Dev Log #1 Pre-Production - Brady Anderson

As a game designer for my team (Team Barracuda). My goal is to help with documentation and building tools in order to make certain aspects of our game fast, efficient and visually easy to identify. In terms of what I've been doing last week in terms of pre-production, I helped set up the jira board and provided a list of stories to fill out our backlog. 

When creating backlog items I tried to create as many as I could that would be relevant to designing the game, making sure I didn't miss anything. Then I populate it with child stories in order to fully understand the scale and what would need to be completed in order to complete those stories. Once our backlog was fully fleshed out and had all the relevant child stories every task. I helped come up with our first Sprint. I was tasked with creating and designing the game's quota system, making sure that we had efficient Tools in order to map out how the quota changes over time and what players would need to collect in order to meet quota.  

The image above showcases the tool I created in order to help manage the quota system. The leftmost column indicates  the day cycle, as a team we landed upon our game fitting within a 15 day cycle. The column next to that is the quota this indicates the quota the players need to hit on those respective days. I wanted these quotas to increase day after day making it so each quota is harder and harder to hit and players need to interact more with the growing and gene splicing mechanic in order to actually hit those quotas. As the first couple of quotas can be managed just by selling seeds that players find within the grass. 

The next thing I wanted to add was an increase from the last quota by percentage. This column indicates how much the quota went up compared to the previous day. This shows us how much the quota is increasing throughout each day, if there are days that need to be tweaked because the quota might be unmanageable or might be too low. This tool allows us to see and change how much the quota can change day by day in order to balance it with the rest of our economy. Adding indicator bars on the slice makes it tremendously easy to read and see where there might be discrepancies between quotas. 

The next couple of columns indicate how many seeds a player must collect to meet each quota. If you look to the right of the screen there is a list of seeds with an average, as well as the most expensive and least expensive seeds. Putting all these numbers together allowed me to calculate how many seeds on average a player might need to collect in order to meet that day's quota. It also allowed me to calculate the maximum, the minimum amount of seeds a player would need to collect in order to meet those quotas in order to design and influence the spawn and drop rate of these seeds.