Joseph Santos Week 9 PPJ and Post Mortem

This week, I just had to finish textures for any fbx in the currently in the build. That meant importing a transparent trexture for ufo in refuel and a texture for the popcorn machine in pop corn popper. That was the end of my art production for this week and the entire term. The rest of the week I spent time helping my team gather play testers for both the playtests on Wednesday with infinite skies as well as alien arcade's own individual play test on Monday. I created the event on facebook and constantly blasted it out to every drexel group in hopes to get as many people possible. During the play test, I've captured some footage for Cory's video.

Pros:
Finish tasks in art backlog and closed it.
Got enough playtesters for the game this week
Cons:
wished I could have helped more with any other art asset that needed polishing
Event I created in facebook to get people for play test didn't draw a lot of people as I hoped. Even though we met our quota, I wished we got more people.

Hours:
Finished textures for fbx:
ufo - imported = .5
popcorn texture = 1

Getting people for play test(posting posters, sending invites) = 2

Attending play test and getting additional footage = 1

Total hours: 4.5

Personal Post Mortem:
This term was a bit rough for me. In addition to this class, I had other production heavy classes as doing the co-op interviews. At times I felt being pulled in 3 or 4 different directions with these projects and as result as I fell behind at times. However, I was not the only one in team suffering from being over burden with stuff and together, everyone pulled through this term to deliver on most of our promises for this build.

Problems:

Time management: 1 Production class is enough work for a student but working on 3, I found myself exhausted each day that I would fall behind schedule. I also had to do interviews for co-op and usually after doing those and traveling to them, I wouldn't feel able to do anything else for the rest of day. Not only would better time management would serve me better but also maybe not signing up for 6 classes this term. Lesson is not to take on too much.

Playtesting: Getting player testers for our game was a big problem most people faced, especially on the motion base. For me personally, I was usually never available when we scheduled playtesting on the motion base since I other classes around those times. I tried to make up for that by spamming our website to various friends, families, and game dev facebook groups, asking them to download the build and take a survey. Turns out I need work trying to write better posting to make people curious about our game and willing to give 4 minutes of their time to play the game.

Some mis-communicaiton: This was a problem that popped up every now and then. Usually I use Trello as a reminder of what I have to do. However, some art assets I did or created wrong. That was due to me misunderstanding the instrucitons, whether written or verbal. Luckly, whenever I screw something up, I was able to fix it and turn the correct asset in before the deadline. Again, this problem popped up every once in a while. Not a major problem but something to note.

Success:

Teamwork: When Moo diary team from last term got absorbed into Alien Arcade, everyone got well. A week or 2 into the term, the team was shown working well together. Everyone did their best to deliver what they ask and for the most part, we gave updates with each other on slack, letting known what was done or needed.

Art: For the most part, I was able to deliver on crucial art assets needed from me. By the end of term, any art asset asked form me is in the build. Also, I was able to catch some errors with other fbx not made by me and fix them.

In summation, despite being overwhelmed with classes and interviews, everyone was still able to deliver a solid build and I am proud to have been on this team.

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. 

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. 

Tj Heiney Week 7 Journal PPJ, Blog post 7, GMAP 378

This week was focused on moving things towards the beta version. I updated the texture on the fuel hose to include the pink texture. I also implemented the fuel bar from refueled. This was the most important task as the aliens and humans need to have a visual way to determine the levels of fuel being drain. I realized today that I forgot to take out the written text fuel levels. We are moving away from this textual UI for more visual image.

I also started the game where you launch yourself. I started building off of the shooting gallery. Through tweaking this, I have it so you can launch yourself instead of the ball.

Total content hours: 4

Joseph Santos week 6 PPJ

For this week, I textured several objects in the game as well create one object for popcorn popper. Part of texturing was doing the uvs of existing games. For example, how to fix model and uv for water gun. There was also the problem of the maya project I had been using to create the fbx was corrupted since it was on awexpress when ransomware attack. However, I was able to meet my objectives for week.

Pros:
finish everything set out to do in status report

Cons:
files corruption and fixing uvs

hours:
popcorn popper lid and uv:
1 hour
fix water gun uv and texture:
3 hours
fix hose fbx and texture:
3 hours
Total hours:
7

Tj Heiney, Week 6 Journal PPJ, Blog post 6, GMAP 378

Add art to Refueled and fix movement:
I updated the art for Refueled to fit the beta. This required me to tweak some of the scripts and placement of items. I also needed to fix the movement for refueled. A lot of the issues with Refueled were fixed when I switched over to using AddForce() for the movement. John and I had originally attempted to do this when I started creating Refueled but hit a strange bug. I did a lot of testing to see if the bug would reoccur but I could not replicate this in the most recent build. I did a lot of tweaking and moving things around in an attempt to make things better.

I still need to add the progress bar that Vince has implemented. I think Refueled is really close to being done and ready for gold build. On the art side, It needs some instructions tweaked, a model textured, and the positioning for the first person fuel nozzle needs to be changed.

The controls and movement are much improved but I think tweaks still need to be made. The play space is too large and makes catching the aliens a little hard.

(2 hours)

Add art to Shooting Gallery and fix movement:

Shooting Gallery uses the same movement as Refueled. The logic is the same so I needed to tweak and update Shooting Gallery as I updated and tweaked Refueled. I did not tighten up or try to tighten up the movement for Shooting Gallery. I left the controls very flighty. The game is short and I think the floaty nature feels better and more challenging. This may need to be tweaked based on feedback.

I also added the art which looks good. Some things may change in later builds because I scrounged up art from other places in the game. Seems good to me though. 

  

(2 hours) 

Positives

I got my games up to the Beta quality that we wanted.

Negatives

I was still pretty sick. 

Total Content Hours: 4 hours

Thomas Heiney, Week 2 PPJ, Blog Post 2, GMAP 378

Started Basic Grey Box for Refueled. 

I started the grey box for the Refueled game. This was the basic layout for movement and world creation. I was able to just create simple objects and move them around. It was a little difficult to get movement correct in the current system. John and I met online to try and figure this issue out. The way I was doing movement (copied from Space Aim) was causing the vehicles to bounce off the wall in weird directions. I attempted to come up with a simple win condition but wasn't sure how we should do this. 

Positive
The basic layout was created. 

Negative
The movement bug cost me a lot of time. 

Total: 6 hours.