Cory Zicolella, Week 6 PPJ - Blog Post 3

Modeling Mech Legs v2 - 2 hrs
Sell Update - 1 hrs

Admittingly, I didn't do much this week due mainly to problems I ran into with the University itself, taking much of my time.  That being said, I got the mech legs reasonably more done (adding actual feet to the model) and updated the sell pitch so it has much less filler, and is less wordy/more to the point overall.
At some point soon I'll be updating our team logo ideas, doing some color sampling--I also realized I made a really silly spelling error on all drafts of the word for whatever reason, so that is going to be fixed too.

Content Positive
- Now the legs at least will cast a suitable shadow; depending on if they are seen or not they could still be textured and modeled, but for now this will definitely work. (2 hrs)
- The sell update went rather well and I am much happier with the shorter length (1 hrs)
- I also provided feedback to other artists' work this week (such as Riley's UFO model) in order to improve clarity

Content Negative 
- I didn't get around to doing much this particular week due to circumstances out of my contol
- Meeting was hard for our team to accomplish this week, and when we did it felt rather rushed
- I really wish I was able to contribute more this week as I didn't do much
-Perforce is creating many problems for our entire team and slowing progress

Angela Buchanan, Week 6 PPJ - Blog Post 3

Angela Buchanan, Week 6 Journal PPJ, Blog post 3

Concept art, Interface Design, Flowchart

This was a lighter week in comparison to previous weeks. For the most part, my tasks could be considered completed. I would've liked to go a bit more in-depth with the interface design, but what I have currently is sufficient and likely won't have to be revisited. This week it was hard for me to participate in a good, quality group meeting due to schedule, so there are some things I would like to go over more thoroughly with the team. I also took care of the Status Report this week, since I knew I would be making a later post.

Positive Content

- The interface design is available to the team now, which helps convey the game more.

- I made icons for the flow chart to make it more exciting and easy to understand visually.

- The icons used in the flowchart are cute and work as nice decoration for other things.

Negative Content

- Meeting was difficult for our team this week due to do schedules.

- I wanted to be more in depth with the interface design, but I spent too much time focusing on other projects.

- I felt my production was a bit low this week.

Work and hours

·         Flowchart – 2 hrs

• I made a more exciting visual representation of our game’s flow. It didn’t take too long, for I stuck to simple representations for the chart.

·         Interface Design - 5 hrs

• I worked on making concept art of how the menu interface would look when choosing a game. I also designed how the score and time would look during the mini-games. I made multiple versions of each (with fairly minor differences), but I’m only going to post my personal favorites.

·         Status Report & Sell touch up – 30 min

• I did the status report this week since I knew I would be making a later update. I also did some minor editing to the sell.

Total weekly hours: 7.5 hrs

Vincent Slifer Week 6 PPJ

This week was spent solely on troubleshooting conflicting and "missing" assets with the build on perforce.  Using perforce this week was a major hassle.  Assets would become unlinked at times, and old files created conflicting files that "delinked" with assets in the scene.  Beyond the problems with figuring out perforce, the actual project itself was somewhat simple this week.  I scripted simple methods to have a timer for mini-games, automatically display that time, and troubleshot issues that came up from integrating the mech game on perforce.

Positive Content

• Integrated Mech Game into the main game
• Built timer
• Added placeholder music

Negative Content

• Spent too much time on perforce
• Relinked asset files
• Troubleshot Mech Game files on perforce

Work and Hours
Perforce Troubleshooting (2 hrs)

• Relinked files
• Deleted conflicting files

Programming (2 hrs)

• Relinked files
• Fixed conflicting files
• Built timer code
• Created Unity package solely for asset integration
• Fixed minor problems

Total Work Time: 4 hrs

Riley Stewart Wk 6 PPJ

UFO Modeling

My task for the week was to model the primary UFO object to be used by the player, and the control panel overlay that will be seen by the player. Using Angela's concept art, the ship was modeled in about four hours, followed by the control panel, which took about three hours. The UFO model itself is primarily used for shadows and reflections that might be seen by the player, as the game will be played in first person. The control panel will be a single png image that will be overlaid onto the players view. For next week, the control panel will be textured and modified as needed, along with the ship if necessary.

Total Time: 7 Hours

Pros:
- Primary models created

Cons:
-Perforce

Total Hours: 7

David Monteleone, Week 6 Journal PPJ, Blog post 3

GDD Draft Update, Status Report, Perforce, Unify Controls

Content with Hours (Examples included):

This week did not go exactly as planned. This was our first week of fully using Perforce. Thus, we had some issues.

I ran into a number of issues with Perforce that resulted in major setbacks. Some of my changes were completely lost and it took a good several hours just to learn and figure out how to manage a Unity game in Perforce. I figured out that you never want to submit the Library folder from Unity! You also need to setup Unity so that it allows Perforce to read your metafiles. These two small bugs took my several hours to figure out. I had to test that Perforce was working correctly with Xavier.

(2 hrs)

After Perforce finally worked, I decided to focus on polishing the games we currently had and integrate Slapz. Sadly, a last minute .ma file issue resulted in Slapz not being in our latest build. I went ahead and attempted to unify the controls so that all games play in a similar fashion on the Xbox 360 controller. This was difficult just due to the fact that many people scattered control scripts throughout the project. This useful script helped me figure out how to get the joysticks to act like buttons:

if (Input.GetAxisRaw("P1_Vertical") == -1){

fly.transform.Translate(Vector3.forward*MoveSpeed*Time.deltaTime);

}

 (5 hrs)

My final task for the week was to update the GDD. I went through and fleshed out the mini games now that we have a better understanding of how they’ll ultimately behave. I also had more art to add in! Thus, I updated the figures in the paper.

 (3 hrs)

Content Positive (Duplicate hours from above):

-          Perforce is now setup and in use(2 hrs)

-          The controls are almost unified, but moving in the right direction(5 hrs)

-          The GDD has fleshed out mini game content and more artwork(3 hrs)

Content Negative

-          Perforce has proved to be a difficult environment to work with, but hopefully it won’t be much of a problem anymore.

Total Hours for the week: 10 hrs

Tags: GDD Draft Update, Status Report, Perforce, Unify Controls, Slapz, PPJ

Angela Buchanan, Week 5 PPJ - Blog Post 2

Angela Buchanan, Week 5 Journal PPJ, Blog post 2

Art template, Concept art, Website design

This was a hectic week for me, but I managed to complete or mostly complete the goals I set for myself this week. I wasn't able to finish the concept art until the night before class, so it didn't give my team mates any time to look it over. 

Positive Content

-I got a lot of concept art done for the aliens, the ships, and the environment. So now our game is starting to develop a solid image for itself.

-Because I already had sketches, I knew the direction I wanted to go in ahead of time. IT also made it easier to discuss art direction during the group meeting because I already had examples to show.

- The concept art was able to be used to flesh out the art template. I also used the concept art to make the website look more personalized to our team. 

Negative Content

-Once again, I wish I could have gotten the concept art completed earlier in the week so that it have been easier to put together the sell pitch 

-As of right now, the concept art isn't working too well with he website background. Even though I modified it, it still doesn't fit the way I want it to.

- I also would've liked to play around more with the website's design.

Work and hours

• Concept Art - 8 hrs
• Most of my time this week was spent on designing and making concept art for the game. I feel like the concept art does a good good job representing the game, so hopefully it helps lead the artist for the upcoming week,

Art Template - 1 hr

I compiled all the images together and added brief text descriptions.

• Website - 30 min
• Most time was spent modifying the concept art in an attempt to make it fit better.

Total weekly hours: 9.5 hrs

Vincent Slifer Week 5 PPJ

Most of my time this week was spent trying to figure out how to configure the control scheme for the mech game.  So far, I have a basic set up that allows me to switch between keyboard and joystick controls, although I have not done a lot of testing.  Beyond the controls, I worked on a basic player health system and reworked the basic parts of the Mech game build.

Positive Content

• Joystick functionality attempt added
• needs to be tested
• Global player health added
• Locked and hid the mouse cursor

Negative Content

• Spent too much time on research
• Midterms & Essays are the greatest

Work and Hours
Programming Research (2 hrs)

• Researched methods to use the joystick controllers and 2 player inputs
• Researched how to use the input manager (needs more work)
• Relearned some old methods to make basic systems
• Researched Static variables as global variables

Programming (2 hrs)

• Troubleshot some errors from previous builds
• Implemented mouse lock system
• Implemented joystick to keyboard functionality for testing purposes
• Added global health system
• Coded basic health bar with UI slider
• Reworked old code to be more flexible
• Created script to delete bullets after falling specific distance

Total Work Time: 4 hrs

Riley Stewart Week 5 PPJ

Task for the week: Initial modeling and animating

This weeks tasks for me were fairly limited: To work with Xavi in fleshing out assets for the game "Stello Says". Unfortunately this was not able to be started until the beginning of the next week as I was out of town for the end of the week/weekend, but this was discussed beforehand during the group meeting (thus the small tasks this week). However, we were able to discuss what would be needed, which was a series of pistons modeled to push a cockpit, to simulate the movements that would be done by the ride system. The basic model was completed after about 3 hours of work, going through various design changes over the course of being modeled. The animations have not been completed, as the setup needed is different and a bit more complicated than what I had initially considered.

Work time: 3 hrs

Pros:

-  Basic models and animations beginning to be created and tested

-Aesthetic ideas being tossed around

Cons:
- Out of commission for most of the week, small amount of work done

-Everyone's favorite time of the year: Midterms!

Cory Zicolella, Week 5 PPJ, Blog Post 2

Team Logo Concepts/Creation - (1.5 hrs)
Target Model - (2 hrs)
Sale Pitch - (1.5 hrs)
Perforce Functionality (1.5 hrs)

This week I decided that I'd handle some of the more miscellaneous things, making one of what will be many target models for the Mech Game and Creating a handful of ideas for our team logo.  I also tackled the Sell Pitch based off of our GDD and created a skeleton file that no doubt will go through several revisions before project completion.

The first matter of business for me was getting the Sale Pitch out of the way, so I tried to make the GDD as straight forward and exciting as I could with the current art we have and direction for the game.  There isn't much else to be said here.

Undoubtedly the most fun this week I've had was with designing some team logos:

I believe at this point, we've decided to go with the bottom-most design to represent our team, although whether it will be colored or not, or what those colors will be are not yet decided.  Of course, all designs are not final.

The model was the source of most of my frustration and because of it, I may not be able to get to another one I was planning on doing (at the time of writing).  For whatever reason Maya continuously crashed and dumped all my progress for quite awhile. I eventually worked around it but it really hindered my progress; it took far longer than it should have.

Content Positive:

• I really enjoyed making the logos and the ideas that came out of it gave us a good selection (1.5 hrs)
• The Sale Pitch was created relatively smoothly, mostly due to how nicely the GDD was completed (1.5 hrs)
• The Target model is completed so the Mech game doesn't have to have floating circles now (2 hrs)
• We made a team Slack and that makes communication even more easy.

Content Negative:

• Perforce confused me so much, first because I couldn't find the right one to download, and then secondly because the UI was new to me.  Alas, I know how to do basic file management now. (1.5 hrs)
• The Target Model repeatedly crashed on me and really ate into my team, especially during midterm week.

Total Hours for the week: 6.5

Edit:  I worked on a rough version of the Mech Legs for about another hour and a half.  It was against crashing, I may have to troubleshoot Maya. This brings the new total hours to 8 this week.

David Monteleone, Week 5 Journal PPJ, Blog post 2

GDD Draft, Status Report, Team Setup, Midterm, Website updates, Task and Asset List

Content with Hours (Examples included):

This week I was tasked with carrying out the paper work. I was tasked with completing a GDD draft. In this draft I went through and cleaned a path so that the group can easily refer to the document in order to get specific details about the goal of the project as a whole. My goal was to make a document where if this game gets picked up in the second quarter, the group that joins us can easily read the document and gain a clear understanding of how to fit into the development of the game. This took the majority of my time, but is critical to get right so that the team can refer to the document and not get confused.

 (6 hrs)

Alongside this was extra team management and setup tasks. I further updated the website to contain the necessary information for our midterm organization review. I added a link to directly download our latest build too.

I went ahead and created a Slack group that the group will be utilizing as our primary means of communication during the development of the game.

I created and now manage the Google Spreadsheet that contains the status report information. This was compiled into a quick PowerPoint presentation or class.

I also put together a rough task and asset list.

(4 hrs)

I attempted to further develop the mini game, or boss level, Slapz, but ran into a time issue when my professor for CS 380 changed the date of our midterm. I needed to stop working on Slapz and turn my attention to studying.

(1 hr)

Content Positive (Duplicate hours from above):

-          GDD has the ground work laid out. The group can now refer to this for overall game design.(6 hrs)

-          The group has a setup management system and lines of communication(4 hrs)

-          The website is updated to be current and contains our current version for download(1 hr)

Content Negative

-          Due to a midterm rescheduling in my other class, I was unable to work on the Slapz mini game as much as I wanted to.

Total Hours for the week: 9 hrs

Tags: Programming, Website, GDD, Week 4, Week 5, David Monteleone, PPJ, Status Report, Task and Asset list

Chenghao Wang, Week 3 PPJ - Blog Post 1

GMAP377-001_PPJs_01

Chenghao Wang

Team 01

Early Programming Prepare  

As a first week in a group, everything seems to be in well-prepared. We are discussing our idea, building our website, making our first tech demo, and assigning different tasks to each individuals. 

Positive Content

• - Our initial idea of this project is very suitable for a game on a motion base like Drexel Ride.
• - The artists presented a high-level concept art idea, which is prefect for our game.  
• - Our tech demo is well-prepared by combining the mini games which we created last week. 

Negative Content

• - Not much coding work to do as a programmer. 

Work and hours

• - Discussed theme ideas with team (1 hour)
• - Coding practice. Learned and practice few coding examples, and be ready to achieve our initial idea by programming.  (3 hour)
• - Researched on the network connection between PC/Mac with iPad. (4 hour)

Angela Buchanan, Week 3 PPJ - Blog Post 1

Angela Buchanan, Week 3 Journal PPJ, Blog post 1

Early Concept Art 

Positive Content

-During the meeting there was good discussion about the narrative aspect of game, which helped direct my concept art decisions

-I feel that the images used in the concept art clearly communicates the direction I want to take for the game's theme.

-Not only did I find images for idea inspiration, but I manged to make a few sketches so that we can begin putting consideration into characters and environment.

-Overall the concept art will help the team define the narrative aspects of the game and the world it takes place in.

Negative Content

-I would've liked to get a wider variety of sketches completed.

-I also wish I could have completed the sketches earlier in the week to bounce more ideas off my team mates.

-There was a mix-up regarding who was doing concept art for one-pager.

Work and hours

• Organized files and structure of individual tech demo (1 hr)

 Restructured tech demo organization to make implementation easier.

• Discussed theme ideas with team (1 hr)

Discussed space alien theme park theme. Covered ideas such as the aliens' intentions and the humans' roles.

• Image search (1 hr)

Researched images to use as a starting point for determining style, theme, and color.

I mostly looked into retro sci-fi posters for inspiration. Vegas night life and Theme parks were added as inspiration as well.

A couple of examples

• Color analysis / Pallet creation.

I analyzed some of the images for color direction, then did brief research on color pallets being used.

•  Sketches (3 hrs)

to add more personality to the concept art sheet, I made a few sketches. One alien concept and a ship concept. I also did a colored sketch to test out one of the color pallets.

Total weekly hours: 8 hrs

Xavier Smith, Week 3 Journal PPJ, Blog post 1

Xavier Smith, Week 3 Journal PPJ, Blog post 1

Project Lead, Tech Demo, Game Design

Content With Hours

This week, I organized a group meeting where we discussed game design, game mechanics, breakdown of work, and group methodology. (1 hr)

Spoke with some members individually about their work and tasks they were assigned. (1 hr)

I complied my, Cory, and Angela's game into a single project and refined my and Cory's game and began working on a consistent UI and a menu system. (6 hrs)

       

                                         Stello says Screenshot                                                                                        Interdimensional Screenshot

Content With Examples 

In our group meeting, we discussed many facets of the game. Firstly, we discussed the breakdown of work and everyone was assigned their individual tasks and a regular

meeting time was arranged. We then delved into the story of the game, how we planned to connect all the mini-games, and various other nuances of the game such as boss battles and one-player vs multiplayer modes. Finally, we discussed how the group should communicate and our methods of doing work.

I spoke with some of the members regarding their tasks for the week, such as asking Cory for a simple intro screen, 

I spent most of my time making the team tech demo using assets given to me by Cory and Angela. I also looked for some placeholder UI elements. I added a few features to my game, as well as implementing shooting, adding a crosshair and targets, and refining the UI in Cory's game. Finally, I spent a lot of time trying to resolve UI issues such as improper scaling and trying to maintain some sort of consistency between games.

Mech Game Screenshot 

Positive (Hours duplicated from above)

- Meeting was productive and everyone was assigned/volunteered for work. Game story and Mechanics were fleshed out and meeting times established (1 hr)

-Everything was done by all members in a timely fashion and Cory finished website without needing any of my help

-Tech Demo came together well and can now leave mini-games, exit application, and scale with screen sizes without problem for the most part. (6 hr)

Negative

- CrossPlatformInput package in other projects gave me some trouble

- UI kept anchoring and scaling incorrectly (6 hr)

- One member did not show up to meetings and we have yet to hear anything from them 

Total Hours for the week: 8 hrs