Izaka's Devlog 1 - Preproduction

Hello!

This is Izaka (aka Aunonna): Art Lead, Game Designer, and Main Editor for Team Dopamine. Welcome to my first individual development log! Today I’ll be sharing the progress & contributions I made over the past month for our game, Project Dopamine (working title). 

[ This is a post I should have probably made before, so there will be a second post today to catch up to the current game state ^^ ]

Prototypes

On the first week of development, we decided to have everyone flesh out different parts of the game idea in rapid prototypes. I made a ~20 slide storyboard to show how our game could work at the most basic level. The purpose of these prototypes was to make sure all our team members were generally on the same page on what our game really was, since talking about it is different from seeing a visualization of someone’s ideas.  

I won’t go too into detail on my prototype since it’s pretty long, but the highlights are as follows: 

• A login screen (start screen) visual, which we could base our main menu and pause screen on

• Ideas for icons and layout of main computer screen

• Idea for how we could tell players their objective at the start (to do their essay) 

• Visualization of essay writing application (basically just the windows XP word app, but we can simplify it) 

• Idea for checkpoints in essay that tell you/force you to take a break as a reward for reaching a certain word count/area in the essay 

• Chatroom concept (based on old MSN, but simpler + with dialogue options. This opens if you open the chatroom app, or open a popup.) 

• Very basic ending screen concepts 

Above: Login (start) screen (first) and main screen/desktop (second). 

Above: Reminder notification idea (first) and essay app + chat popup concept (second). 

Above: Essay checkpoint concept (first) and chatroom concept (second). 

Above: End screen concepts (only based on essay completion as of making it). 

After some team discussion on everyone’s prototypes, we were able to narrow down the main features we wanted to explore in our vertical slice. We also began working on putting our main tasks in a Trello board. 

Concept Art

After working those out, my task for this week was to make concept art for various future assets (drawn this time, instead of photo-bashed). This task was also assigned to my fellow Art Lead, Caitlin, so that we could reconvene afterwards and discuss. The idea was to do this so we could figure out each other's styles, strengths, and finalize who was doing what in the future for our game. Here’s what I came up with: 

• Background Wallpaper Concepts 

• Icon Concepts: OS Logo, Essay (Word), Snake, Picture Folder, Folder, Messages, Clock, Settings 

• Message system layout (from last week’s prototype) 

• Login screen design (from last week’s prototype) 

Here are some of the wallpaper concepts I made:

Above: Detailed wallpaper (based on the Frutiger Aero aesthetic.) I love dolphins!

Above: the rest of the background wallpaper concepts. These are simpler because I actually focused more on the "concept" instead of the "art" this time... And they're obviously not final yet.  

Hopefully we can figure out our visual identity by discussing these and Caitlin’s concept art. I’m looking forward to seeing what we end up doing in the near future! Thank you for reading. :)