Ryan Crim, Week 9 Journal PPJ, Blog post 9, GMAP 378

Personal Post-Mortem:

As we approach the end of development for Alien Arcade, it is as good a time as ever to reflect on how it went. In general, having joined the development after it had already been worked on for a term meant that there would inevitably be a lot of ups and downs as not only did I have to become accustomed to how the game was currently working, but I also had to bring a different prospective to improve/change it up.

Issues

Concepting

The biggest regret I have regarding this project was missing the first group meeting since it was on a Sunday at the time (mentioned in my first PPJ). In this meeting, most of the brainstorming for how Alien Arcade should evolve as well as concepting game ideas took place so the majority (about 80-90%) of the mini/micro-games made during this production were pitched to some degree in this meeting. In my opinion, some aspects of the game seemed to be ignored to an extent and had to be handled later in the process (such as scoring), and some of the game ideas seemed to be missing something, and I think I could have been an asset to bring up early issues. In general, I think not enough was done during the concepting phase and that caused issues later where myself or others in the group were second guessing what exactly needed to be done for a few different aspects of the game. Looking toward the future, I definitely never intend on missing the concepting phase of a project again because it is the most important part in determining how smooth the production goes.

Soft spoken

In the same vein, one issue that tends to plague me on group projects in general is the fact that I am naturally soft spoken. For the first half of the project, the combination of this and the fact that we were not consistently inspecting the progress of the game as a team in a meaningful way resulted in a lot of issues existing for much longer than they should have. Furthermore, there were situations where I feel as though extra/unnecessary work was being put into aspects of the game and I should have spoken up more to prevent what I considered time sinks. For example, while the resulting alien model and animations look really great in Draw at Noon, I still hold the belief that the four or five weeks it took to make them (especially the time spent on the complex animations) was not worth the effort since the animations only appears in a single five second game and it took away time from improving aspects of a lot of the other games. Toward the end, I got a bit better about speaking up and mentioning my thoughts/issues, but I think it may have been too little, too late in some cases. Therefore, moving onto future projects, I will definitely try to continue to improve my communication skills and speak up more.

Motion base

Despite the fact that this whole game was being designed for the motion base, I was not able to regularly attend it considering that the open hours on Wednesday conflicted with my schedule and I was generally busy throughout the week working on Senior Design, the multitude of changes for this project and assignments for other classes. Therefore, while I was putting a lot of effort into each of my mini/micro-games to try to make the motions as obvious as possible, I was never really able to test them to make sure they were working as I wanted them to. Furthermore, I was not receiving solid feedback about the motions since playtesting on the motion base was sparse. I definitely wish I would have been able to test more on the motion base (although my motion sickness would have made that tough anyways).

Successes

Mini/Micro-game creation

The most fun and rewarding aspect of production for this game was definitely creating and working on my own individual mini and micro-games. Over the course of the term, I ended up creating four micro-games (Abducktion, Draw at Noon, Dance Off and Whack-An-Alien) and one mini-game (G-Switch), which I believe makes up almost a quarter of the games. This included setting up each scene, writing all of the scripts and, in some cases, creating art assets. With all of these different games, I was able to test my prior knowledge of Unity development as well as discover a whole slew of new techniques and perspectives that I will be able to carry on with me to future projects. For example, prior to working on this game, I knew that sound effects were important, but for a mini/micro-game collection they are crucial since players can heavily depend on sound cues to take in information without having to break their concentration from the action on screen.

Bringing consistency to the game

Having learned of the importance of prefabs in earlier game classes and utilizing them in previous projects/games to make updating reoccurring objects (such as UI) a cinch, I was surprised at the lack of prefabs when I joined the team, especially considering that this game would have a lot of different scenes for the multiple mini-games. Therefore, over the course of production, I made sure to create relevant and useful prefabs that are applied in each of the scenes, which made updating aspects of the game a lot simpler. The biggest example of a prefab that has saved a lot of work is the Dashboard UI prefab, since it has been updated many times throughout the course of production and required almost no effort to update each time after I added in the initial prefab to each scene. In addition to UI prefabs, I helped bring consistency to the game in many different forms, including updating the scoring logic (humans vs. aliens, centralized score values, high score saving, etc.) as well as made sure that each game had their own unique music and that said music was balanced between all scenes. Moving forward, I definitely intend to continue to make sure every project I work on properly keeps everything consistent and as centralized as possible.

Meeting deadlines

Another aspect of the production that I am happy with was that I was generally able to meet all of my deadlines that were set. The only cases I did not end up hitting my weekly deadlines were when I was waiting for an art asset that was not yet finished. In those cases, I made sure to find another aspect of the game to work on so that I was not wasting time. An example of this would be the few weeks I was waiting for the alien model and animations to be completed, so instead I made improvements to the general structure, such as updating the InputManager to be more organized, creating a custom version of Unity’s RigidbodyFPSController to easily change its inputs and adding the ScoreChange prefab. Also, I made it a point to help anyone else out with any issues that they were running into. In general, this project provided good practice for setting realistic estimates for work, a skill that I have been working on since my first Co-op.

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Content with Hours (Examples included):

With the second beta out of the way, this week marks the sprint toward gold build. Therefore, a lot of this week consisted of fixing small issues and polishing up each of my games as it was needed as well as touching up different aspects of the experience as a whole.

Over the course of the production, one thing that has seemed to be neglected has been audio, especially the music, with some games still lacking music or reusing music from other games. Therefore, since Corey had already downloaded a bunch of music clips from playonloop.com a few weeks ago, I went through each game, added the song that fit best and made a note of all of these in a document. In addition, I know that there has been serious audio balancing issues in the game, so I added a prefab to play the background music in each game. That way we could manage the volume for all of the music from a single place and to hopefully keep the audio a bit more consistent. (1.50 hrs)

Moving on to my individual games, I started by making a few updates to Whack-An-Alien. Based on the feedback from showing it in class and a small bit of playtesting, the obvious issues that were occurring dealt with the alien moving a bit too fast and the controls being not as intuitive as they could be. Switching the speed was a matter of changing a variable and testing, and switching the controls consisted of changing the input strings in the Inspector to allow human #1 to control moving the hammer and human #2 to control banging the hammer. Also, changing the controls made it necessary to update the human control image with Angela’s help. Lastly, there was a suggestion to add a green light to appear in the hole that the alien was rising from to make it more obvious and it made sense so I added it as shown in Figure 1. (1.00 hr)

Figure 1. Screenshot of Whack-An-Alien with green light and updated controls

Next, I made a couple of different changes to Dance Off to try to make it clearer, easier and more consistent. In terms of making the game clearer, I added team name bars to each side of the game arena and changed the background color of each side to green for the aliens and pink for the humans as shown in Figure 2. Furthermore, I updated the coloring of the notes that scroll so that are more readable against the background. In terms of making the game easier, I made the offset for a correct note more lenient, so in the case of the humans it is about 3.5x more lenient and for the aliens it is 2.5x more. Lastly, I made the controls of the game more consistent with the controls of other games, such as Refueled, Space Aim and Stello Says, by making human #1 responsible for the vertical axis and human #2 responsible for the horizontal axis. (1.25 hrs)

Figure 2. Screenshot of updated Dance Off game

For G-Switch, there was only one real issue and that was the fact that it could be difficult to tell when you are nearing the end of the current platform you are walking along. Originally, I intended for the platforms in the upcoming section to be the guide, however, with the addition of the alien instructions panel the next platforms may not always be readily visible. Therefore, I added transparent pink zones at the end of the jump-able platforms in order to try to more visibly let the player know they are reaching the end and should jump as shown in Figure 3. Furthermore, I made sure these pink zones were short, so if the player thinks they need to hurdle this then they would still have plenty of jump to make it to the next platform. (1.00 hr)

Figure 3. Screenshot of G-Switch with transparent pink jump zones

The last of my games that I made changes for this week was Draw at Noon. While discussing the current state of the game, the team was adamant about how unfair this game was to the humans. Therefore, in addition to adding a fourth arrow sign for the aliens to press as shown in Figure 4, I also made the signs prevent showing the arrows to press until the instruction bar disappears. In terms of cosmetics, I updated the animation script to also change the alien’s texture so it would show different emotions depending on the state of the game. Also, I fixed a visual glitch that was making it appear as though the human’s bullet bounced off the ground due to the recoil motion. To fix this, I moved the location of the bullet’s start point forward so it would not be affected as greatly by the camera as it recoils back. (0.75 hr)

Figure 4. Screenshot of Draw at Noon with four signs and angry alien

Lastly, toward the end of this week, Angela submitted a HUD gradient that makes the in-game UI (score and time bars) stand out despite the background of the game as shown in all of the game screenshots above. In addition to adding this gradient in the form of a prefab to each scene, I updated the ScoreBar prefab to remove the temporary transparent black box around it and I updated the TimeBar prefab to instead use the pink to green gradient version that Angela had created. (1.00 hr)

Content Positive:

- Made sure every game has their own unique music

- Balanced the background music generally between the menus and games

- Fixed various issues in Whack-An-Alien, Dance Off, G-Switch and Draw at Noon

- Updated in-game UI (scorebar, timebar and HUD gradient)

- Helped resolve issues in others’ games

- Got five playtesters (off of the motion base)

Content Negative:

- N/A

Total Hours for the week: 6.50 hrs

Tj Heiney, Week 9 Journal PPJ, Blog post 9, GMAP 378

This week was a lot of clean up. Refueled still needed some tweaking in the form of balance. To further balance the game, I shrunk the play space. This meshed well with the slow speed of the Alien ship. Ryan and I fixed the sound so it would loop when you were draining fuel.

Hours: 1 hour



Shooting Gallery had to have the alien cut out replaced with the 3d model. I finally got instructions in for both games.

Hours: 1 hour

Total Content Hours: 2 hrs

Post Mortem:

The project went well enough but there were many issues with project management. We never really had a firm leader and thus no one ever really knew what was going on. I ended up asking Ryan Crim what to do most weeks. The work load was really unbalanced as well so there were some weeks where things didn't get done or done on time. Time was a big issue as well since most art wasn't done in time to be implemented for the work. Usually the programmers would do the work over the weekend and art wasn't done until Tuesday. It was hard to find the art as well. 

Ryan Crim, Week 8 Journal PPJ, Blog post 8, GMAP 378

Content with Hours (Examples included):

Getting closer to the end of this project, my main focus this week was to clean up different aspects of the game structure and my individual games, as well as implement a new one if I got the chance.

To begin the week, I tried to make the game more uniform by adding the pink bar of pre-game instructions I had in my mini/micro-games into each of the others as shown in Figure 1. This required modifying the timer and stateholder scripts to consider when a game actually “starts” (instruction bar disappears) as well as updating the scripts for each game to consider this new logic. Furthermore, there was the issue of the low amount of points the game awarded from playtesting, so I centralized and increased the point values and updated all the game scripts to use these variables so that the point values can be easily modified. Lastly, in terms of structure, I noticed that when I updated the transition screen to compare the scores from the last game to decide what music should play (as part of my score changes from the last build), I accidentally had the updating of previous scores in an if-block so it did not update every time as it should and does now. (2.50 hrs)

Figure 1. Screenshot of pre-game instruction bar in existing Runnerz game

Moving on, I made a few additions and updates to my each of my existing games listed below...

• Abducktion (0.25 hr) 
• Added sound effects for X-ray and cup swap (whoosh) 
• Draw at Noon (2.00 hrs) 
• Created an animation controller and added/modified scripts to handle animating the alien as shown in Figure 2 
• Modified motion of human knockback to coincide with the alien’s as well as to keep the camera on the animating alien 
• Fixed issue where alien would shoot itself after Ricardo shortened the transitions 
• G-Switch (0.25 hr) 
• Slowed spinner speed to make it easier for aliens to affect the game 
• Added sound effect for jump to make it easier for Human 2 to know when to switch gravity 
• Dance Off (0.50 hr) 
• Modified motions of player object and added slight motions to camera to try to get more consistent motion and feedback

Figure 2. Animating alien model in Draw at Noon

After modifying my existing games, I had a bit of time to create a game based off of the Whac-A-Mole arcade machine (cleverly called Whack-An-Alien) as shown in Figure 3. Just like the real machine, moles (or aliens in this case) randomly pop up out of the nine holes. The humans need to position the hammer over the corresponding hole (by holding in the correct direction(s)) and slam it down on the alien in order to get points (see the screenshot for controls). After a short time of not being hit by the hammer, though, the alien will retract into its hole and the aliens will be awarded points. Aliens continue to pop up randomly until time runs out. The work for this game consisted of building the scene up with all of the assets (including modelling a simple Whac-A-Mole-esque machine in Maya), writing the two scripts to handle the moles and the hammer, and retrieving the background music for it (http://www.playonloop.com/2016-music-loops/dolphin-ride/). (3.50 hrs)

Figure 3. Screenshot from Whack-An-Alien micro-game

Lastly, since we are nearing the end of the project, we were required to watch a post-mortem presentation from the GDCVault in order to familiarize ourselves with the mindset we should have in thinking about how the project went well and how it could have gone better. After watching parts of a few different presentations, I finally settled on watching Chris Harvey’s “Learning From Our Mistakes: A Post-Mortem of Guacamelee!” all the while taking notes. Below you can find my summary of these notes. (1.75 hrs)

As a co-founder of DrinkBox Studios, Chris had a prime viewpoint to see how the process of creating their first game, About a Blob, compared to their process for creating their much more successful third game, Guacamelee, and thereby outlined what changed to bring this success. Within this presentation, Chris split the process into three main stages: Concepting, Development and Marketing.

In the Concepting stage, there were a few different aspects that needed to be considered, including choosing a concept, defining the game and finding the fun. In terms of choosing a concept, they changed up their process by having members of the studio in all different departments meet and create single page pitch sheets outlining a game idea complete with genre, platform, target audience, story and mechanics. Therefore, they could select the game idea that the consensus enjoyed and refine the selected idea with pieces from other pitches to make it even better. Moving on to defining the game, DrinkBox refused to enter production until they understood and nailed down the basics of the game and had as few loose ends as possible. That way the team could stay focused and synchronized meaning that time would not be wasted later on second guessing decisions. Lastly, in terms of Concepting, Chris mentioned that in order to find the fun while keeping consistency, the fundamentals of the game should be conservative and individual elements should instead be riffed on. There is no need to reinvent the wheel for every aspect of your game, and it is better to have existing similar games to see what works and what does not, since that could end up wasting a lot of valuable time in the process.

In the Development stage, there were also multiple aspects that needed to be considered, including pre-production, deadlines, personality and charm, toolset and target platform. Starting with pre-production, Chris mentioned the importance of having a small, dedicated team (from different disciplines) with clear goals and roles to get the process rolling and keep it focused. He also stressed that the leads of the project should not be working externally or this focus could easily be thrown off resulting in rebooting and second guessing. Lastly, he mentioned the importance of keeping constant discussion and to work on small pieces at a time instead of trying to create the whole game at once. This led directly into the idea of setting incremental deadlines with small and obtainable goals. On this front, Chris also noted the effectiveness at making the deadlines external to publishers/the public, since it would put pressure on the team to actually get it done, allow the team to see what each person is capable of and to identify what in the project is not as important as originally thought. Despite having deadlines, though, the DrinkBox team found the importance of switching to the mindset of saying “yes” to more of the team’s ideas so their personality could define it. Therefore, they would have team meetings to see in-progress work from all departments and accept feedback/suggestions as well as encouraged experimenting, which created a more positive atmosphere and revealed unexpected talents from individuals on the team. In addition to being more open and creative, the team realized the importance of making the development faster, easier and more efficient in any way they could. Therefore, when they found a deficiency or an iteration process to be slow, they made modifications to the process to improve the situation, such as creating a programmer-driven, artist tunable system to create visual effects instead of relying as heavily on the artists. Lastly, in terms of determining the target platform and the release process, Chris said they had basically no change in the result (still self-published), but they did change their attitude to question presumptions and to put proper thought into it before making a decision.

Moving onto the last part of the process, Marketing, Chris laid out the importance of making the game as visible as possible through the game reveal, public relations and the launch. Starting with the game reveal, DrinkBox was initially scared to show About a Blob early due to changes possibly confusing people and the belief that showing a game not polished enough would ruin the reputation of their game, however, this resulted in a lack of anticipation for the game. For Guacamelee, though, they took the opposite approach and announced the game just out of pre-production with an announcement trailer that was not perfect, but it still built excitement. Furthermore, they showed the game off as early and often as possible anywhere they could. This lead to them to continuously work with a PR firm to help with the marketing side. Chris mentioned that there was not much media coverage for About a Blob since they were trying to do it themselves and put it off until the end. Considering marketing is a huge part of selling a game, it makes much more sense to hire people who know what they are doing, instead of trying to figure out it out yourself and wasting time that could be spent on the game. Lastly, Chris discussed the importance of planning and taking the launch extremely seriously, including a press tour, reviews and store placement/timing.

Overall, Chris started out the presentation sounding a little nervous, but I think he definitely warmed up throughout it. The information provided and the idea to compare the process of creating a successful game to one that was not so successful really helped drive home the points he wanted to make. This presentation definitely brought a different set of ideas that I never really considered and I plan on putting more thought into the process next time I work on a game.

Content Positive:

- Implemented a bit more uniformity with pre-game instructions and centralizing point values

- Added to and fixed up various parts of my four existing games (including alien animations in Draw at Noon)

- Created Whack-An-Alien micro-game

- Watched a very interesting and helpful post-mortem presentation

Content Negative:

- N/A

Total Hours for the week: 10.75 hrs

Cory Zicolella, Week 7 PPJ, Blog Post 7

This week is a bit harder to calculate, as I sort of did everything at once.

-Video Editing (4 hours)
-BMG Finding (In and out during renders of the video)
-Playtest Analysis (1 hour)

This week, as the team discovered we had a video sell draft due, I decided to tackle it.  The GDC panel we presented to about a month ago had used a testimonial video to try to pitch to the judges, so we used that as the base.  It definitely required some updates to reflect the game, and also needed better editing work done in general.

However, this process proved far more difficult than it should have.  Namely, I ran into many video issues.  The plus side to this is while waiting for the multiple renderings to finish, I had alot of combined time to search for background music files.  After awhile of rendering troubleshooting (to no avail), I managed to get together all of the music that we'd need so far.

The first of these issues was that I had some de-synced audio for some of the clips.  Very well, fixed easily enough.  Took about 15 minutes and done.  That was the easiest problem, though.  The second was that I knew in its current state, the video needed captions because we captured it in a noisy area.  So I spent at least an hour (if not more) using Adobe's captioning tool, following their official steps.  When it got to the final step for caption display, it simply wasn't working as advertised.  I asked around for some people's opinions, and they didn't know how exactly to solve it either (most people never used the actual captioning tool, but just title cards).  So that was an effort that ultimately went wasted for this draft because I couldn't find anyway to get them to appear.  The final and largest problem I ran into was that when previewing or exporting the video draft, it would constantly get stuck at 62-64% with an 'Unknown Error'.  Because it didn't know itself what the problem was, I didn't ether.  I had to sift through all my footage that would be around the 60% area, check settings, change encoders, render in different ways--when it came down to it, after too many attempts, I disabled two video layers and it exported fine.  This leads me to believe that the computer I was working on either didn't have enough RAM to render out the edits I wanted to (it was a heavily edited portion of the video), or there was some sort of RAM cap on Adobe Premiere.

That eventually got finished though, and I made efficient use of my rendering time to find music, as I said above.  This week wasn't perhaps as productive as the last, but it definitely had me ripping my hair out.

Content Positive
- I got the Video Draft Finished
-Unique BGM for all games now yay!

Content Negative
-So. Many. Premiere. Editing. Issues.
-WHY DON'T THE COMPUTERS HAVE ENOUGH RAM IN THE GRAD LABS

Total Time Spent - 5 Hours

Ryan Crim, Week 7 Journal PPJ, Blog post 7, GMAP 378

Content with Hours (Examples included):

My main task for this week was to update the scoring in the game to make it more visual to players without requiring a lot of time to look at it. To do this, as a team we decided to split up the score in two different scores (one score for the humans and another score for the aliens), so that we could implement a tug-of-war style score bar. The way that it works is that depending on the difference in scores between the two teams, the bar fills with more of the winning team’s color as shown in Figure 1. In addition to implementing the score bar prefab to add to each game, I also updated the Score and ScoreChange scripts to properly work with the new scoring system as well as went through the scripts for each individual game and reworked them to handle the new system and to add points for humans/aliens accordingly. After this extensive reworking of the games, I went through and tested each one to make sure that all of the updates work as expected. Furthermore, I updated the High Score scene to properly display each team’s final score and to show the top three high scores for both the aliens and the humans as shown in Figure 2. I also noticed that the scores were not being saved anywhere as well, so I updated the high score script to load from and save to XML files for each team’s high scores. (5.50 hrs)

Figure 1. In-game score bar showing change after a win for the humans

 

Figure 2. High score screen showing scores for both teams

After working on the scoring, I had a bit of time to flesh out a quick idea that came up to implement a DDR-style micro-game. The main gist of the game is that the screen is split into two with the aliens on the left and the humans on the right as shown in Figure 3. “Notes” are spawned in the center of the screen and move toward each team’s input area. If the player inputs the correct direction (see screenshot for controls) when the note is over top of the corresponding input area, the team is awarded +2 points and the note sparks a bit (seen by the green note on the alien’s side). If the wrong input is entered, the input is entered too early/late or the note reaches the edge of the screen, the note fades away and no points are awarded (seen by the rightmost red note on the human’s side). The notes continue to spawn until there is no time left. In terms of the work required for this, it involved writing each of the scripts, building up the scene with all of the necessary art assets and retrieving the current background music (http://www.playonloop.com/2010-music-loops/95/). In order to make the work a bit easier, I salvaged bits and pieces of the code from each of my other games, those being Abducktion, Draw at Noon and G-Switch. Some of the repurposed code included the analog input logic from Abducktion and the object rotation from Draw at Noon/G-Switch. (5.00 hrs)

 

Figure 3. Screenshot from Dance Off micro-game

Lastly, I made a couple of modifications to Draw at Noon. The first of which was adding in the textured alien model that was being worked on the past few weeks. The issue at this point, though, is that the current model does not have any rigging or animation as I believe it is still be worked on. Therefore, as you can see in Figure 4, the t-posed alien looks out of place, however, it does look better than the existing 2D placeholder. In addition, I made a couple of slight changes to how the bullet works, including updating its speed, starting it exactly in the barrel and changing the color of depending on who shot it (pink for humans, green for aliens). (0.50 hr)

 

Figure 4. Screenshot of Draw at Noon with textured alien model

Content Positive:
- Reworked the scoring to be split between the two teams to create more competition
- Added visual score bar prefab to each game to make it easier to tell who is winning
- Updated High Scores to show saved scores for both teams
- Added Dance Off micro-game
- Added textured alien model to Draw at Noon
- Modified bullet behavior to improve it slightly

Content Negative:
- Still waiting to see if the rigged/animated alien model happens

Total Hours for the week: 11.00 hrs

Ryan Crim, Week 6 Journal PPJ, Blog post 6, GMAP 378

Content with Hours (Examples included):

This week I spent most of my time creating and updating universal aspects of the game, while also making some updates to my own micro/mini-games.

To start the week, I worked on creating an easy way to show score additions/subtractions to the players. Therefore, I created a ScoreChange prefab that consists of a UI text component with a script that animates and deletes it when done, as well as plays an audio clip depending on whether points were added or subtracted. I also updated the existing Score script to contain the overloaded AddScore() methods below that update the score and loads the ScoreChange prefab into the scene at the provided position (or by default, Vector.zero which is the middle of the screen). Lastly, I updated each of the scripts for Abducktion, Draw at Noon and G-Switch to call these methods to put the ScoreChange prefab to work, an example of which you can see in Figure 1. (1.25 hrs)

// Updates the total score and displays the change to the screen

public static void AddScore(int amount)

{

AddScore(amount, Vector2.zero);

}

// Updates the total score and displays the change to the screen at provided position

public static void AddScore(int amount, Vector2 position)

{

// Update score

totalScore += amount;

// Create and set up the score change text for this amount

GameObject sc = (GameObject)Instantiate(Resources.Load("Universal/ScoreChange"), position, Quaternion.identity);

sc.name = "ScoreChange";

sc.transform.SetParent(GameObject.Find("Canvas").transform, false);

sc.GetComponent<ScoreChange>().initText(amount);

}

 

Figure 1. Fading Score Change text displaying after humans win Abducktion

Next, I continued trying to bring a bit more organization to the project by creating a Dashboard UI prefab with a child to hold the humans’ controls image. Unlike before where each game needed to update the dashboard if there was a modification made to it, now the modification can be made in one place and automatically updates in each game. This already proved helpful when Angela pushed the next dashboard with the alien instruction panel (shown in Figure 1 above) as I was able to update the prefab without having to change it in each game. Furthermore, I did go through each game and added the provided human and alien control images that Angela has created so far for the new dashboard. In my opinion, the alien instruction panel is too large and intrusive at this time, but I believe this is something that we will discuss in the upcoming week.  (1.00 hr) 

In terms of changes for my individual games, I started with some updates and additions to Abducktion. The first change I made was to bring more visibility to the duck when X-Ray mode is activated as it had been noted in playtesting that the duck was extremely tough to see in contrast to the tractor beam light and the sand textured ground. Therefore, I created a simple X-Ray sprite of the duck, as shown in Figure 2, that contrasts much more than the normal duck sprite. In addition, I added the new abducting spaceman visual timer prefab to Abducktion (as shown above in Figure 1 on the right-hand side) and made some modifications to the Abducktion scripts in order to get them to properly behave with it. Lastly, I perused the website that this team has used for music loops and added in the free shorter edit of this loop (http://www.playonloop.com/2012-music-loops/air-ducts/) in order to provide more atmosphere to the game. (1.25 hrs)

Figure 2. Sprite of duck for X-Ray mode in Abducktion

Moving onto Draw at Noon, the first thing I did was make small modifications to the arrow signs that the aliens need to press by changing the pressed color from pink to green, shown in Figure 3, to align more with theme of the game with humans represented by pink and aliens represented by green. Furthermore, in the screenshot, you can see that I also added the abducting spaceman visual timer prefab to the game and made modifications to the Draw at Noon scripts to behave with it. Lastly, similar to Abducktion, I added a free short edit music loop (http://www.playonloop.com/2013-music-loops/bridge-over-darkness/) to the game. (0.75 hr)

Figure 3. Updated Draw at Noon scene

For my last game so far, G-Switch, I started by creating some art to help expand on the atmosphere of the game. This included creating a very simple portal model complete with a spinning portal as well as simple art for the spinner to make it look a bit cleaner as seen in Figure 4. The portal required a simple script to rotate the portal, however, the spinner logic needed to be slightly modified to handle the sixteen specific angles that the zone can be in as opposed to the old logic that allowed the zone to spawn on any degree. Similarly to my other two games, I also added the abducting spaceman visual timer, updated the G-Switch scripts to behave with it, and added a free short edit music loop (http://www.playonloop.com/2014-music-loops/twin-turbo/) to it. (2.00 hrs)

Figure 4. Updated G-Switch scene

Content Positive:
- Created ScoreChange and Dashboard with alien instruction panel prefabs
- Updated art in Abducktion, Draw at Noon and G-Switch
- Added visual timer prefab to each of my games
- Added background music to each of my games
 
Content Negative:
- Alien instruction panel may be too large

Total Hours for the week: 6.25 hrs