Team Laser Combat: Meeting Minutes (10/29/2010)

Time, place, and attendance:

Things we covered from the agenda:

I asked Kristen to confirm that we still had the original vector image of the game logo for two reasons. First, we need to make sure it's backed up; and second, we need to scale it up for T-shirts and other possible merchandise. She and Justin confirmed that they do have it. We should put it in the Dropbox to make sure it's always backed up.

Previewed the maps and discussed the preliminary designs for the following levels: Small House, Mansion, Cemetery, Summer Field, Autumn Field, Winter Field, Town Square, and Library.
Prompted a discussion on categorization of maps based on size, and another on options for random spawn points. (See below.)

Done. On green scratch paper. In short, everyone liked my design and agreed with my reasoning.

Decided to keep the captain selector as it is because it's cool and because it will help the player feel a more immediate connection to their main character.
Agreed that the removal of the option to rename the captain was OK since the renaming of all characters can be done on the character configuration screens.

Agreed on Android Nation in silver and red for screen titles, and Alpha Male Modern in white gradient for help text and combat token displays.

Decided to stay with the current design of 1.0. We'll dial it back to 0.5 if, during testing, we discover that the combination of other bonuses ends up making troopers more powerful than they should be.

Things we covered that were not on the agenda:

I mentioned my idea of having a strong but friendly feminine voice to introduce screens and announce major events, and that I have tentative agreements with some good candidates. The team liked the idea, so we're moving forward with it.
First we need to finalize an asset list, which will go in the Audio section of the game design document.
Then I need to upgrade the audio system in MHFramework so it can play sequences of individual words to create phrases. I don't expect that to be a major chore.

We discussed the current plan to have captains spawn in random locations, and then have their supporting characters spawn nearby. The team decided that it would be wiser and give us more control if we set specific spawn points on each map, and then selected them randomly as we were putting characters on the board at the beginning of a match.
To help the level designers, Obstacle 0 in each tile set will be designated as a spawn point object, which will be removed during map loading so the space will simply be an open floor when the map has finished loading.

Things from the agenda that we did not cover:

Decided to wait until later to see how the actual game screen would look and to have time to create a checklist of necessary elements.

Friday, October 29, 2010