Week of Monday 8/22 - Friday 8/26

After successfully pitching my game Kung Food, a frantic 2-player arcade fighter in which various ingredients engage in lethal combat, and amassing a group of 12 individuals of varying skill sets and levels of experience, I was nominated as lead project manager, however I would also continue my role as lead mechanics designer for our game. Our first two days of work moved sluggishly as the network was dominated by hundreds of gigabytes of data attempting to install on dozens of our computers. However, in this time I managed to organize a Trello in order to manage the progress of each of our team members, and to collaborate with my design team in determining the basic movesets and controls for the game using Street Fighters 2, 3, and 5 as our main references. We continued this research over the next few days and produced a spreadsheet detailing the frame data for each move of our base "shoto" character on which the others would be based.

Furthermore, I designed and sketched concepts for special input moves that will be furthered to our art team in order to fully render. I consulted with the art and programming leads and we established a timeline and aim to have a completed playable demo for the game by the end of October, and I then discussed with our coding team about developing a tool with which we can tweak hitboxes and frame data for moves. I took time to familiarize myself with the basics of Blender, GitHub, and Unreal Engine 5 in case I were needed to add assets directly to the game myself, and I assigned the rest of the design team to do the same at some point over the next week.

My proudest work this week came in the form of designing a mechanic with which players could expend their EX meter in the game. Essentially, the EX meter would gradually fill over the course of the fight, and the player would typically spend it on a special, high-damage move. However, with this mechanic they would also be given the option to expend an EX meter to execute what I call the Counter Counter. This would be accomplished by one player parrying one of his opponent's moves with a well timed block and then inputing Medium Punch and Medium Kick at the same time. This would activate the Counter Counter, which changes into one of five states depending on where the players are on the stage. These states all have unique attributes and utilize cooking utensils that are strewn about the stage/countertop, hence the name Counter Counter. The specific cooking utensil used would alter the state of the counter, for example, if the Counter Counter were used by a rolling pin, it would consist of the first player flattening his opponent with the rolling pin and inflicting a "weakness" effect. It was in this way that we could implement stage hazards without disrupting the overall flow of gameplay, an issue that is prevalent in fighters like Injustice 2 or Super Smash Bros.

Over the course of this next week, my goals are to organize communication between the artists and designers and coders and form a solid pipeline so that we can accelerate our pace from what has been a somewhat slow week. Our direction is looking clearer, however, and I think with good efforts from our art team especially, we will be able to meet our deadline for this project and our demo.