Blog

Tasks Completed

• Fire Particle Assistance (1 hr)
• Cool Down Bars (1 hr)
• Playtest (30 minutes)

Total Time = (2 hrs 30 mins)

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I helped Javier with some particle work. I also worked on some concepts for cool down bars which can be implemented later (after the class concludes).

What Went Well

We received a lot of positive and helpful feedback on the playtests, my friends really enjoyed the game and it was nice to see people having fun playing our game. I started working on something that can be included if the project is continued which it is planned to be. Things are breaking less which is great.

What Didn’t

There wasn’t a lot to do in terms of art assets and tweaks. There are some things we won’t get into the game before class ends that is a little disappointing but the project is continuing so I guess it will reach that potential. Finals are coming but I don’t think it will be that big of an issue

Upcoming

Final Sell presentation

Final Deliverables

POLISH

POSTMORTEM

Some of my strengths on this project were organization and teamwork. I usually helped Jeff and Mark divide and assign the tasks for the art team. Also I tried to be present and available to my teammates so if they needed something they could ask and I could jump in and help. Typically if someone was relying on my asset I would try to complete it in a timely manner so they had time to complete their task before class. I liked being in communication and available to those I worked with to complete certain features (for example working with Michael to complete the tutorial).

My biggest weakness was poor time management. I often waited until the last minute to complete tasks or I did not prioritize my classes and projects properly. I didn’t leave enough time for revision and review so that would have to wait until the following week. Sometimes I had concerns and I didn’t speak up enough or I didn’t take initiative. I wasn’t afraid to ask questions or reach out but I feel like I lost some initiative to call meetings and clear up concerns throughout the quarter.

Three Things That Went Right

• Scope: I think we set a reasonable scope that could be reached in the time we had. We set great goals and we met them by the end. We were aware of everyones specialities and their abilities and assigned reasonable tasks that allowed us to reach our goals!
• Teamwork: I think we were able to achieve our goals because of our team and how well everyone worked together. We have many independent people on our team who were not afraid to take initiative and get work done. It felt like everyone would tackle issues together and communicate. We all worked together to give helpful feedback and critiques to improve the game and each others work.
• Commitment and Motivation: Everyone was motivated to jump in and take care of tasks. We might have had some late nights but people got their stuff in which was great. Even when things were done there was motivation to polish and keep changing things. It felt like this team didn’t lose momentum and people were always looking for something to work on.

Three Things That Went Wrong

• Deadline: We started this quarter with stricter deadlines but as the quarter went on the deadline was pushed back later and later. Most people had late nights on Sunday and Monday.
• Playtesting: We struggled finding enough people to playtest. I’ll admit we received helpful feedback but every week it was difficult to pull enough people together to meet the set number. I know many of our team members, including myself, had a lot of personal matters since it was summer so that was also difficult to work around at times.
• What is HacknPlan?: We would always discuss what everyone was doing each week so everyone was aware what was going BUT we ignored hacknplan completely (I am guilty of this). I feel like we neglected to update tasks on hacknplan which made us forget about certain features and then we would have to pick up the pieces later.

For future projects I want to take initiative when I can and improve my time management skills. I want to complete tasks and leave time for revision and review. That way I have time to edit before the next build or meeting. I’ve had late nights because I did not stick to deadlines and I know others have as well because they were waiting for certain features. So I want to become more organized in terms of tracking my work and progress on hacknplan and I want to adhere to deadlines and give myself stricter deadlines. Overall becoming organized internally should help with my time management issues.

I am very proud of this team and how much we have achieved! I had a great time working with everyone.

Tasks:

Temple: 3h 30m

Catapult: 1h 30m

Total Hours: 5h

Positive:

This week I redid the model and texture for the temple tower. It now includes 4 statues as well as wall treatments and more hieroglyphs. I also went through all of or 3D assets and made sure that they were a reasonable polycount. The only one that I found that was not was the catapult, which I tasked Javier with fixing.

Negative:

Communication was a bit lacking this week. I was not informed that .obj files were now prevented by the gitignore and that caused some submission issues. They were eventually fixed but it would have saved me quite a bit of time if this was announced.

Upcoming:

For next week, I will be working on final polish for art assets as we reach our final deadline.

Post Mortem:

Three things that went right:

I think as a team we were all highly motivated to work on this project and as a result we got a lot done out of the gate. Another thing that went well was that we were all very involved in the design process at the beginning of this term which increased our individual motivation as well. A third thing that I felt went well was that our scope was not out of control. As a team, we did a good job of reassessing scope and keeping the project within it.

Three not so right things:

Communication was an issue throughout this quarter. Feature lock was never enforced which always made Monday nights a mess. Another issue was after the first couple weeks, little attention was given to art and not many tasks were given out. As co-art lead, I would have come up with new ideas and tasks but I was not ever given much to work with. A third issue, that connects to both communication and art, was that it felt like our dev team did not check the artist progress despite updated hacknplan and announcing our progress in the discord. Some of the tasks given to me to assign to the other artists had been done as long ago as the previous quarter.

Moving on:

When approaching new projects, particularly senior project, I will be putting a higher emphasis on communication. Everyone will be brought up to speed and required to check the hacknplan. I will also be enforcing feature lock so that we don’t break our project the night before. I have already been involving my entire team in the design process and I think it is a great way to motivate any team, current or future. I also learned a lot about scope management in this project and I will carry that knowledge with me into every new project.

Complete:

• unit movement while dying feature fixed (1.5h)
• more tutorial stuff (2h)

What went well

• Units looks much better when they die now.

What didn’t

• tutorial ugh

What’s up next

• aside from minor bug fixes its basically just tutorial stuff

Postmortem

This term was for some reason just exhausting, probably because it’s Summer and I dislike Summer. The bad parts were bad, but the good ones were great. I don’t even think it was a time issue, as much as a motivation and determination issue. Things I have always struggled with.

This term we went more into the design part of it, which is probably my favorite part about this whole process. Getting to talk about and discuss video games always lead to a great time. Figuring out inspirations and deciding on some big changes were always the highlights of the day.

The team, just like last term was fantastic. People were doing their part, a tad late sometimes, but it always felt like progress was being made. The game now has a full load-out mechanic, a new map, optimized code, a tutorial (eww) and just insane amounts of polish. (The main menu!)

Some things I would change would be to have done balance changes slightly earlier on in the term, as we reached the end of the term we hit what I knew was going to be the hardest part of a game like this with so many systems, balancing. The team always had great ideas on how to balance and as we learn more about the intricacies and they product reaches a more final state we can take a step back and perform our balance duties with much better knowledge. I also learned how to calculate time better for my future tasks.

Going forward I hope to always have a team that’s at least this good. Also some of us were considering carrying on this project and fully fleshing it out. I’m excited for the possibilities and am pleased with how much I learned these past 2 terms as a programmer, designer, and person.

What got done:

• Adjusted take damage function so that towers and blessings don’t reset OOC timer (1 hr)
• Finally made game manager static singleton to simplify code (1 hr)
• Asset implementation (1 hr)
• Playtesting (3 hrs)
• Total (6 hrs)

What went well:

• Good design discussions with Mark, Joseph, and Michael about plans for development and feature adjustment should we continue work at EGS

What didn’t:

• Assignments from other classes all piled up and sucked up almost all of my time this week so I didn’t really get much done

Upcoming:

• Trying to weed out the last few bugs we can prior to the showcase

Personal Postmortem

This term was a lot rougher than last. Even with the difficulties that I had at the beginning of the term with adjusting to my leadership role, there was always a strong sense of hope and ambition I had. I don’t know exactly what happened but this term I just felt exhausted, and it caused a multitude of problems. Namely, I just had a very difficult time pulling myself together to get my own work done for the project, and small pesky bugs would put me off for days at a time sometimes. Additionally, I felt like I sort of lost track of what the team was doing frequently. My communication with the team was not great, and I did not do a good job of encouraging communication among the members as much as I did last term and it made the environment a lot heavier. Lastly, I somewhat failed at having more regular meetings with the team to do work like we did in the first term. Progress was still made, and we still stayed in touch, but I feel like something was lost in not regularly seeing everyone and spending some time doing work with company, and having some fun doing it.

There may have just been a lot of talk about personal failures and issues I had, but there were still a number of successes. Chief among these was that I did a much better job at entertaining design discussions and ideas that I might have considered somewhat out of left field beforehand, as well as taking these ideas into account and implementing some of them. On the other hand, from a programming perspective, my knowledge of game development best practices has definitely improved. As much of a pain as it was to rewrite as much code as I did, I think that I was able to greatly improve the performance of the game as well as the readability and re-usability of our code base in doing so. While I may have struggled a little bit with certain aspects of leadership, I think I was largely able to transition to handling a larger team more effectively than I had previously thought I would. With as many people as we had, I had to improve at being comfortable being hands-off with certain things and trusting that my team would do their work well, and I think I was able to do that.

Overall, I am happy with the product that we have put together, and hope to continue working on it in some capacity, maybe even publishing it at some point, because I have seen a number of people really enjoy playing it, and I want to bring that enjoyment to more people.

Completed Tasks

• Spreadsheet rework (0.5 hours)
• QA (3 hours)

Positives

• Lloyd’s playtesting day went well as we got 17 responses from that, which will make getting the rest for next week easy
• File size of the game has gone significantly down as optimizations came through this week
• Some gameplay features have been smoothed out for an overall better looking product

Negatives

• Time management was really bad for me this week
• I noticed some new bugs that popped up for me during my QA session that other aren’t having, which is never a good sign

Upcoming

• Playtesting
• Juice
• General Optimizations

Completed:

• Sun Beam Update (2 hr)
• Lightning Update (1 hr)
• Playtest (2 hr)
• Total (5 hr)

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I really wanted the sun beam to have more of a “beam” feeling to it rather than just the scattered rain type of look. I tried to accentuate the cylinder  by making it more visible and making the sparkles the extra effect. I also made the cylinder grow and deflate as if the clouds are opening and closing. The bolt was only toned down in color since the new lighting made it look really blue.

What went well:

• I am more satisfied with the beam, and I feel like it is at least close to what it should be.

What went poorly:

• I tried to alter the look of the bolt, but didn’t find a satisfying change

Upcoming:

• Fire particle change
• I plan to look up how to make particles converge on a point (an idea I have for the bolt)
• Any other alterations I can find

Tasks Completed

• D-pad icon for tool tips (30 minutes)
• Tutorial images (2 hrs)
• Small UI and Menu edits (30 minutes)

Total Hours = 3 hours

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I helped Micheal with the tutorial by creating any visuals he might need. Then I made some small edits with some of the other UI including D-pad icons for the tool-tips.

What Went Well

We got a lot of playtesters at an event on Saturday and I got a few to test the game out as well. I received a lot of good feedback. I The tutorial is finally coming together and I am HYPED. I can’t wait to test it out among players.

What Didn’t

I went home this weekend for medical and family reasons but I still stayed in touch. I got some smaller tasks done such as the D-pad icons but next week I will be ready to dive in and fix any major issues if they surface.

Upcoming

• POLISH
• Balancing
• Play testing
• Updating UI and touching up assets

Tasks:

playtesting: 4h

Tutorial Dialogue (revised): 10m

Temple statue: 4h 30m

Total Hours: 8h 40m

Positive:

This week we got some great feedback from prospective gmap students at the open house. I also helped revise the tutorial further as well as help manage the art tasks. Additionally, I started working on making the temple tower visibly 3 by three grid spaces by adding guardian statues.

Negative:

This week has also had many rough spots. One of them being the temple. While I was able to model and texture the statues Jeff and I have been unable to implement them due to the multi-mesh nature. I had originally hoped to not have to retexture the tower but I will have to combine all components into one mesh and retexture the whole thing. While going through the temple, I also found many flaws in the topology so I will have to optimize it anyways. I also had a difficult time obtaining a task for this week and it feels like art is being given a low priority until later in the week. We also keep being given assignments that have already been completed.

Upcoming:

For next week, I will be fixing up and re-implementing the temple tower. I will also be doing a final sweep of other art assets to make sure that they are optimized.