trello Board to keep ourselves up to date with what tasks we are planning to complete in sprints. This had two main bonuses, I one being that we could see a list of everything each of us had to be on top of and two, we didn’t have to chase each other around to see what we each were up to. A true win win if you ask me. However Trello does fall short in that it doesn’t provide an adequate messaging system, for that we turns to the Gamers choice, Discord.

            For us, choosing discord as our go to for messaging, sending work, updates and calls was a no brainier. We are all familiar with he software as we had used it for previous projects, it also allows relatively painless file sharing so nothing gets lost in emails and shared drives. Discord also has another major advantage, channels and threads. By separating out our main sever into smaller sections and using threads to keep specific topics linked we are able to have an easy to navigate and understand messaging system, with everything clearly laid out for future reference, perfect for when we need to double check how we agreed to integrate our different parts of the development process. 

            The main thing about the production side of games design however is communication. Without clear communication and the team as a hwoile being able to challenge each other’s ideas none of the stuff mentioned above would matter. For a team to work they need to be able to talk freely and not worry about making mistakes. As such when starting this project we were sure to set out expectations for each other so we all knew where we stood. This has been invaluable for the entire development process so far.

              Anyway, that’s it for another week, please let me know below if there’s a specific are of the design and development process that you’d like to know more about!