Angela Buchanan, Week 3 PPJ, Blog Post 3, GMAP 378

Interface, 3D art, 2D art, 2D animations

I was able to mostly complete the slot machine this week, however, I didn't realize unity didn't have an easy way to implement masking. Therefore, some minor adjustments will need to be made to the base so that icon can fully scroll downward before disappearing. 

Unfortunately I had the animation frames done before knowing this, so I will have to go back and modify the slot and update the frames.

When creating the sprite sheets for the slot machine, I was faced with minor set backs when trying to get the sheets to work properly in unity. The animations kept coming out shaky and not smooth.

Eventually I resolved the problem when I realized my dimensions were not in powers of two.

Fixing the dimensions seemed to fix the problem.

I did my best to update as many of the dash instructions as I could, but eventually I ran out of time and had to focus on other assignments for other classes.

Positive Content   

- Managed to get the slot machine sprite sheet working

- Fixes needed for the slot machine will be easy to implement

Negative Content

- Slot machine will require some minor edits for it to be usable

- Struggles with animations held me back a bit

Work and hours

Slot Machine and Animations (4 hr)

- Right now the bottom is too thin for icon to pass by without disappearing awkwardly, so I'll have to adjust the base. Other than that, the slot machine is complete.

- The screen above the slots are intentionally left blank to allow different messages to be displayed.

Cardboard Cutouts (1.5 hr)

- Just a simple collection of cardboard cutouts for use in the water-gun game.

- The UFO is the goal for both alien and humans while the spaceman and alien are the rising characters

Interface Update (.5 hr) 

- The modifications are simple, so they do not take very long. I toyed around with slanting and distorting the text, but all versions seemed off in comparison to the original. 

- Because of that, nothing much has changed other than size and minor reposistioning

Total Hours: 6 hrs

Chenghao Wang, Week 3 PPJ - Blog Post 1

GMAP377-001_PPJs_01

Chenghao Wang

Team 01

Early Programming Prepare  

As a first week in a group, everything seems to be in well-prepared. We are discussing our idea, building our website, making our first tech demo, and assigning different tasks to each individuals. 

Positive Content

• - Our initial idea of this project is very suitable for a game on a motion base like Drexel Ride.
• - The artists presented a high-level concept art idea, which is prefect for our game.  
• - Our tech demo is well-prepared by combining the mini games which we created last week. 

Negative Content

• - Not much coding work to do as a programmer. 

Work and hours

• - Discussed theme ideas with team (1 hour)
• - Coding practice. Learned and practice few coding examples, and be ready to achieve our initial idea by programming.  (3 hour)
• - Researched on the network connection between PC/Mac with iPad. (4 hour)

Angela Buchanan, Week 3 PPJ - Blog Post 1

Angela Buchanan, Week 3 Journal PPJ, Blog post 1

Early Concept Art 

Positive Content

-During the meeting there was good discussion about the narrative aspect of game, which helped direct my concept art decisions

-I feel that the images used in the concept art clearly communicates the direction I want to take for the game's theme.

-Not only did I find images for idea inspiration, but I manged to make a few sketches so that we can begin putting consideration into characters and environment.

-Overall the concept art will help the team define the narrative aspects of the game and the world it takes place in.

Negative Content

-I would've liked to get a wider variety of sketches completed.

-I also wish I could have completed the sketches earlier in the week to bounce more ideas off my team mates.

-There was a mix-up regarding who was doing concept art for one-pager.

Work and hours

• Organized files and structure of individual tech demo (1 hr)

 Restructured tech demo organization to make implementation easier.

• Discussed theme ideas with team (1 hr)

Discussed space alien theme park theme. Covered ideas such as the aliens' intentions and the humans' roles.

• Image search (1 hr)

Researched images to use as a starting point for determining style, theme, and color.

I mostly looked into retro sci-fi posters for inspiration. Vegas night life and Theme parks were added as inspiration as well.

A couple of examples

• Color analysis / Pallet creation.

I analyzed some of the images for color direction, then did brief research on color pallets being used.

•  Sketches (3 hrs)

to add more personality to the concept art sheet, I made a few sketches. One alien concept and a ship concept. I also did a colored sketch to test out one of the color pallets.

Total weekly hours: 8 hrs

Xavier Smith, Week 3 Journal PPJ, Blog post 1

Xavier Smith, Week 3 Journal PPJ, Blog post 1

Project Lead, Tech Demo, Game Design

Content With Hours

This week, I organized a group meeting where we discussed game design, game mechanics, breakdown of work, and group methodology. (1 hr)

Spoke with some members individually about their work and tasks they were assigned. (1 hr)

I complied my, Cory, and Angela's game into a single project and refined my and Cory's game and began working on a consistent UI and a menu system. (6 hrs)

       

                                         Stello says Screenshot                                                                                        Interdimensional Screenshot

Content With Examples 

In our group meeting, we discussed many facets of the game. Firstly, we discussed the breakdown of work and everyone was assigned their individual tasks and a regular

meeting time was arranged. We then delved into the story of the game, how we planned to connect all the mini-games, and various other nuances of the game such as boss battles and one-player vs multiplayer modes. Finally, we discussed how the group should communicate and our methods of doing work.

I spoke with some of the members regarding their tasks for the week, such as asking Cory for a simple intro screen, 

I spent most of my time making the team tech demo using assets given to me by Cory and Angela. I also looked for some placeholder UI elements. I added a few features to my game, as well as implementing shooting, adding a crosshair and targets, and refining the UI in Cory's game. Finally, I spent a lot of time trying to resolve UI issues such as improper scaling and trying to maintain some sort of consistency between games.

Mech Game Screenshot 

Positive (Hours duplicated from above)

- Meeting was productive and everyone was assigned/volunteered for work. Game story and Mechanics were fleshed out and meeting times established (1 hr)

-Everything was done by all members in a timely fashion and Cory finished website without needing any of my help

-Tech Demo came together well and can now leave mini-games, exit application, and scale with screen sizes without problem for the most part. (6 hr)

Negative

- CrossPlatformInput package in other projects gave me some trouble

- UI kept anchoring and scaling incorrectly (6 hr)

- One member did not show up to meetings and we have yet to hear anything from them 

Total Hours for the week: 8 hrs

Cory Zicolella, Week 3 PPJ - Getting Started

Website Creation/TroubleShooting - 4.5 hrs / 2 hrs

Website Content - 1 hrs

Rough Menu Art - 1 hrs

This week our group had a meeting where, together as a team, we discussed the general story behind our game and the driving force for doing what we want to do.  We each brainstormed for a bit, and had fun tossing around some ideas for some theoretically really concrete and fun mini games to add.  A few of us are including our prototypes from the last class meeting in the game and will restructure them to fit the current environment they need to be in.

After that, I volunteered responsibility for creating our team's website and essentially our project development's 'home base' -- Sadly, I don't want to put a screenshot of the website you're reading into the post, but I assure you this post's existence is proof that I (somewhat) did my job.  It definitely needs to look pretty still, and have more content, but that will all come at one point or another once we actually get our feet off the ground and have things to put in here.  For now, this site will do for my own sanity's sake.

I also volunteered to help Xavier with the very small job of creating prototype art for a concept menu.  It was nothing major, but I did have to revise it once.  The scrapped version is below:

The new version simply replaces what would be the buttons with the names of the games, and they are all separate images instead of one jpg.

Content Positive

• The website, I think, came together quite nicely. Right now it's simple but I have further plans. (4.5 hrs)
• I made a small push this week to get Riley to help me put some content on the webpage so it wasn't mostly empty, and it looks great so far (1 hrs)
• 'Hand-scrawled' art has been prototyped for a menu.  It does its job (1 hrs)
• My prototype from the last class meeting will be integrated into the game, which means I will be able to develop it further 
• Team Communication so far has been fantastic and it makes everything so much easier.

Content Negative

• Troubleshooting a handful of minor problems with the site getting setup was annoying and took time away from doing other, arguably, more useful things (2 hrs)
• Despite how glad I am our website isn't barren, I wanted to get more up there. Ah, well.

Total Hours for the week: 8.5 hrs

David Monteleone, Week 3 Journal PPJ, Blog post 1

David Monteleone, Week 3 Journal PPJ, Blog post 1

Idea creation, One pager, Elevator pitch, Mini game ideas

Content with Hours (Examples included):

This week the group had our first meeting where we discussed the general idea of the game and how we wanted to go about producing it. I was tasked with creating the one-pager document along with the elevator pitch. My role for the duration of the quarter will be to produce the needed documents for our game, GDD, one pagers, etc.., help the other programmers with production when it is needed, and coordinate between the artists and programmers.

The one pager focuses around the idea that both players are stuck in an alien carnival where the aliens send them on various mini game challenges. This week I helped collaborate with the group to make our final idea. This final idea can be found within our one-pager. A simplified version is in the elevator pitch.

 (4 hrs)

Alongside the one pager I created the concept art for the mechanized war machine mini game. This mini game is based off of Cory’s original idea. This concept is shown below.

(2 hrs)

My original game that I pitched, Slapz, will become a boss level within the Alien Arcade. Because of this, I had to go back and flesh out some of the bugs that I found from out demo build. This took some time, but I’m excited to be able to continue Slapz in some direction within our mini games.

(3 hrs)

Content Positive (Duplicate hours from above):

-          The one pager came together well and has given myself and the team a good idea of where we are heading. (3 hrs)

-          The elevator pitch has shortened our concept into an easy to figure out 1 minute speech. (1 hrs)

-          The concept art gives myself and the team a good direction of what we can make. (2 hrs)

-          Slapz was further patched to become a mini game for us in our final project. (3 hrs)

Content Negative

-          Several of the controller bugs still remain within Slapz. I attempted to fix them so we can merge my project as a mini game. However, I couldn’t figure out why the triggers stop working every now and again.

Total Hours for the week: 9 hrs

Tags: Programming, One-pager, Elevator pitch, Week 3, David Monteleone, concept art