Snowblind - Devlog 1

Hey all,

My name is Erik Dewhurst and I know this is a couple days late, but I figured I'd do a write-up about the development of this game.
Firstly; this game was created as a part of the 2021 Global Game Jam. The theme this year was "Lost & Found". My team started work on Jan 27th and finished on Jan 31st. We'd never worked together before, met through PIGSQuad (Portland Indie Gaming Squad), and only had a few team meetings before Jan 27th.

Ideation:

It's notable that the theme for the jam was released 2 days early. Obviously that gave us time to think about the theme before we truly started. That ideation time combined with a small snowfall in Portland lead me to the idea of a snow storm. I then spent an evening prototyping a snowstorm in Unity and determined it was somewhat trivial to do so.

Once the jam started in earnest, our group successfully established a good premise and general design.
We discussed a variety of ideas via Discord while writing our thoughts in a Google Doc. It took about 3-4 hours to get a rough design doc we all agreed on. Our method was simple and crude, but turned out to be effective.
Multiple people had ideas surrounding "lost in a maze" or "lost in a forest". I suspect the existence of the snowstorm prototype guided our thoughts toward that concept.

Collaboration:

Once we had the idea of a human and dog playing Marco-Polo in a snowstorm, we split up and started work.
We talked pretty regularly via Discord about various elements of the game, but we mostly came together to integrate Assets.
Having a clear understanding of the premise helped us all take full ownership of our separated parts.

What we missed:
During ideation and work, we discussed a number of things that didn't make the first version. That's always the way.

The biggest things that ended up on the cutting room floor were intro and outro scenes. Some work was done toward an outro scene, but we abandoned both due to time restrictions.

This first version also didn't include an outro song, gamepad support, OSx support, or intermittent mood-setting music. But these are all planned for the first update.

There were a lot of late nights put into this game. Next time I'll try to sleep more healthy hours.