Showing posts with label Tj Heiney. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Tj Heiney. Show all posts

Monday, March 7, 2016

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. 

Tuesday, March 1, 2016

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. 

Wednesday, February 24, 2016

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

Monday, February 15, 2016

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

Wednesday, January 20, 2016

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.