I am now a part of Office Mayhem! For these first couple weeks I was introduced to the code by my lead Ty. I have spent this week looking through the code and learning the architecture Ty has made. Right out the gate I was assigned three tasks to complete. I was assigned to implement a crunch time feature, an auto detect controller feature and to create a basic immersive start screen. The crunch time feature is a mode at the end of the round where players move faster and tasks are worth bonus points. This was actually pretty simple to do with the code already. I created a new function that was called when the round would almost end that would set the players speed and the point value of the tasks to the new amount. The auto detect for controller was so that if new players wanted to jump in and plug in a controller. Right now the game only detects for controllers when the game is started. I just had it that every other second it will check to see if there is a new controller plugged in. The last item on my list was creating a new start screen. The new start screen will allow for players to experiment and run around in a level at their own pace and have something to do while people are joining. I made a duplicate of the basic tutorial and got rid of the tutorial text aspect so it was just a basic room to run around in. Next milestone I am going to get the level more fleshed out where it will add players dynamically (right now they just don’t move) and flesh out the room more with maybe certain sections to stand in to start the game or a menu to change your appearance. That is all for this post. It was a nice learning week and I am very excited to work more on Office Mayhem.
Alright so this is my final blog post for capstone for this team. To start I want to say that I am very proud of the work my team and I have done. I am going to start with individual team member evaluations including my own and finish with an overall team evaluation. This is an individual postmortem and does not reflect on how any of my other teammates view our team and what we did.
Mike did a really good job handling both the designer and the producer for our team. He lead the team in meetings and did his best to keep us organized and on track. As a designer I thought he worked hard to make the dungeon and to balance it as well as being open to suggestions form the rest of the team.
Austin was a great co-programmer. He worked very hard on and really made the game great. His use of particle effects and handling the AI was very good. He went very above and beyond what I expected of him. He did alot and was great to have him.
Andrew was a good artist but his major problem was his time management. He did what we wanted of him but it would take a long time and the problem was he would tell us when he would have it done but he would never get it in when he said he would. He also had some issues doing what he needed to do and he did not communicate it with us as well as I think he could have.
Scott was also a good artist. He did a good amount of work and communicated well with the team. His major issue was that he was a little slow at getting his work done. He didn’t do that much in the beginning but near the end he really pushed himself and did some amazing work.
As a member of the team I feel that overall I did a good job. I got my work done on time and I think I put forth a very good amount of effort.I feel as though I communicated fairly well with the entire team. One thing is that I would say is that I feel like I could have pushed myself more to get more stuff in the game and communicate with Mike to see what could be added to the game.
As a team our communication was a little rough in the beginning but near the end we brought it together. Also I feel like at the start of the semester we did not push enough to get the basics of the game in there so that we could add more near the end. We also spent a little too much time on things that we could have easily cut that weren’t needed for the game that we cut in the end anyway. This I feel really hurt us in getting content into the game. Even with those setbacks I feel that we worked well as a team and put good quality work into the game.
So we did not go through but this blog post is not about that its about how I am going to decide which team to put as my top teams to work on. So I have chosen Spellbook Rush, Office Mayhem, Grand Master and Kanji Samurai.
I chose Spellbook Rush because I am fan of co-operative games and Spellbook Rush does look like a lot of fun to make. I like all the people working on it and I have a very good feeling that I would work well with them. They also need a gameplay programmer which I am. The only downside to them is that they are in Unreal and I am not that confident in it so I will have to do some learning over the break but I am willing to do that.
Office Mayhem is also here cause I like the game as a whole and I would work well with their team. They are working in Unity which I am very comfortable in which is a plus. The one downside to their game is that I honestly am not a huge fan of competitive games but I still like the concept of the game. Oh they also want a gameplay programmer to help them which is always a plus.
Grand Master and Kanji Samurai are here mainly because I like the games overall. Grand Master looks very fun and I am sure I would have fun working on it but I don’t know how well I would work with the team so I am a little hesitant on that front. There probably isn’t any worry but you never know. Kanji Samurai seems very cool and I know I work well with their other programmer but with what they need it seems like alot of busy work that I feel would get a little boring for me. The team is fine but I might not like working on the game overall.
Ok well this concludes my capstone blog. I hope you have enjoyed it and it hasn’t been the most boring thing you have ever read. Um….. bye.
Ok so we got the go to present for the winter showcase. I am very excited and scared for this presentation. I don’t know how people will receive our game or if we will be able to present it properly. How we are going to do it is that we are going to present that our designer and the other programmer are going to do all of the talking which is good cause they are probably the most charismatic people on the team. The other programmer is going to be in full cactus outfit and act as our main character while the designer will talk more about the game itself and clarify what the programmer is saying. I think this will showcase the humor that we want to present in the game and will make people excited about the game overall. The only problem is that we have to keep a level of professionalism and not go over board with it. We tried this in the past and we went a little too far so knowing this I am sure we can pull it back and present a fun and humorous but informative presentation. We are also going to be using a trailer as more of a hype trailer than a way to explain the game overall. We have a simple game which can be explained pretty easily if we just talk about it. To make sure we keep the enthusiasm up we have alot of GIFs that showoff our main character’s animation which is where we get most of the humor for our game. Us explaining with the combination of these GIFs I am sure that we can get our point across and give people a good look at what the game is. I think the best thing for us is to remain loose during the presentation and remain upbeat and positive. The game is fun and hopefully people see the greatness in its simplicity and humor.
Alright so in the previous blog post I said that I was afraid that we weren’t moving fast enough well the team got their shit together made a huge leap in progress. I am now more confident in our game than ever. It looks so awesome! Shout out to my other programmer who killed it with putting in animations and tweaking the graphics! I am very proud and enjoyed that he was able to do so much. Now there was some issues with putting the animations in but those were solved just in time which is good but I feel that one of our artists isn’t being honest with how much he wants to do the project or he is just very bad at time management and we need to have a talk with him about it. Ok that’s all I am going to say about that cause I did some cool stuff which I am happy everyone likes and I want to change the subject.
I made a menu system……
Now to go into more detail about it I made a scrolling menu system that loops through rooms of our dungeon. I put room together in editor and then I made waypoints for the camera to travel to throughout the dungeon. That was pretty simple to do but the annoying thing to handle was getting the camera to look in the right direction which there was probably such an easier way to do but this is my process of how I got it to look good. So firstly I just had the camera looking at the next waypoint but that caused problems with turns where the camera would look either just at a wall or through the wall to see the other waypoint. That was bad so instead I decided to make a second set of waypoints for the camera to look at. Now I can just line up the lists of waypoints up so that the camera is in sync with where I want it to look. This allows for some tweaking of values so that you can adjust where the camera is looking at in case we want it to like look anywhere. Right now it is just in front of it but that can be easily changed.
Umm yeah thats like the main cool thing that I did which is nice. I did some other polishing stuff but nothing to grand. Well hopefully all works out for our petition into winter showcase (we are done with milestones cause its like one week until showcase so we just have to petition to be in the showcase, which now I am very confident that we will be able to do it).
Ok so catch up from last blog post, we re-presented and went through Deep Dive. We are now in Proof of Concept. For this we need to focus on how our game is unique and why people should but it. I feel like we really have to sell the absurdness of our game. The fact that you play as a cactus beating up different cacti and other plants is very humorous. I think that is the key to our game. As for doing work I am working on the level design with my designer. We are going to test two different dungeons, one with ten rooms and one with thirteen rooms. To do this I’m pretty much going to copy our project and just make the levels like this. It’s an easy way and one that allows other people to work in each level separately. For the implementing the levels I’m just going to make a larger level map for the player and just adjust the rooms layout as my designer has planned out.
On a slightly different topic I am a little concerned that we are just not moving fast enough and not putting in enough work. We have worked on our communication which was an issue but now it is alot better but the speed of our work is very slow and I personally feel like with the size of our team we should have a lot more then what we currently do. I know I am part of the problem because I also could have been doing alot more but I feel like as a team we have to address this together. I’m not too concerned about talking about I am more concerned with that we will have time to fix this problem before winter showcase.
Well that all for this post. I will talk to you later.
We did not pass. It sucks. We didn’t pass because we did convey our ideas in a good way. We were very dry and boring. I think we wanted to be more professional but it came off as not enthused which is upsetting. Well after finding this out I felt very drained and not wanting to do anything. We had our team meeting and decided that we needed to have a solid story for us to move forward to really pitch the idea of the game. So we brainstormed and came up with a hilarious story that really matches our crazy concept. This really got me reinvigorated and ready to make a funny and awesome presentation. With this crazy concept we decided to come up with an even funnier presentation style and what we came up with is pretty out there. To save the details it involves a cactus outfit and a lot of yelling. I did not do much on the build itself because I felt like that we needed to focus on the presentation more. But with that I will be doing research on animation blending so that when the artists get the animations in the next couple weeks I will be able to easily put in their animations. Well that’s about it for this post, talk to you soon.
So this will be a quick update on what is going on in Deep Dive. I have made the level array with the rooms floor plans. This makes tracking movement in the level alot easier because now there is no chance that the player could become offset with the room when changing room. I have also made smooth movement with the camera and had my designer tweek with it so now it feels very smooth and nice. We have also completely set aside procedural generation for now. We felt we have been working too hard on that and not focusing on the main mechanics of the game. With this me and my other programmer are able to move forward with those mechanics but we will have to move fast to get them in. With moving fast we have started to become a little sloppy in our code but i’m not too worried by it because we can take time to refactor it later so it is not as hard coded. We also know which parts are hard coded so we have it in our minds what needs to be changed. We are also working on our communication which has been slightly poor quality recently. People just seem to not know what is going on even though we go through detail what needs to happen during our meetings. Overall my other programmer took the lead this week and I kind of did other work so that I can be ready to go next week. Which by the way we are challenging Deep Dive tomorrow. We have done, I think a very good job at planning ahead what we want and hopefully our presentation will convey that. Well I will update you soon with how we did on Deep Dive.
Going into deep dive we were working on dungeon generation and basic player movement with a new camera. We originally were going for a top down view but we have changed to a more side view that can be rotated by the player. We are hoping with this we can make larger and more interesting maps with hidden items that the player will have to rotate the camera to find. Trying this out in out in QA we have also thought it would be good to try and keep the rotating aspect but instead of it being focused on the character it will be focused on the room itself so you will see the full room from that angle. So there will be now four specific locations that the camera will move through. The player will still control which location the camera is in.
We have worked on our dungeon generation with a basic tile that knows if it is a floor or a wall as well as if it is holding an object.From that we have a room that is made up of tiles which is loaded into an array for the level. Knowing how the level will be set up is read in through a text file and then builds the room from that. My other programmer will be working on finishing this so that we can a complete randomized placement of the rooms.
We will hopefully challenging Deep Dive this week so we can work on proof of concept. If we can get art into the game that would be awesome as well as my designer can set up rooms for us to use in the build. I also will update the tech documents with these new changes.
Andrew Millsap 