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

Ryan Crim, Week 1 Journal PPJ, Blog post 1, GMAP 378

Content with Hours (Examples included):

After meeting as a whole team at the end of the first class, I took a little bit of time to read over the GDD and familiarize myself with the layout of the Perforce and Slack channels. (0.25 hr)

Having a better understanding of the game and process, I tried to brainstorm some rough game ideas as well as quickly look into some implementation ideas. One of these ideas involved creating a tilting platform with a maze (see idea 2), which was not too difficult to implement thanks to this helpful link (http://catlikecoding.com/unity/tutorials/maze/). However, there were a lot of early collision issues that would need to be worked through to make this idea solid. My rough implementation for High Strikers (idea 1), went a little better, but there are also cases where the hammer collides a bit weird with its surroundings as well. Below are short descriptions of each of the rough game ideas I had. (1.75 hrs)

1. Throughout the arena, there are High Strikers (strength machines to hit with hammer) that the humans must go around and trigger to show their strength. The first player walks around while the second player controls the hammer. The aliens could modify the position of the High Striker machines or disorient the playing field in some way. Furthermore, if it were decided to have actual micro-games, then the idea of moving around could be eliminated and the players each control an axis of the hammer to hit one High Striker before time runs out.
   
   Figure 1. Screenshot of rough High Striker game
   
   
2. The humans are placed inside of a maze on a tilting platform. By tilting the platform, the humans slide their way through the maze trying to get to the end goal that is placed on the opposite side of the maze. Meanwhile, the alien abilities could include swapping between two mazes every so often to try to throw off the humans rotating the platform to change the controls.
   
   
   Figure 2. Screenshots of rough maze game switching between mazes
   
   
3. The humans need to get through all of the crowds to make it to their favorite ride, in the style of Frogger. One player is in control of moving, while the other is in charge of rotating the view to see where incoming obstacles are. The aliens can slightly disorient the humans to slow their progress. 
4. The humans are in charge of a face painting booth, so they are given a stencil to fly above and try to match with paint. The first human controls the flight while the second controls when the paint flows out. The aliens affect the “person” being painted, such as having them sneeze, etc. to try to mess up the paint job. 

Furthermore, on this past Sunday, we had our first group meeting that I tried to remote into since it is not an easy task for me to make it down to Drexel on the weekend. I was able to connect into the Skype call with John and Xavi, however, there were connection issues that caused all of the voices coming through to sound extremely robot-y and not understandable at all until eventually the call dropped. (0.25 hr)

One note I did get from the meeting was that the programmers were tasked with implementing a scene to show the correct handling of the TransformWrapper as well as score and timer updating, so I took my High Striker scene and added it to the project to show that I could implement those features (see Figure 1 above). In general, the process of adding a mini-game to the system was not difficult, but there was a tad bit of confusion with how some features of the structure work. (0.50 hr)

Content Positive:

- Gained an understanding of how to add a mini-game with a timer and score

- Brainstormed and roughed out a few very basic games ideas

Content Negative:

- Remoting into the first meeting did not work, therefore I missed most of the discussion

Total Hours for the week: 2.75 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