John Frankel, Week 10 Journal PPJ, Blog post 9, GMAP 378

Content with hours

Playtest 1

I was at the first playtest with the other group and we got a handful of playtesters to come and play our game.

(1 hour)

Playtest 2

I was at the second playtest and kindof had to manage people who wanted to go on the ride.  I played the aliens when we had no one else and I sent them to the survey after riders had completed.

( 1 hour)

Bug fixes and improvements

We had a list of bugs and improvements that we wanted to do in the transition and two of my games.
In the Transition:
I updated the controls, added background music, added a floor to the tent (although I think there might be a problem with it.), I changed where the controls on the slot machine were and that was it.

In Tic Tac O Noes:
I added a lookat script that had the Xs and the Os look at the player, I also increased the time by 1 second. I also updated the controls.

In Crazy Ball and Chase ball:
I made the crazy ball look at the player so that it would look like it was chasing them. I diferentiated the two games so they looked different.  Hopefully that will be enough.

Here is the code for the look at script.  It can be pretty useful.

 public GameObject player;
    public float offset = 90;
// Update is called once per frame
void Update () {

        transform.LookAt(player.transform.position);
        transform.eulerAngles -= new Vector3(0, offset, 0);

}


Total Hours: 4

Post Mortem

This was not my favorite project to work on.  In fact, if we are being honest, it actually is in competition for my least favorite projects and I will explain why.

While we did reach our goal of adding a large quantity of micro games and I was able to work on the framework which had some interesting programming involved the project suffered from two pitfalls.

Negatives

First, the project had a weak or really no leadership.  At the beginning of the project it was blatantly apparent that no one wanted to lead the group.  David lead the team last term and this term he did not want to.  After that Xavi was the one to be asked to be the leader, but he was reluctant at best,  some parts of the programming leadership fell onto me but I knew nothing of the game so at best I would give it a shot.  I used Trello a lot at the beginning and logged all of the tasks we came up with, but as the term went on no one used the trello so I gave up on it because it was a lost cause.

Now the second problem really hit the team hard and there are a variety of things around it.  The second problem was the loss of morale.  The group became less and less interested in the success of the project and just wanted the class to end, or at very least I did.  Without a group morale, and with no real leader to push everyone forward the group began to stagnate.  Work was only good enough from most of the group, with a few over achievers who still liked the project (props to them for hanging in there with the rest of us).

There was also problems with communication, that others have talked about and there was some problems with everyone going off on their own direction.

Positives

We did end up making a lot more content then I expected.  We started with 5 games, and ended with 22 games.  That is a large amount of progress.  We retooled the frame work to make it work better, and continually improved the art for the game.

The art has always been the saving grace of the game.  And the artist always stepped up their game, especially Angela, to produce quality art.