Here we go again! This semester feels very different in a lot of ways. For one thing, I’m not in charge anymore, which is honestly great. There’s a lot less pressure for larger-scale changes on the game, which means I can really focus on the pieces that I’m making. There’s just less pressure in general in that it’s not “my/our baby” anymore, it’s someone else with a pretty clear vision. If I have questions about whether what I’m doing fits that vision, I don’t have to do soul searching about the nature of the project, I just have to ask the person whose job that is whether it fits. It’s a lot more specific, and closer what I think it’ll feel like at a real studio. The challenges of covering all the bases with not enough people are gone, replaced by the challenges of making sure everyone’s on the same page with the content they’re building. Meetings are gonna become a lot more essential, and probably a lot more interesting too.

I’m excited to see how this game shapes up. I really enjoy playing it, and I think designing for a platformer, especially something like this, is going to be a lot of fun. I haven’t had the chance to work on something this simple since freshman year, and just getting the chance to make content and really polish it as far as I can go is going to feel really good. There’s always the plan to have a week or so for “polish” at the end of a project, and I’ve just really never had that. I do enjoy spending time tweaking tiny things to make sure they’re perfect, and this really seems like a project where I’ll have time to do it. I’ve also dipped my toe into narrative stuff before, but never really come to a polished state with any of it where I would really be comfortable showing it off. This really seems like something that fits my writing style well. There’s always a lot of weird pressure when the requirement is to be funny. I think most of these are self-contained though, and a lot of my humor is off the cuff one liners, so I’m hoping it’ll work well.

This week is pretty much just getting myself acquainted with the project. Any work I’m doing will mostly be just to get myself into good patterns and habits for when I really start getting into a full schedule, and for the most part I’m just reading old documents, messing around with the project and the repository and having concept meetings to start tossing ideas around. I’m also meeting with the old sound designer, as I’ve got another sound class that will let me make content for this in it, and as such we’ll be splitting duties for this semester. It’s a very different game to build sounds for, as I have a much more solid basis for what everything should sound like, both in that I am working with other people’s vision, and the actions that need sounds are more rooted in conventional sounds I’ve heard. Overall, this project seems like it’s just going to be so much easier, and I’m excited to join a project that’s already this solid.