Xavier Smith, Week 9 Journal PPJ, Blog post w, GMAP 378

Cleanup – 4 hrs
Fixing up games – 2hrs
Poke Games – 3 hrs

Lots of work done this week! We saw a lot of things that needed improving during our group meeting so I went ahead with all the tasks I assigned myself. Firstly I fixed up the Controller Select scene, and then Angela improved the art for it and made it look way better! Then I noticed the animations were pretty laggy in Stello Says, so I sped up the animations to match the game speed, as well as switching the background to a less noisy one and removed some of the obsolete text. After that I did a little tweaking for the balance in QWOP and did a fair amount of cleanup on Crazyball. The overall game should be a lot smoother and coherent now!

Finally, I started working on the PokeGames that we’re going to implement. I’d say they’re about 80% done right now, but here’s a quick preview as to what it’s going to look like. Player 1 will move left and right, Player 2 will launch the finger (foot for now) and the aliens have to try and avoid getting shot.

Content Positive:

- The game looks a lot better and is a lot less buggy!

- The instructions are a lot more consistent and coherent!

Content Negative:

- Didn’t quite get to finish the PokeGames

Total Time Spent: 9 Hours

GDC Vault  Postmortem Breaking Into The Game Biz

I chose this postmortem as it was a topic I am personally invested in. 

The presentation detailed how professionals within the video game industry got their start before Video Game programming was taught in schools. The first individuals, Randy Smith spoke about how he had a list of companies he wanted to work for upon graduating and would cold-call companies. However he advised that this is not a good approach for the modern day, however the enthusiasm behind the decision is what is important. 

The second individual,  Tess Snider spoke about how she taught herself and built up a resume on her own over the years, and eventually just sent her resume around to employers and found a job within a week

The third speaker, Ralph Koster spoke about how his first game was an unsuccessful board game project with one of his friends. He then proceeded to receive tests from Eldin online whereby he improved the system until he was eventually brought on to the team. He stressed the importance of creating a portfolio, regardless of what level you are currently at. 

The final Speaker, Gordon Walton spoke of his time before games were sold commercially, but advocated the previous speaker's point of putting your games out there. 

The speakers then talked about the most self-destructive behaviours within candidates. Behaviours mentioned were talking about never having played the company's game, generic programmer resumes, and finally speaking about where they want to be in the company rather than how they could help solve the problem within the job description. They then advised to look up requirements and learn the things consistently listed in them. 

Afterwards, they spoke of the things that stood out within no-experience candidates. The most pertinent points seemed to be passion and having a portfolio that displays interest and skill within the field. 

Finally, they discussed tips for candidates to work on and get noticed. The advice from the panel was to aim for a job that you really want, having an attitude where you are willing to improve, creating projects, networking with individuals regardless of their position, and finally having a passion for creating/making games rather than playing them, avoid getting typecast 

Xavier Smith, Week 5 Journal PPJ, Blog post w, GMAP 378

Idea creation, GDC, Slack, Mini-Game polish, PPJ

Preparing for GDC presentation - 6-8 hrs
Fixing up games – 2hrs
Editing Slides – 1hr

What a week! Most of the work this week was getting prepared for the GDC presentation and fixing up the games/making a suitable demo build for it. We had a bit of a setback in scheduling the motion base due to a scheduling error and had to go twice, however this gave us the chance to find and fix a loot of bugs in the game.

Firstly, one of the games we planned to show off had a bug where it ended immediately, and so I had to spend time figuring out what was causing that error, turns out it was just one line in the code that needed changing (along with some unity jank).  Secondly, I had to make a separate build for our presentation, as some of the games weren’t complete enough to demo. There were a few errors along the way but it eventually got done and our demo ran perfectly!

Additionally, some of our games that we needed to demo required a bit more overall polish and clarity in the instructions, so I made a few quick changes such as fixing up the movement/instructions on the QWOP game and swapping out the end-goal sprite for Runnerz.

Finally, we had to put together a presentation; I made the main slides (most of them just being reworks of Angela’s slides) before having Cory insert the testimonials video (now featured on our website!) and Angela fix the slides up to give them that extra polish.

Content Positive:

- We worked really hard to get our demo and marketing material up to snuff for GDC!  Everything we needed clocked in at under the 5 minute allotted time and we have things to use for the site now.

-  The game is all around more refined, especially for the games we demoed! (Namely Runnerz, QWOP, Interdimensional, Space Aim, Press/Don’t Press and Abducktion)

Content Negative:

- All of these things were stressful and took a lot of time out of the week

Total Time Spent: 9-11 Hours

Xavier Smith, Week 3 Journal PPJ, Blog post w, GMAP 378

Idea creation, Team Setup, Slack, Mini-Game Creation, PPJ

Content with Hours (Examples included):

            Not everyone could make the entire group meeting this week, but we got everything we needed to done! I also decided to let the artists polish the games this week using the greyboxes created by the programmers last week just to make sure they have a fundamental understanding of unity just in case it's necessary. 3 new games should be coming soon!

(1.5 hrs)

             Made the greybox for the QWOP game! As I let my team know, I wasn't able to do much this week due to a game jam I was attending for one of my other projects, so this one still isn't 100%, but the basic functionality is there

(1 hr)

     

Content Positive (Duplicate hours from above):

-              

           -Divvied up tasks and everyone seems fine with their workload(1 .5 hrs)

-             -Got the basic greybox out for a game in record time! (1 hrs)

Content Negative

-          -Snowstorm ):

-       -Not everyone could make the full meeting

Total Hours for the week: 2.5 hrs

Xavier Smith, Week 3 Journal PPJ, Blog post w, GMAP 378

Idea creation, Team Setup, Slack, Mini-Game Creation, PPJ

Content with Hours (Examples included):

            Due to scheduling, we decided to change our meeting structure to one large meeting, then another one where we check in once a week on Sundays. This meeting we also talked about restructuring how we delegate tasks so that no one person has 30 things to do like last term (sorry David!). Finally, we drew up some mini-games, picked 5 to work on and went our merry ways. Here's hoping the new system runs just a little smoother

(1.5 hrs)

              Finished making CrazyBall! That one took a lot longer than I thought it would. We don't quite have the art and art direction for it yet, but it's still fun regardless. In a nutshell, the human players have to control a ball (player 1 rotates left/right player 2 moves forward/backward) and try to avoid one ball controlled by an AI, and the other controlled by the alien. This mini-game goes by in 4 seconds and everyone can move quickly so you're gonna have to react quick to this one. 

               Additionally, I went ahead and created generic movement scripts for humans and aliens respectively in 2D space that we can drag and drop into games to hopefully allow us to have a more universal movement system without having to worry about writing new scripts and changing code around. Here's hoping we find other uses for them in the future and the work pays off!

(6 hrs)

     

Content Positive (Duplicate hours from above):

-              

           -Work should be more fairly distributed now and mini-games should require significantly less time to be created from start to finish (1 .5 hrs)

-             -Learnt to make a cool little mini-map and added some more universal drag-n-drop script

s to the project cuz we all about that modular life (7 hrs)

Content Negative

-          none

Total Hours for the week: 7.5 hrs

Xavier Smith, Week 1 Journal PPJ, Blog post 1, GMAP 378

 

Idea creation, Master Asset/Task List, Team Setup, Slack, Perforce, Team Integration, PPJ

Content with Hours (Examples included):

           Today's the week we merge teams and expand! A lot of the work this week was focused on getting all the new members into our team and setting the structure for our project moving forward. I spent some time ascertaining team member's strengths/weaknesses and delegating work and positions within the team accordingly and established small tasks for everyone to accomplish by our next meeting that I set for Sunday. Here's to hoping things run smoothly all term

(1.5 hrs)

              Our first meeting! They grow up so fast. This week I gave the new programmers a basic overview of the system and assigned them the task of creating a very basic mini-game so that they could get a feel for the system we've implemented moving forward. I then sat in on the artist's meeting where we discussed game concepts, mockups, and storyboards.

(2 hrs)

  My second task was starting on the Master Asset List. I looked at all the games we had planned from the weekly meeting and created programming assets accordingly. I also made note of all the documentation we'd need to do and when we'd need it by. 

(1 hrs)

     

Content Positive (Duplicate hours from above):

-          Group organization tools are setup and everyone has a good idea of what's expected (1 .5 hrs)

-          We pitched a ton of games and concepts in our meeting. Everyone got a chance to speak and contribute something! (2 hrs)

-          Finished everything but the art for the Master Asset and Task List, so we have a ballpark estimate of how much we need to get done this term  (1 hrs)

Content Negative

-          Some members couldn't make the meeting, but they Skyped in and were informed of everything.

Total Hours for the week: 4.5 hrs

David Monteleone, Week 1 Journal PPJ, Blog post 1, GMAP 378

Idea creation, Team Pipeline, Team Setup, GDD, Slack, Perforce, Team Integration, PPJ

Content with Hours (Examples included):

This is the start of our new expanded team! Now that we have the other half of the class with us, I had to integrate them into our current system. I had to get everyone into our Slack and explain what each channel is used for and how we use Slack. I sent out the initial set of invites to edit our blog. Somehow this was a bit of a problem and so many people needed some instruction on how to use the blog. Both Cory and I assisted in this area. I had to get everyone setup on our Google Drive so that they can edit the weekly Status Report file that we use. I also handed off the leadership of the group to Xavier. I feel that I learned plenty from being the main leader last quarter and it’s time for someone else to gain the same experience. I let him know my concerns and explained how I’ll help him along the way if any issues do come with regards to team organization and leadership. Last, I helped anyone that needed to get up to date with using Perforce as we needed to put a file into Perforce this week.

(1 hr)

My main task for the week was to put together the Team Pipeline Doc. This doc contains the necessary information about how to get started with our group, how the leadership is structured, how mini games will be made and implemented, and plenty of other important group information. This document was constructed from some of the content in last quarter’s GDD, but it was looked over and refreshed to better reflect how the group wants to run this term. I had to gather the necessary version numbers of all the tools we want to use this term. I also created a pipeline, with steps, to formulate mini games, build them, and ultimately integrate them into the main game. Last, I created the group hierarchy from the agreements we came to in class.

(2 hrs)

                I also attended our first entire group meeting. At this meeting I participated in formulating ideas that can be made into future mini games. I acted as the voice of reason as I was a main designer and programmer for Alien Arcade last term and understand most of its limitations. There was also a programmer meeting at this group meeting where both Xavier and I explained to the new programmers how the code is structured and how games integrate into the system as a whole.

(1 hr)

                Last, I went ahead and made a grey box idea for the water gun game that we came up with at our meeting. This is simply a proof of concept. The great part of doing this was that it showed myself how easily we can reuse assets from our other mini games. I reused scripts from the mech game and several others to create the grey box shown below. Shooting the red targets will move them upwards. In the future we want to expand on this to possibly a race between the humans and the aliens. The grey box is made, but not integrated into the entire game.

 (2 hrs)

Content Positive (Duplicate hours from above):

-          Group organization tools are setup by myself and ready to go! (1 hr)

-          The Team Pipeline Doc is complete and gives the group a go to document for team organization and how to integrate new games into Alien Arcade. I created this. (2 hrs)

-          Our first group meeting was an excellent start to getting the group’s mini game ideas flowing. (1 hr)

-          A grey box for a water gun game was made by myself. (2 hrs)

Content Negative

-          None

Total Hours for the week: 6 hrs

Tags: Idea creation, Team Pipeline, Team Setup, GDD, Slack, Perforce, Team Integration, PPJ