The Brownies first dev log

Welcome to Boom! Haunted

Hello and welcome everyone! We are The Brownies, our members are Aqeel, Sana, and Lavanya. In this post we will go over our progress during this first week of the project, how we came up with ideas, and some of our goals/methodologies.

Team Goals:

As a team we want to respect everyone's time and boundaries while at the same time, producing a good game that people will enjoy. This means distributing work fairly and evenly as well as accomplishing this work by the promised time. We want to make a game that will allow our audience to appreciate not only the humor but the underlying story.  To do this, The Brownies will provide an experience that tells the emotional story of our character.

First Encounters:

During our first team meeting we sketched, blocked (quite literally with Legos), and planned some ideas for our game. Our main character is the ghost. We will use our ghost to tell the story of npcs, showing their experiences through interactions with items and other npcs. We decided the main two forms of humor would be in the dialogue and physical. There are some basic objectives of the game we want the player to focus on. The main one is gathering hauntings, indicated by a bar that fills. You can do this by interacting with the world and npcs. Once the player gathers the necessary hauntings, they can complete the game. The main drive behind this mechanic is to force the player to experience the story to finish the game. Below are some images showing what we created during our first meeting.

Individual progress:

Aqeel:

I got our teams basic needs such as the Trello, Itch, team charter, and google drive setup. After adding everyone and another meeting with my team I focused on blocking out a basic menu design. As we get further into the project I'll add more to the menu so it matches the aesthetic of our game, as right now it's just some buttons.

After this I made a small area for our character to walk around in. This was helpful for testing the physics script. Sana changed and expanded the level layout which she talks about. 

Lastly, I wrote the physic script with some help of online resources. Right now it only supports walking around and camera movement. There are some bugs however. We are still deciding if we want our game to be third or first person. As of right now the camera only fully functions for first person. There is also one other bug that stops the player if they try to walk left or right while walking into a wall or collider. I hope to fix both of these by our next dev log. 

Some next steps include pause menu, functionality for both menu screens, fixing bugs in the code, and programming interactions with objects.

Sana:

I began building the initial level layout of our haunted house prototype in Unity. I blocked out the main structural spaces, including key rooms like the kitchen, living room, parents’ room, and hallway, based on our Legos floorplan model, to start defining spatial flow and player pathing. 

The focus right now is on modular floor and wall placement, with attention to camera perspective and gameplay navigation. I’m prepping this space for a playable demo, which will feature early environmental interaction and mood-setting elements to guide narrative tone.

Next steps include snapping floor and wall elements into alignment, carving out wall spaces for doorways, and implementing basic player movement.

Oh also, our Legos floorplan didn't include an office, but I had extra space and a ghost's gotta haunt, right? SO we've got one more room now!

Lavanya:

Progress Update: I’ve been working on compiling a list of interactive and non-interactive items within the space to help us determine which assets I’ll be modeling and which ones we’ll be sourcing externally.

Modeling Progress: From the interactive set, I’ve started modeling the following:

• Wall
• Doors
• Cell phone
• Tube lights

I chose these since they were the easiest to begin with and helped me get into the workflow.

Art Update: I also created a concept art piece for our main character. Overall, I’ve been focusing heavily on the art side of things this week! (I am having some problems uploading the pictures)