As i've finished the course early i won't be there to see the final product, however i'm going to post all the outstanding pieces of evidence of work here.
Heres a zoom out of the mind map, it's hard to get it visible when trying to get it all in one image.
Heres a zoom out of the trello board. This was very unorganised and we didn't make a gantt chart or progress chart.
The game design document file is on the synoptic project home page, none of my team put anything on this, only i did. I even left the story segments blank with just advice in them so other members could fill it in but that never happened.
Pictures of the google drive i set up for the team
Final thoughts and evaulation from where i left the project:
Sorry for paragraphs
The project started off strong on all ends i'd like to think. There was a solid foundation for the character creator idea and how it would affect gameplay. I had started on character sketches and Will had begun researching into the code side of things during the christmas holidays just so we both could get a head start. For Danny though, he wasn't on board with the task at the start and didn't really jump to do much till the project idea shifted to pixel after my initial idea failed.
Speaking of the initial idea, my original idea was simply a character creator that lead into a interactable town where the player would talk to NPCs and they would react to the different character creation choices the player made. This was purely a tech demo task after all so i thought this was fine and would be much less work than coding attacks and enemy AI. The game would have a design similar to Super Neptunia RPG and i would draw all the characters and their assets while someone else would draw very simple backgrounds, as this is purely a tech demo task with focus on the character creator and how it affects dialogue, movement and so on.
However, before i managed to present my idea to the tutors i was told by a tutor that there needed to be more to it, i.e. combat and other elements of RPG gameplay. Unfortunately, in the end this is what caused the project to go down hill.
Because there now needed to be combat in the game, i struggled to try to animate MORE than just simple walking, which would require some complex animation trees (i think it's called) which would demand of me to draw loads of animations per character and character asset choices and the like. Because of this i drifted into a low place in my head and contacted a tutor telling them i'm going to need to completely change everything done so far cause i just can't do it as it was making me hate the thing i love, drawing.
This is where the project went into pixel designs, something Danny is really good at, and where i moved over to background designs and simple character sketches which danny would translate into pixel characters. I also later did designs for menus. This was where things really went downhill for me.
It was at this point where i really felt useless and like i had done nothing and also where i kinda just stopped caring. Danny became convinced that the project was heavily a platformer when it was just simple platformer elements of jumping around the 2d Level. Looking back what i wanted was probably a metroidvania, however i hadn't played one at the time of starting this project so didn't know what they were. Due to my social anxiety and other things, and the fact im not friends with Will and Danny, i didn't manage to tell them the idea wasn't a platformer.
Anyway, i continued to do background designs for the game and talking to my team about simple stuff until i decided to put together the game design document, something i did very simply at the start of the project and asked for my team to add to but they never did. I organised the game design document perfectly, added images and GIFs of our work and left space for them to fill in and then let them know i had done this. I continued to let them know i had done this and they just ignored me, so it's still in the state i left it with them never touching it.
After this i asked if i could do some menus or UI stuff, to which will gave me some images showing the character creation menu and main menu, which he hadn't even included the main features of the original idea, which were the options "Pronouns", "Gender", "Name". I ended up including all these options in my designs even going so far as adding the ability to choose they/them variant pronouns that would affect dialogue to be more gramatically correct and also allowing the player to input individual pronoun types.
I hope that these features actually ended up in the project and they didn't cut them out.
Conclusion
In conclusion, the project's original idea was much simpler and would have been more achieveable, by adding combat and other zones besides a town the idea became too large and in the end caused the project to stray from the breif which was to create a character creation system and a very simple tech demo to showcase it's effects. In the end the character creation became an after thought while the game was the focus, and with a completely unorganised team and project this lead to people drifting away at times and also nothing proper being done for ages.