Design Pipeline

This is an overview of the pipeline that the design team has followed. The design team is quite small, this has allowed us to have a certain degree of flexibility when following the pipeline, which has increased the speed, and quality of the work. This pipeline has been followed for feature implementation, and level design.

References

The first step in the pipeline involves looking at our reference games, to see how they solve similar problems. This step is very important, as it saves up a lot of research, and testing time.

High Level Concept

After looking for references, and having a clear idea of what we want to implement, we create a high level concept document. This document will be use to iterate the feature or level, and will help the viability evaluation of the code team. Once we have the feedback from the code team, we can already start iterating so that the feature can be implemented in the engine. At this point, if the engine requires a system that hasn't been done, we will also provide the code team with the information.

Detailed Design Document

After the required systems are defined, we define in detail how the feature or level works, defining the values that will need to be public, and creating sketches that will help both the code, and the art team. In the case of levels, we define all the assets that will be needed for the level.

Implementation

Once all the documentation is complete, the designer responsible of the feature, will team up with an artist or a programmer(depending on which feature is beign worked on), and will iterate on it until it's in a good state.

Feedback

After the feature has been implemented, and some iterations have been done, a round of feedback is done, most of the times with the whole team, others only the Lead and the responsible Designer. If the feedback is good, we consider that the feature is finished and implemented, if some things need to be changed, more iterations are done until the feedback is great.