The Week in Review

This has been an odd week for me as a producer. The challenge we usually face with documentation hasn't been a problem, everyone's been working hard, but it's clear we had one weak spot. It was me.

I make it a point to have all of my work done and ready to go as early as can be, but the animatic has been a struggle for me. I thought I needed to animate every slide, and it took significantly longer than I was expecting, let alone longer than it should have taken. I learned that I am definitely not an animator, and that sometimes I need to delegate tasks to others. This would have saved time, time better spent developing QA reports, interacting with the team, and working on other associated tasks.

This week, I will create my last iteration of the animatic, and work with the team to start recording audio for the trailer. Audio and UI development will be the core tasks for this week, along with level iteration, bug fixes, and injecting final art into our levels. We have QA testing for this Saturday, and a work meeting planned for this Sunday. The next week will have three QA tests as well.

I am the Alpha and Omega. Actually, its just Alpha this time.

Oh, hello there. I know it's been a while, but I hope we can get that past us and move forward.

This week kicked off without a bang, unfortunately. The regular Tuesday meeting was relatively uneventful. We did push the much-desired early warning system forward, along with a slow-mo feature that allows players to have better reaction times if they have the energy to do so. We didn't have much to say on Wednesday, as not much was done. But we are doing a bit of a game jam on Sunday, so that should help. We kick that off with pizza; we haven't had a fun get together for a while now and I think it's a great way to decompress before we put our noses to the grindstone for five hours. We've prioritized programming tasks, designated whiteboxing for our designers, and Artists are animating and attempting to update the GUI (we're a lot farther along than 'attempting' may suggest, but alliteration is important).

I'll be working on the animatic during the meeting and moving forward. Hopefully I can get it done in one shot, but I've never done anything like this before. It could be a lot longer of a process than I am expecting.

Either way, I'm looking forward to the build we show for our Alpha milestone. Our Friday meeting centered around planning our days to create the best showing, and I think the Professor will be very impressed on how the moving parts have come together. With an improved trailer, a build that shows off the elbow grease we're using on Sunday, and solid presentation, this sprint could be our best yet.

Week 5: Of Buddhism and Black Sabbath

What an interesting week this has been. Revelations, realizations, working hard, hardly working, demo reels, and War Pigs.

We went through two major turning points this week. We realized that the Green Mountain Game Festival was on the 22nd, and we weren't happy with where we were in relationship to this event that starts in 15 days. So we decided that we wanted to change that. I spent several hours creating a plan and a Gantt chart to go with it, ran it by our team leads, and got it approved by them with some minor tweaks, mostly the prioritization and time commitment of artistic ventures. These tweaks were discussed and accepted with some insisting from myself-a compromise was quickly reached between character and environmental art time commitments.

We also received an email from our executive producer. The basics were that we needed to remind ourselves that we're in a class here, and we need to meet the requirements of the class while still producing a high quality product. We let paperwork fall to the wayside, and it built up. This is not a good thing to do, and we're suffering for it. I had been dealing with securing an internship-without an internship I don't graduate- and hadn't even logged hours for two weeks. Not an excuse, but at least a reason. That stops now. As a group, between getting this email and 8pm that same day, our task list expanded by 15%.

I had worked very hard on the wrong things. I spent a lot of time working on a graphic for our team- time I could have spent organizing the wiki and chiliproject. I reorganized my priorities and spent an hour just fixing the task board alone. We established new standards for the recording of time, namely the creation of "Administrative Columns," one for blogs, meetings, testing sessions, and project management software/wiki organization. These should help make it easy for people to log their time in an effective manner.

The production meeting was very informative this week. I learned that using the rift from the famous Black Sabbath song 'War Pig' on my demo reel may not be the best idea. Oh, the humanity! I may create a gag version just for laughs. May. Probably won't.

Week 4: Back and Better Than Ever

Whoops, looks like I missed a week. Thankfully, the team did not.

We've accomplished a lot these past two weeks. We're designing a new character, building actual levels for alpha and beta testing, let alone release, and we've begun implementing new features. Probably the most interesting among the features are additional 'interactions,' as we've been calling them. Interactions are unique platforms or areas in the level that the player uses their shield to interact with. Smashing through barriers, getting a speed boost, pulling to or pushing away from a wall- all these and more fit into the 'interactions' that we're adding in.

Our meetings have gone very well, and something new or interesting is always brought up. We discovered a solution to a persistent bug two meetings ago, discussed new character models today, and realized a potential roadblock down the road. Our programmers will be tweaking the scripts Brian makes and coding some interactions on their own, in addition to squashing bugs. But there is a strong chance that there could be a point where we've run out of meaningful ways to put our strongest programming resources to the biggest trouble areas- where our programmers will just be doing boring or ineffective work. This is something to keep in mind moving forward, and to be on the lookout for when we're reaching release.

Week 2: Lets Get It Started

Week two has ended, and boy, what a week it's been.

That sounds much more interesting than it's actually been, but it's my blog, so there.

We've met twice since our first in class meeting, not counting our first in-class meeting. These meetings have all gone smoothly, if a little longer than we anticipated. The latest meeting has gone swimmingly; we got through all items on the agenda with some great discussion and conclusions. One of the most important goals we had was figuring out how we would theme our levels. We decided on having a factory section, a mine section, a city section, and a catacomb section. These would all link together to form a continuous level and follow a narrative.

I have an idea for a story thread on our Facebook page. Some entity finds a journal from a scientist that ran an expedition to the mines, cataloging the events that lead up to the current game. This could walk our audience up to the narrative our designers are working on. We'll discuss this at our meeting on Monday.

And now, the end is near

After three and a half years, I face my last year of school. My last set of grades. My last classes. My last team, my last project, my last chance to put everything I've learned to the test, and get just that much better at recognizing my strengths, my weaknesses, my limits. Hopefully this blog will both reflect the challenges and successes we have, and that I can go back learn much from this with reflection.

Last semester's capstone project was not the best experience I've had at Champlain. I had a trainwreck of an incredibly public presentation. I had a teammate who brought the whole team's schedule down in shambles thanks to his always dissenting opinions, awful communication of schedule, and constant tardiness of his work. Managing that team was a nightmare thanks to one man. But I learned some valuable lessons. The necessity of putting your foot down on distractions- while they're a great way to keep comradery high, bring the topic back to the project once you get a good laugh out of it. Point out problems that cause some serious issues rather than try to deal with them alone. Delegate. All of this leads to a successful team.

We had a fantastic first meeting during class. We brainstormed, identified problems, identified solutions to those problems, and the whole process went surprisingly naturally for a new team. I made up a checklist so people could account for their weekly tasks, we figured out which team members would step up to take the lead positions, and have an after-meeting event already planned out. This semester is definitely looking up, and I cannot wait to see what our team will come up with when the bell tolls.