Hey! Hi! Hello! I’m Jeffrey and this is my first blog post going into Production II. We only had a one week sprint this time so our work was heavily focused on producing a basic vertical slice of what our game would look like if given more production time.

This has certainly been an interesting sprint though. We start off with a team of:
1 Producer

2 Game Artists

5 Designers (including myself)

Having no dedicated programmers was definitely something I wasn’t expecting to be an issue, but we work with what we have in life.

Speaking of, this whole summer semester will be an interesting experience. During this production class, we will be working with the same group of people the entire time without switching up teams because this is all of the people in the course. It’s like we’re our own little studio!

On a more serious note though, this allows for some really solid opportunities. Before now, I’ve never really been in a position of leadership for Design things so being placed as the Product Owner was a really interesting experience for me. I was in charge of deciding and finalizing many aspects of the prototype that we went with, as well as making sure that everything was done to a certain degree of quality.

The prototype that we dedicated this week to was called Cognitive Cop, an investigative mystery game that takes place inside the minds of criminals.

In addition to my responsibilities as the Product Owner, I also acted as the general UI Designer for the game. We decided that the main area that would be represented in our prototype would be a disco club so I used that as a big inspiration for the general aesthetic style of the UI.

I’ve always liked working with Photoshop to make fun things and I consider it to be one of my strongest points as a Designer, I’m really glad that this project allowed me to work with an aesthetic I really enjoy too.

Of course, this semester for me is about trying out things that I’m not necessarily great at and improving on them. I think one of the main things I want to work on is Narrative design. I’ve always loved the idea of crafting emotional stories and compelling characters, but I haven’t had a huge amount of opportunities to actually practice it.

I plan to go about this not only through the projects within the course material, but also on a personal project that I will be starting development on. I believe my success in both this course and improving my personal design skills lie in balancing my time between both projects.

I’m looking forward to this Summer as a way to really expand my horizons and improve on my ability as a Game Designer!