Met at Lied Library on UNLV Campus. Justin and Travis present.

We began by taking care of administrative stuff, then we moved into aspects of the design we felt needed work.

On the website. We can register a domain for $35 for a year (we get a discount if we get more than one year) and we can get basic web hosting for as low as $8 per month. (However, the $8 package basically gets us what we have now.) There's a deal for $25 a month which gives us more webspace, lots more bandwidth, email addresses, etc etc. We'll need to decide what we want our domain name to be. Right now truewestern.com is available. However, it would be cool if we could use the site to host more things, say if we decide to do another design after True Western, or personal resumes/projects, or a bulletin board about game design in the Las Vegas area, etc... maybe even more people from our class would want to post info on the site. Just something to think about-- but all we need to worry about at the moment is a domain name :)

On our project. We'll be shooting for a full design document by the time E3 rolls around in May. That's about 3-4 months, and it's very possible if we stick to once per week meetings. The design document will not include programming. However, if there's an interest in it from the group, we can make a mini-prototype as a separate project for our portfolios.

From there, we went over aspects of the design we felt were light in our assignment, and gave each one a glazing over in turn. We touched on the character's abilities, and using them as an alternative to gaining experience. Certain abilities could be sectioned off into "trees" and could be traversed like the tech trees in Starcraft or Diablo 2. For instance, in the gun tree, the pistol node could be the root. If the character reaches level x with pistols, the rifle and shotgun nodes become available to train. Also, each node will have special commands, like the trick shot at pistol level 5 (for example.)

Also, we touched on a non-linear storyline. Right now, all characters will eventually join the party with the exception of a few secret characters. What was proposed, is that out of the second half of the characters, only a few will join the party based on the player's choices throughout the game. So one time through the game, the player will get Yukiko and Wild Shot, and the second, they could get Lincoln and Kai. The first few characters (Joseph, Tamah, Father Steve, and Violet Hunter) will be in the party every time. Let's go over this more in detail on Saturday. If we do this, we don't want to screw anything up design wise (each character has a unique skillset, so it would be stupid to put the player in a position where they require a skill of a character that hasn't or won't join the party.)