Dev Log #2 Production - Brady Anderson

For this dev log  I'll be going through and talking about some of the things I've done during the production of Kalidax Farming Program. In terms of my role in this project I am primarily a game and systems designer. However, I am now transitioning into my state of helping out the art department with environmental art. 

One of the first things I did during the production of our game was design a bunch of potential alien concepts that would be grown from our seeds that players would collect. How I went about designing these was, I first reviewed all of the reference material that our entire team has gathered in order to build a picture of what type of aliens we should have and what they should look like. Once I had a good sense of the art style and direction, I then looked for real world references in order to inspire my designs. In total I came up with three different and unique designs. The first alien designed, I called The Angler Trap. This is a combination of both a venus flytrap and an angler fish. It’s designed to lure in its prey via its bright colorful mushroom and then devour them. The second was a mosquito-like armored alien. The goal for this design was as it would be spliced together and evolve  it would lose the ability to fly in order to build thicker and thicker armor. As well as looking like it has acquired numerous diseases through all of the blood it has eaten. The third and final alien was the long Strider which is a large alien with a round top and really spindly legs. Its whole design philosophy was a creature who was built to suck nutrients out of the soil through its legs. 

Once all the reference material for these aliens were gathered I then Drew up some rough sketches of what they would look like in their base form and what they would look like in their final splice form. I also then gave a design rationale to explain the core concept of the creature and its important features. I did this in order to give the artists a better of what the important features of this creature should be and their functionality. Finally once all that was completed I drew up a small concept of what their seed should look like. 

After designing the aliens I then moved on to the game's economy system. There were a few things I had to make sure we accounted for, such as how many quotas the player would have to meet, and how much those quotas were. How much money would players be able to generate in a single day? As well as how much things would cost and sell. I did this by partnering up with Sarah in order to tackle this large endeavor. We utilize spreadsheets to try and streamline the process by building algorithms in order for the spreadsheet to automatically do a lot of the heavy lifting. 

We found it a bit daunting in order to predict a bunch of different play patterns over the course of a game so we decided to stick to the average player. This allowed us to design around what the average player would experience and when these players should expect to be able to unlock certain upgrades and buildings. 

 With my most recent sprints I have shifted my focus away from game design as I've already designed a lot of these systems and I am now moving to environmental art. Some of the things that I'll be tasked with or already have done, is drawing final art for some of our seeds as well as the incubation pod. The way I approached these were again by referencing our game design goals as well as our references, in order to understand what type of art style and design I should approach with these. With the alien seeds I drew them in a way that represented what they incubate into. With the Sprog seed on the left I tried to emulate a kind of a tadpole mushroom like seed. The middle seat is the angler trap. With this seat I tried to replicate some of its features it would develop into such as its shiny mushroom lure, as well as some of its teeth. The art on the right is the incubator pod. With this I tried to make it look as rugged as possible as the company isn't going to give you their highest tech gear. So you'll be likely working with a lot of lower tech gear that is cobbled together to get the job done.