Tj Heiney, Week 8 Journal PPJ, Blog post 8, GMAP 378

This week I had the simplest tasks for the project that I have had all term. I was very grateful for this as re-learning unity has been a point of contention for me this term causing me stress. We needed to get the games up to BETA level. Refueled has gotten much better over the weeks. It was hard to nail the original concept.
I needed to add a new model and texture it for the game this week. I also put sound into the hose so that a sucking sound was made on alignment. I finally fixed the way draining works on the hose. It is now iterative so it counts down while you are colliding. I need to add the following code.
   void FixedUpdate()
   {
       if(colDet && humanFuel < 100)
       {
           humanFuel += amountDrain;
           alienFuel -= amountDrain;
       }
   }
    void OnTriggerEnter(Collider mCollision)
    {
        audioSource.PlayOneShot(refuelsound);
        if (mCollision.gameObject.tag == "Refueled_FuelLine2")
        {
            colDet = true;
        }
    }

    void OnTriggerExit(Collider mCollision)
    {
            colDet = false;
    }
The changes for Refueled:
3 hours

Shooting gallery only needed sound to be added.

The changes for Shooting Gallery:
1/2 hour

Total Content Hours: 4

Postmortem, Divinity Original Sin, Swen Vincke:
 This postmortem was really interesting. It was interesting because it tried to teach a lesson opposite of what most software companies teach. Although this postmortem was about Divinity: Original Sin, most of the talk focused on the entire company and the brand of Divinity. The talk focused on the larger aspects than just the game itself but the company. Divinity Original Sin is the latest game in the Divinity series.
The quality of games in the series had been swiftly declining. The talk started out with the lessons that they learned prior to Divinity. The most important lesson is a simple one, broken games don't sell well. So why did they put together a broken game? The list of issues was distilled into: A reliance on middleware, too many iterations, fragmented focuses, team issues, no control from publishers, no day 1 money, a lose of identity due to publisher involvement, and insufficient financing.  Divinity Original Sin was born out of the need for a reboot. The series had taken too many poor turns under publisher control.
The team set out to correct the franchise and put it back on track. They decided that they needed to be independent of publishers to allow them to work with freedom. When they went independent they established pillars to guide development. These pillars were: take control of the project and stick to the vision, make your own tech which enables you to control what your game is built on, self publish to set release date, and establish a strong identity. All of these are important lessons but Mr. Vincke stressed that Iteration is very important. Iteration is the most dangerous thing in software in my opinion. If you iterate too much you will never get a finished game. His take was that iterations allow for multiple visions and you can settle on what works the best.
The talk also focused on marketing your game. It is very important to create your brand so that people see your work. I think this has been the biggest challenge of this term since it was hard to test AlienArcade.