Before you start reading, I completely accept the fact I screwed up lol. This talks about my point of view on our group's screw up for our game.
3 Day Programming
So I've been programming our game requirements the three days before the presentation and used the base code that we've worked on in the Engine Design Lab which already had the camera and physics and many other features an engine would have. I know the requirements are pretty easy except the Skeletal animation to get done. I only received code from our business guy in the group for the shaders & Xbox 360 Controller in our game (I forgot to mention that in the presentation when I said I did all the programming in 3 days lol). This affected me significantly because what I thought was done from the other programmers wasn't done, they came to me during the 3 day programming period and said "they don't know how to do it" and they didn't bother to learn how so I had to code their parts. Thus my three day coding period wasn't enough to do both my part and their parts so we didn't 100% of the requirements done.
Personal and Valid Reasons I Was Unable to Program Earlier
- Didn't get the level scene graph to work with until the last few days (I was still getting art from them the day of the presentation) and our game-code is based heavily on the level design and how you encounter with it, I would be happy with place-holder models to work with. It's not like a top-down shooter where I can start programming the AI and way points and etc. without the need for graphics. I later realized the lead artist wasn't doing the work either since he was waiting on the other artists to give him their parts (which he didn't get until very very late, He also got models on the day of the presentation) and he was responsible for the scene graph.
- Wasn't interested in our game, I had a different vision for the game than the designers. No motivation to do it, would only do it for the requirements since that's what's being marked.
- Programmers except me and the business guy didn't know how to do it and aren't willing to learn which annoyed the hell out of me.
-The votes for this type of game outweighed the others and the sadly the majority of the voters that voted for this are the freeloaders.
Everyone in our group was at fault.
Plan for Next Semester
- Since everyone else said they don't mind what the next game type is I'm going to pick something I enjoy programming (just for this group, programmers don't usually pick what they want to make) which is AI, we are going to do a Top-Down shooter next semester.
- Kick out all the freeloaders
- I'm going to do all the programming and I'm going to start early because I love coding Top-Down Shooters. once we kick out all the freeloaders our group wouldn't have any other coders except the business guy but I want him to focus on his parts.
- We are going to keep the group up-to-date with everyone's part, so the graphics people will know how the programmer (me) is doing and vice versa. We will comunicate about our division needs so we become more synchronized.
- Weekly group meetings
- Early place holder models even though this isn't going to be like our last game where it matters significantly.
Conclusion
So everyone in our group (except the deadweights/freeloaders) had the ablility to do it and make a good game but our team coordination was really poor so we paid the hefty price, having a crappy game.
