It's hard to believe that today (it's just past midnight as I write this) is going to be the last day of our production phase, and the submission of the Gold Master. In what can only be described as organised chaos, we've been working like mad to get everything finished. If only we had more time!!! I think we've all learned a lot of things, like how to do some things well, and how NOT to do some other things. Like making sure that for each system that we build there's at least two people who know how it works! Alternatively, creating more in-depth documentation so that anyone who needs to understand it can do so fully by checking the docs.
Oh well, I have to get back spending a bit more time on the project before getting a few hours sleep for the final day ahead.
Showing posts with label Project Manager. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Project Manager. Show all posts
Wednesday, December 17, 2008
Tuesday, December 16, 2008
Wow, what can I say. We made some more progress today, I'm very happy with the results even though we still have much to do. We added what I think are some cool camera effects, and some extra rumble effects for the Xbox 360 controllers. We tweaked the controls and started fine tuning the menus which turned out to be not as simple as we thought. We're putting as much player feedback as we can so the experience is richer for the player. Also we have a tool for selecting the game configuration such as game resolution and hardware options. And we only have 2 days left!!! I still have some of my hair left, but it's going to be an interesting couple of days as the inevitable deadline marches towards us.
The excitement is building as the finish line approaches...I'll be glad to get some sleep at the end of the week!
The excitement is building as the finish line approaches...I'll be glad to get some sleep at the end of the week!
Saturday, December 13, 2008
Final Week
This is the final week of our course. Final submission of our game is on Wednesday and the last day of our course is Friday. We still have a lot of work to do between now and Wednesday. I'll be here Sat and Sun working on the code, and most of the team will be too.
Paul
Paul
Friday, December 12, 2008
Leaps and Bounds
Wow...a lot of progress today. Most of the game elements are now present in the game engine, it's just a matter of polishing and finishing the build we currently have in preparation for submission, which is what we'll be doing tomorrow. I anticipate a busy day ahead!
Paul
Paul
Wednesday, December 10, 2008
Not...much...time
Short blog post...not much time...2 days to go...hair falling out...getting closer but still seems far away from completion...argh...
Paul
Paul
Crunchie Time
While I want to avoid the whole "crunch" work ethic in general, and hopefully have us leisurely completing the milestone by this Friday, it always seems to me like there is always something more to be done, or some extra polish that could be added, or one extra bug to fix.
So, we are going to have to work intentionally and stay focused over the next 3 days to get to where we need to be. With approximately 200 outstanding items, with 10 programmers over 2 days, that's 10 items a day per programmer we need to complete to be finished by Thursday night, leaving us Friday to polish up the submission. It probably won't work exactly like that, but it gives a rough idea of whats ahead of us. Some of the items are minor bug fixes while others are balancing gameplay and testing that all the components are as bug free as possible.
While it is fairly intense, I can't really complain. I love making games! Even though we are in what I would call a pressure cooker situation, I wouldn't have it any other way. I've learnt more about programming and also learnt things about myself and what I'm capable of (overcoming fear of giving presentations for example) that I wouldnt have otherwise had I not participated in this course.
Bring it on!
Paul
So, we are going to have to work intentionally and stay focused over the next 3 days to get to where we need to be. With approximately 200 outstanding items, with 10 programmers over 2 days, that's 10 items a day per programmer we need to complete to be finished by Thursday night, leaving us Friday to polish up the submission. It probably won't work exactly like that, but it gives a rough idea of whats ahead of us. Some of the items are minor bug fixes while others are balancing gameplay and testing that all the components are as bug free as possible.
While it is fairly intense, I can't really complain. I love making games! Even though we are in what I would call a pressure cooker situation, I wouldn't have it any other way. I've learnt more about programming and also learnt things about myself and what I'm capable of (overcoming fear of giving presentations for example) that I wouldnt have otherwise had I not participated in this course.
Bring it on!
Paul
Monday, December 8, 2008
Milestone Review
We had some feedback from our producer today on our Alpha milestone submission. Basically there's a lot of work left to go and we have just under 4 days to do it in. There's still a lot of bugs to iron out and a few features that are not visible in the game yet.
It's going to be a busy week.
Paul
It's going to be a busy week.
Paul
Saturday, December 6, 2008
Warning...longish post ahead!!!
In what must be something of a first, I managed to get a blame 3 times in row! It started with memory leaks, followed by a heap corruption, followed by another memory leak just for good measure. All of these I readily uploaded to our repository in good faith whilst proclaiming loudly each time that "...this time it's working, really!...". Thanks to some great debugging team work from Andrew and Josh, the twisty logic that I was working on succumbed to their combined mental might, and the code was uploaded cleanly much to our relief.
Which leads me to conclude that the more well planned a design is, the easier the implementation will be. Now for me, I had previously thought the creation of a game was an almost organic process, with the element of what we call "fun" something that emerges out of playing and tweaking and developing during the writing of the software. However, with a more detailed plan of the logic and complex interactions that I was attempting to code, I might not have spent so long debugging the errors.
What I'm thinking of is, if you take any game, say Monopoly for example, it has a set of clearly defined rules and interactions that dictate exactly what may happen at each step of the game, and clearly specified results. If an interaction occurs in some point of the game that is not specified by the rules, it is then over to the players to work out amongst themselves what outcomes should apply. Generally this is not a desirable thing to occur for a board game, and should be minimised with clearly thought out and detailed rules, but does not necessarily prevent the game from continuing provided the players agree on a compromise and then proceed with the players next turn.
However, what happens with a computer game when something occurs that is outside of the logic that has been written for the game?...Well, one of two things...either the event cannot occur, which is a powerful feature of computer games, automatic enforcement of a gameworld for a player to express themselves in...or, in a more dramatic scenario, the software will simply crash or hang, leaving the game player stuck with no other option but to restart the game, or give up entirely as the prospect of having it crash again may be too discouraging.
So then, to my long beleagured point, it's clear that the details really are the most important thing to pay attention to when designing a game. It may occur to some (such as myself) as killing the creative process by requiring a fixed design from the start. This is not really the case, as there is always scope to make changes if necessary.
The real benefit comes from being able to quickly create the software of a good design, as the logic has already been thought out in advance and the actual implementation becomes trivial. As the development time to get something up and running is now shorter, this allows for more playtesting of the actual game to take place, which in turn allows more time for tweaking and adjusting to balance all the elements into something known as "fun"!
ergo, do not skimp on planning and design!
Paul
p.s. Milestone submission was a day of intense focus and rapid last minute debugging. With plenty of time to spare (30 seconds to be precise) the submission was electronically sent at 4:59pm today and we all left to get some much needed sleep!
Which leads me to conclude that the more well planned a design is, the easier the implementation will be. Now for me, I had previously thought the creation of a game was an almost organic process, with the element of what we call "fun" something that emerges out of playing and tweaking and developing during the writing of the software. However, with a more detailed plan of the logic and complex interactions that I was attempting to code, I might not have spent so long debugging the errors.
What I'm thinking of is, if you take any game, say Monopoly for example, it has a set of clearly defined rules and interactions that dictate exactly what may happen at each step of the game, and clearly specified results. If an interaction occurs in some point of the game that is not specified by the rules, it is then over to the players to work out amongst themselves what outcomes should apply. Generally this is not a desirable thing to occur for a board game, and should be minimised with clearly thought out and detailed rules, but does not necessarily prevent the game from continuing provided the players agree on a compromise and then proceed with the players next turn.
However, what happens with a computer game when something occurs that is outside of the logic that has been written for the game?...Well, one of two things...either the event cannot occur, which is a powerful feature of computer games, automatic enforcement of a gameworld for a player to express themselves in...or, in a more dramatic scenario, the software will simply crash or hang, leaving the game player stuck with no other option but to restart the game, or give up entirely as the prospect of having it crash again may be too discouraging.
So then, to my long beleagured point, it's clear that the details really are the most important thing to pay attention to when designing a game. It may occur to some (such as myself) as killing the creative process by requiring a fixed design from the start. This is not really the case, as there is always scope to make changes if necessary.
The real benefit comes from being able to quickly create the software of a good design, as the logic has already been thought out in advance and the actual implementation becomes trivial. As the development time to get something up and running is now shorter, this allows for more playtesting of the actual game to take place, which in turn allows more time for tweaking and adjusting to balance all the elements into something known as "fun"!
ergo, do not skimp on planning and design!
Paul
p.s. Milestone submission was a day of intense focus and rapid last minute debugging. With plenty of time to spare (30 seconds to be precise) the submission was electronically sent at 4:59pm today and we all left to get some much needed sleep!
Thursday, December 4, 2008
Pulling it together
Well, tomorrow is it. Submission of the Alpha build of our game. It's been 4 short weeks since we started production and time seems to be standing still while we work our collective butts off to get this thing finished. I honestly don't know what I'm going to do with myself when this course ends...sleep probably...just need to stay focused for one more day, make sure everything is getting done that needs to get done and we have a playable submission by tomorrow afternoon.
...oh...and then we have one more week to play test and polish the game to get it ready for the Beta...followed by 3 days of final bug-fixing before the Gold release, and then a post-mortem analysis of how we went...
Goodnight for now, and as Ace(Rimmer's alter-ego) said on Red Dwarf, "...smoke me a kipper, I'll be back for breakfast!" ...or perhaps more pertinently..."I am a fish!"
Paul
...oh...and then we have one more week to play test and polish the game to get it ready for the Beta...followed by 3 days of final bug-fixing before the Gold release, and then a post-mortem analysis of how we went...
Goodnight for now, and as Ace(Rimmer's alter-ego) said on Red Dwarf, "...smoke me a kipper, I'll be back for breakfast!" ...or perhaps more pertinently..."I am a fish!"
Paul
getting closer!
We had a lot of seperate bits of code on different team members computers that hadn't been committed to our code base, so part of today was spent updating and committing everyone's code so that we are now all working off the same base code. For some reason, drawing of the bullets disappeared after this process was complete. We've got someone working on that.
Many elements are coming together, and the feature freeze for our code is to take effect tomorrow evening, leaving Friday free for documentation and last minute bug fixes and polish.
cheers,
Paul
Many elements are coming together, and the feature freeze for our code is to take effect tomorrow evening, leaving Friday free for documentation and last minute bug fixes and polish.
cheers,
Paul
Tuesday, December 2, 2008
Speed Bumps
Today, apart from the usual revising the schedule and making sure people are on track with their tasks, I've been re-writing a piece of code that creates new objects every single frame of the game. This is a rather time-consuming operation, so I'm adapting so that it takes up considerably less time, hopefully with the effect of gaining a few frames per second on the frame rate. We'll know more tomorrow!
Paul
Paul
Monday, December 1, 2008
Making headway
Hello dear readers,
Many elements of the game are nearing completion and have started being tested in the game. Two players, sounds, shooting, the core time-travel mechanic, path-finding, stationary shooting turrets, ability for the player to place items on the map, a computer controlled enemy, animations for the time-travel/level reset graphics, keyboard/mouse and XBox 360 controller functionality, 3rd person camera with zoom, collision detection, mines, and the famed temporal anchor device have made an appearance in the game engine today. Though some are not quite in their final form of polished gameplay, it's good to see some visible results from our efforts over the past 3 weeks of development.
The plan is to wrap up most core development on the game Wednesday night, leaving us Thursday to iron-out bugs and Friday to tidy up the game, finish documentation and prepare for submission on Friday afternoon.
Onwards Ho!
Paul
Many elements of the game are nearing completion and have started being tested in the game. Two players, sounds, shooting, the core time-travel mechanic, path-finding, stationary shooting turrets, ability for the player to place items on the map, a computer controlled enemy, animations for the time-travel/level reset graphics, keyboard/mouse and XBox 360 controller functionality, 3rd person camera with zoom, collision detection, mines, and the famed temporal anchor device have made an appearance in the game engine today. Though some are not quite in their final form of polished gameplay, it's good to see some visible results from our efforts over the past 3 weeks of development.
The plan is to wrap up most core development on the game Wednesday night, leaving us Thursday to iron-out bugs and Friday to tidy up the game, finish documentation and prepare for submission on Friday afternoon.
Onwards Ho!
Paul
Friday, November 28, 2008
Glorious Debugging
Ok, so one week to go till Milestone 2. We've fixed a lot of bugs today and got a cleanish build up and running. We'll be doing a bit of overtime tomorrow to catch up on a couple of things, but otherwise things are looking good.
cheers,
Paul
cheers,
Paul
Thursday, November 27, 2008
Progress
A week into Milestone 2, we've made some progress, but not as much as we'd like. Memory leaks are slowing us down. We'll be discussing some of the issues surrounding this our team meeting tomorrow.
That's all for today.
cheers,
Paul
That's all for today.
cheers,
Paul
Wednesday, November 26, 2008
Digital Watches are neat
To borrow the words from the book 'The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy' by Douglas Adams, deadlines are great, I love the wooshing noise they make as they speed by... :)
...but seriously, our next deadline is next Friday, where we deliver Milestone 2, in which we will feature all the elements of the game in our submission.
Today we managed to get a (only slightly buggy) version of our code built that featured our core gameplay mechanic (that we had hoped to demonstrate in the 1st Milestone), much to the enjoyment of our team!
We continue work tomorrow, whilst I wrestle with scheduling the myriad of tasks into a manageable and logical sequence that will enable us deliver the project on time and under budget (our budget being zero dollars).
Adieu,
Paul
...but seriously, our next deadline is next Friday, where we deliver Milestone 2, in which we will feature all the elements of the game in our submission.
Today we managed to get a (only slightly buggy) version of our code built that featured our core gameplay mechanic (that we had hoped to demonstrate in the 1st Milestone), much to the enjoyment of our team!
We continue work tomorrow, whilst I wrestle with scheduling the myriad of tasks into a manageable and logical sequence that will enable us deliver the project on time and under budget (our budget being zero dollars).
Adieu,
Paul
This post has no title
Someone needs to grab a picture of the new blame hat and post it up...it's very pretty.
Well, the new schedule has just been sent off for approval. I'm much happier with it this time round, and our design has been set out in greater detail which will make it easier to manage the day to day completion of tasks. The whole team has again raised the level of their output and produced a lot of work today. Still, need to wait to see if it get's approved by our Producer first...
Must...sleep...now...zzz
Paul
Well, the new schedule has just been sent off for approval. I'm much happier with it this time round, and our design has been set out in greater detail which will make it easier to manage the day to day completion of tasks. The whole team has again raised the level of their output and produced a lot of work today. Still, need to wait to see if it get's approved by our Producer first...
Must...sleep...now...zzz
Paul
Monday, November 24, 2008
Milestone Review
Well, they say the best way to learn is make mistakes. I don't who they are, but they're right.
While there's no doubting everyone's committment to the completion of this game, given the limited time frame and the adjusting to working in a team, we've made a few errors in our first Milestone that our tutor pointed out to us during the review today.
We had loads of very useful feedback from our tutor on where we went astray, and we've been busy today re-working our production plan for Milestone 2.
It's the end of a long day! More tomorrow.
Paul
While there's no doubting everyone's committment to the completion of this game, given the limited time frame and the adjusting to working in a team, we've made a few errors in our first Milestone that our tutor pointed out to us during the review today.
We had loads of very useful feedback from our tutor on where we went astray, and we've been busy today re-working our production plan for Milestone 2.
It's the end of a long day! More tomorrow.
Paul
Saturday, November 22, 2008
Milestone 1 complete
After a long day, full of drama and pulling my hair out, we handed in Milestone 1 of our project. Everyone on the team worked really hard, taking shorter breaks so they could spend more time getting the submission ready. We had intended to have most coding completed by Thursday night, however there were a few bugs to be worked out that we spent most of the day fixing on Friday. Which meant a few final hours of organised chaos getting a build working that we could submit.
If anything, we want to avoid this for the next milestone in 2 weeks time, so that the aim is to have the build ready by the night before submission, leaving plenty of time to polish anything that needs to be handed in.
Thanks for reading, more updates next week.
Paul
If anything, we want to avoid this for the next milestone in 2 weeks time, so that the aim is to have the build ready by the night before submission, leaving plenty of time to polish anything that needs to be handed in.
Thanks for reading, more updates next week.
Paul
Thursday, November 20, 2008
Insane in the brain
Wow, after a day of frantic coding/debugging/integrating and seemingly nothing to show for it, in the last half hour we've managed to get our level loading and rendering on screen, and player input working to control the camera. Excitment has ensued!
One day to go. Things are looking good, but I predict it will be a busy day tomorrow getting ready to submit the milestone at 5pm!
See you on the other side!
Paul
One day to go. Things are looking good, but I predict it will be a busy day tomorrow getting ready to submit the milestone at 5pm!
See you on the other side!
Paul
Wednesday, November 19, 2008
Getting closer!
Yay!
Another quick update.
Today we have a basic Level Editor up and running, so we can generate a basic level file which will then be loaded by our game.
Also, basic gui and buttons have been completed.
Now it's just a matter of tying everything together in one big happy bundle and we should get a working demo of the core gameplay concept.
2 days to go!
Our intention is to freeze any extra features and/or changes to the code starting from tomorrow evening. Only bug fixes will be allowed so that we have all of Friday to tidy everything up and get it submitted.
That's all for today,
Paul
Another quick update.
Today we have a basic Level Editor up and running, so we can generate a basic level file which will then be loaded by our game.
Also, basic gui and buttons have been completed.
Now it's just a matter of tying everything together in one big happy bundle and we should get a working demo of the core gameplay concept.
2 days to go!
Our intention is to freeze any extra features and/or changes to the code starting from tomorrow evening. Only bug fixes will be allowed so that we have all of Friday to tidy everything up and get it submitted.
That's all for today,
Paul
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