3 Day Programming & Plan for Next Semester

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.

Cram Week Begins! Quick update post

So there's one week left and we don't have much complete. There's a lot of models in our group Dropbox folder but there's a lot that aren't complete. There's not enough for us to code for the game and they aren't placed in the scene yet for our game from our graphics and designer people. I alerted all the programmers to just stop waiting for the graphics and just code all the requirements even though it may be not related to our game. A handful of the requirements are similar if not the same to the previous year's requirements so I have a lot of my previous code for our previous game that I can use. The only requirement that got me thinking, and sounds troublesome is the Animated Characters requirement where we have to perform skeletal animation in the game. I will look into that once I have everything complete.

Wrong about the midterm

So I got my midterm back today and I failed. I didn't explain in detail about a lot of the questions and gave a really brief description so I only got part marks. I blew the last two questions completely which was a total of 20 marks and I only got 3 of the 20 marks.

As for our gdw game I've started programming the base and it's really easy to do things in this engine and I understand how this engine works. I'll be coding everyday now for at least 3-4 hours and when it gets closer to the end it will be much longer and then eventually straight coding. I have already got a lot of the features in such as states for player/game/items/etc, camera types, physics, movement, heart beat indicator (used to determine the monster distance), and some other small base features. I'm currently working on the particle system which shouldn't take long, several hours/no more than a day.

The other guys have added in the xbox360 controller features in and I assigned some one else to do the GUI.

The designers and artists are on a roll, designing is complete and they are working on art. Much of the art is complete but there's still a lot to do.

Such a stressful week

I've finally finished all the midterms and assignments for this week and I've slept in and feel great. I've had 4 assignments and 2 midterms in the span of three days (Monday - Wednesday). I've pulled 3 straight all nighters which is a new record ahead of the Great Canadian Appathon which was two days. I"m gonna celebrate hard haha and do nothing today! Well except this blog post since I must do it.

As for the engine, now that I actually started to use the engine, I've learned how it works (very similar to some engines I've used before so it doesn't take me long to do something). I've already finished the camera movement and function from the homework assignments and I'm going to start coding the core features and structure for our game (which is really late to start, I want to beat my 3 all-nighter record).

For our Engine Design midterm, for once Professor Dr. Hogue gives us an easy midterm. Well actually I don't want to say it's easy because if I didn't do well on it I'll have a bad impression lol (to Dr. Hogue if you're reading this). Though it was easy, I know I didn't do as well as I could of on it since I didn't explain in detail for many questions but I still understood the questions.

Design Completed

Some concept art from our design/art people:

All the design for our game is completed. Now it's my turn to figure out how to use the game engine (which is late) which shouldn't take me that long since I've used many engines before (not saying all engines work the same way) and I've looked at the structure of this engine and it seems to be pretty easy to pick up.

update

I started to setup the genre-specific code in wildmagic for our game. I also played around with wildmagic to see what I could do with it. I'm trying to learn how to use all the features such as shaders.

Our designers have been working a lot on the game and the concept art looks good (I would show some but I don't have any) and the levels are creative and we believe it will truly make the player think about how to beat the level.

Third week update (Late)

Sorry for this late post but I was so busy the previous week and I forgot about the blog temporarily.

Last week I competed in the Great Canadian Appathon 2 so I had no sleep for two days straight and then I had four assignments due in the same week right after the appathon.

I think our team did really well in GDA2 we had me (third year game dev. and previously worked for a game developing company) as a programmer, and three 3rd year networking students (one is also worked at the same game development company), one was also a programmer, another was a artist, and the last person did the game design. Our game was programmed in Flash CS5 since we only had 2 days to build the game and it had the ability to export into a ipa (iphone) app file. Our game came out pretty well, we think we made the top 25 (hoping we hear a response tomorrow) but I don't think we made the top 12 (to get a prize) since there is a lot of talented game developers in the contest and our game wasn't our best and the coding was rushed and messy. We are sure we'll do better next time though. :)

As for the GDW3 game there has only been more late designing going on. I really like the new idea the designers thought about in the game though I question if it's achievable in such a short time.