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!

It all begins again!

We begin with a new semester, some new faces and a new plan to complete our Alternate Reality Game. We even begin to plan the second part of the game the Augmented Game. A lot of work to do but bunch of fun to have!

Lets start with how our work plan should work.

As you can see the structure is basically setup so we get the games, the website and the video all are in the kanban. Kanban is a process of basically prioritizing your tasks and putting them in a system where people will pick the highest priority and work on it til it gets done. We still are using the scrum process but only for things that don't have their framework completed and went through the lean process. The only things right now that need to be iterated on at this point should be the Subliminal Messages team and the AUG Design. Here's hoping it works out great!!!

Sprint 2 ENDs!

Well it has been a fun month. 1st the story team, bugging the mini-team on Silcat and the deal with the Splash page. With the Sprint done its now time to worry on the Presentation, eeeecckkk. Did I ever mention I don't like public speaking? I'm teaming with a Robert for this thing and after the 1st two attempts to wow the class....we failed big time! No humor or visuals...yea pretty bad. Well hopefully we pull it together and be simply AWESOME!

Until then here are our ugly burn out charts...obviously we need to work on our communication. PFFFTT

And to end on a good note here is the Header I made for the Invitation Email that was added to the splash page presentation.

HEY YEA!

Changes changes Changes

So first let me update the work I did as the project director. I was approached by few of the story team and was brought to light a situation that has been going on and pretty much as was asked to step in and try to solve it. We ended up in a separate classroom to talk things through. I ended up having each of the team members go down the line and explain their problems and see where they all lead up to. For the most part it came down to...drum roll please...communication. Communication. Communication between members and the team lead or Product Owner. It was pretty good mess. And that lead to a bigger mess.
After this we had a really fun week of HELL, with the splash screen. We ended up having a few lines of mis-communication which lead to one of my artists working with a piece up to the very last minute, another programmer spending more then he should have online and others missing out on showing what they can do. Pissed me off and guilty all at the same time, mainly because I felt it was my fault that it happened. I felt pretty bad about the whole situation. BUT I did learn from it, and it even saw more of our communication problems. Something we are going to have to work on this next semester. Anyways it was a great week.
When I wasn't just working on that I was revamping the sites we have that help us find the info we are looking for and what not. Here are the screen shots of what it looks like now.

Finally!

Finally I got a chance to actually work in Unity. With one of our co-students not putting in any time to do the work for one of our minigames, I had decided to step up to the plate and try to fill the spot and do some art for a change...that was about 3 weeks ago....and I made like three two sets of assets which didn't meet up to what was needed...and now I think I got it lol.

Now these are just pictures of the 3D models and they aren't animated. The Supernova on top has the texture that moves outwards like it was exploding and the sun swirls around to simulate the nature movement of a star. Took a bit to get the scripts to run everything but as it turns out really proud of this.

Storm Rolled In

Okay, so when we started this sprint I thought,"So the 1st sprint went badly, this next one will be great!!" Well it got better but as it turns out there were a few issues we still didn't encounter yet. Like consistency. It seems that after I had made the ARG roadmap everyone wanted to change it. PFFTTT well, we'll see how this goes. Speaking of roadmap here it is :D