Boots to butts

Alright so this week I have finally had enough with people's work ethic in my class. We are pretty much at this point the laughing stock of the school. We don't look like we are going to get this game done unless we really put our noses to the grind stone. On the good side of things, my management team all agreed with me. So that's good that I do have to support of my team to get this done.

The major things I updated this week is the AUG roadmap, which I discovered that I was doing it wrong and was actually making Gameplay Flow Charts instead. So I updated that and post them on the Project site and remade our Gameplay flow chart just so people can see where we are going.

I think if this boot to butts mentality works we should be getting back on track and have an awesome game!

I think we made good progress this week.

We ironed out our AUG gameplay, defined our Alpha Roadmap, and prepared our feature/task list for user stories. The Roadmap has been updated and placed onto the project site here: https://sites.google.com/a/gmatc.matc.edu/matc-arg-project/roadmap  and I remade the Gameplay flow chart here: https://sites.google.com/a/gmatc.matc.edu/matc-arg-wiki/aug-gameplay-flow-chart for everyone to reference.

I plan on getting it into SilCat for Monday so all we need to do is make the tasks based on the roadmap, assign them and get to work :D

Another thing we agreed on as a class that management is not pulling punches no more. Basically if you don't pull your weight; you'll be pulled from the credits and then held back a semester. We all know Emil has no problem with this concept and I have now taken the gloves off. We have already talked to a few of the misfit people who need to step up and start proving they want to be here or they are the 1st to go. I'm sorry it has to been done, truly I am but we can't sit around any more, it's go time!!!

That's pretty much the content this week.

Bizzare's Corner Begins

With me trying to switch this site over from a personal website to a professional one, I got rid of the Gaming for City Slickers page which I am going to use for a local zine but when I got to looking at Bizzare's Corner I figured this would be a great page to show my creativity and writing skills. SO I'm keeping it and there is nothing you can do about it :P. Actually go check it out now, I have a few items up there now!

http://powerupranch.blogspot.com/p/bizzares-corner.html

Portfolio Work

I decided that I am going to start putting up some of my best work on here from Forever Interactive. Go Ahead and check it out:

http://powerupranch.blogspot.com/p/forever-interactive-work.html

Your tearing me apart!...lisa?

I am feeling like we are in trouble. This sprint is coming to an end quickly and it seems that I have a bunch of my classmates not feeling any need or want to continue working. It comes comes down to me to put the pressure on them and get people to understand why they need to push. Its really not game design issue but a management issue. So I need to find different ways other then the do it or I fire you mentality. Looks like I am going to need to read up a bunch.

As for the game it self. I feel we have more enough time to get it done as long people actually start putting in the effort to complete their tasks. 

ARG/AUG Weekly #2

Ok so here is the news from this week,

#1 Feb 19th is the last day for all the mini-games to be in Beta state. Any game that is not in beta will be cut from the list. This may cause some issues with subliminal messages and passwords but we will have to adapt whatever is left to compensate.

#2 We have a new site for the build, Thanks to Boston. We should have the build up and running soon. Jeremy Jones is working on the art assets for the site and Wayne updating the build regularly. We should be able to playtest soon.

#3 With the absence of the design team in the last two meetings and some opinions voiced and my own head screaming at me, in our Monday's class we are going to be going over the AUG gameplay and finalize the roadmap in class as a class. I have a couple reasons to do this: the first being we don't have time to wait on the design team to finally decide to show up to their much less begin designing. The second reason, the way we have the current roadmap setup, we would running down the same path we are currently running down and it won't work. So we need to come up with one game with multiple elements of gameplay that make the structure of the AUG. For those who are coming up with ideas for games, keep em, we can break them down to their elements and mix them together to make a super awesome game that everyone can enjoy and does what we need.

#4 When we put the ARG into beta state two things need to happen, we need to get I wanna say two programmers and two artists to volunteer to fix any bugs in the game and push the build to be pushed to beta and gold state in one sprint. That means everyone else should be on the AUG to start building. We should still have everyone play testing at this point but a couple hrs playing the game shouldn't be out of site for the team. 

#5 Class for the portal started. It didn't start off as I expected but it doesn't mean we can't move forward. I want to talk to all the students in that class this next week so we can figure out a time to sit down and design the portal portion of the AUG so we have the game concept ready long before we are ready to work on it.

That is all the news I have. I think we have made some good progress this last two weeks but there are some really big holes forming like people not showing up to meetings, lack of communication on a couple fronts and a lack of a final build that is in beta state come Feb 19th (not the games the final build). But with all that said I have faith that everyone will push to complete tasks and get everything working perfectly by the end of this Sprint. ONWARD!!!! 

Global Game Jam 2012

I went to the Global Game Jam this past weekend. For my first time participating I felt very good about the results. But let me explain what the GGJ is first.

The Global Game Jam is an event where computer nerds, game hobbyists  and students form groups around the world to see what they can make in 48 hrs. The people who organized the event set it up so that we have a place on the site as well as our own stream so people can sit at their computer and watch us be at our computers. People do it!. I think we had a steady 8 people watching us, though I will say that it was probably eight of us watching ourselves. Kind of pointless but I did have people I know hop on and get me to say, "Hey"

In any case I enjoyed the experience and learned so much about how an agile based company works and how it related to the game development. The biggest thing I had learned was the importance of using lean when in a scrum scenario which is basically focusing on the basic framework of our game rather then try to add tons of content. We followed this structure up until about 2/3 of the event and then fatigue set in. We stopped tracking our progress and tasks and didn't notice that our framework was WAY too big. So we barely got our game up.

I have concluded in the end I would love to do this again but not anytime soon, maybe in the summer. Here the link to our game, we plan on getting together again sometime just to fix the bugs so we all have something added to our portfolios.

http://globalgamejam.org/2012/temple-feathered-serpent

hope you have fun!