Elliott Friedrichs Development Blog

Challenges Today, I'm going to discuss a pretty difficult sprint during production of my team's game Hero Fodder. I'm going to talk about how the challenges during this sprint affected the team and how they were handled, fixed, and eventually led to the team working better and more fluently as a whole. This was the sprint directly after Greenlight presentations, and we had already discovered that our game was moving forward. This was incredible news, and better yet, we got two new members added to our team who were the exact people we wanted, and we were on cloud nine. However, plenty of things went wrong this sprint that were a mix of our fault, and completely out of our hands. Before Greenlight, our team had grown pretty accustomed to our meeting schedule and what we did during those meeting; so accustomed that we decided to stick with what we did during those meetings without taking into account the new team members and how they liked to work. Team meetings during this s

Greenlight This post is a bit overdue, but it's here nonetheless! Our game went forward! The Greenlight presentation went very smoothly, and people watching online seemed to love our characters. I felt really good about Greenlight presentations after they happened, and this feeling was confirmed when it was decided that my team's game, Hero Fodder, would move forward with production. The entire experience was honestly quite nerve wracking, since I had never done anything like it before. Though, once we got up onto the stage and started talking for a bit, we all seemed to relax. It was really difficult to tell which games would move forward in my class, since they were all very good, which added a bit more to the nervousness that the experience provided. I would include a picture of our team up on stage, but the recording for Greenlight presentations hasn't been released yet, so for now, I'll show you the VDD that I made for Hero Fodder. However, know that I'm curren

Prototyping Looking back at the past five weeks of game development with my team "One-Hit Wonder", the first two weeks were a bit slow-to-start. We were getting back into the groove of development after taking a small break, and were really just trying to find our footing again. We took the first week to brainstorm, coming up with three different prototype ideas for the next few weeks of production, and the second week, we put it into motion. This was the sprint that we developed the prototype for a top-down horde shooter that we called "Paper Tanks". The following sprint was dedicated to a metroidvania that we called "One Man's Trash", and the sprint after that was for a roguelike called "Hero Fodder".  One Man's Trash Even though we ended up moving forward to greenlight with the Hero Fodder prototype, I think that our strongest prototyping week was actually during the One Man's Trash sprint. During this singular week of prototyping,

Introduction Hello! I'm Elliott Friedrichs, a third year, Game Design major with an Interactive Narrative minor at Champlain College. My game development journey has basically just started, but it kind of feels like I've been doing this for so much longer. At the same time, I know there are still plenty of areas of which I can improve upon, especially having just taken my first steps into narrative design. However, that doesn't mean I'm not motivated. It's the exact opposite, actually, since I can't wait to get more into character creation and world building, which I've gotten back into a bit recently while drafting prototype ideas with my new game production team.  Some of my greatest strengths, on top of character creation and world building, are really shown off best in a team setting. These would be my communication skills, and my overall enjoyment in writing and making documentation, such as design sketches. The latter just improved over time, while the