Nice!

Things are going well.

Spent a good chunk of the day working on the project. We got feedback on our PoC today - it was nice to hear that most people who played it enjoyed it. And there is nothing like hearing "good job" from your producer to help motivate me back to work! I sure hope our tech doc turn in was up to snuff as well.

After the day o' work i finally had the time to make a run to wal-mart and get the next 3 months worth of food. Feels like that is the first thing i have done since starting this project that didnt have anything to do with it ... i'm happy now that i have a horde of food to keep me alive during the next 3 months of gratuitous work. FF1 here we come.

Here's hoping everyone else out there had as good a day as i did!

You mean i get to sleep??

What a week. After 5 or so days of working 12+ hours a day - we finally had the PoC demonstration. I was a bumpy week, and we definitely have some problems that need to be worked out, but our game came out much better than we all expected. On friday we barely had anything on screen, and we turned that into an almost fully functional battle. Many thanks to my team!

The demonstrations today were very rewarding. It was nice to see people play what we had and react positively - mostly due to the combo animation. We also got a lot of good feedback from everyone who played it (mostly feedback about how we need more feedback!)

As developers, i think we overlooked some of the little things that are really important to make the game intuitive and enjoyable, so i am grateful that we had others to come in and play so we can learn what we missed. Time for a night of rest before starting on feature frag 1!

Storming!

I'd say our team has officially hit the storming stage we learned about in public speaking. I wasn't there for it personally, but there were some problems that occured today, resulting in quite a long sit down. A lot of good advice was given, which i hope some of our team members will take seriously. I am not a confrontational person myself, and one of the biggest things to me on a team is peoples ability to work together and be kind to their teammates.

I still think these problems will come back to haunt us, because i have heard of other similar situations with the same persopn, so i am not sure of the sincerity of the apology. However, i am forgiving enough to look past what happened, and i hope that things will work out. I also hope the smell goes away soon ... but we'll see what happens.

On a brighter note - we were able to get our rendering to work, and after the sit-down we had today we were able to keep moving forward. Hopefully this trend will continue.

Streeeessss

Defiantly feeling the pressure now, we have have very little time left to finish PoC - and still plenty to do. A lot of our game is reliant on being able to draw in order to test if it is working correctly, so we're hoping that once our rendering is up everything will play nice and it'll all work. I'm probably worrying too much about it - as i tend to do, i guess i just can't help but worry ... it's in my nature.

Other than that things are going well, our TDD is coming along nicely, although i think spending the time to fix that ended up taking more away from out PoC than we wanted. We're back on track now, and i'm hoping everyone will get their work done and done well so we can have a solid PoC turn in, and hopefully something to show on Wednesday.

Hell week.

The past couple days of dev were pretty nice up until we got our tech design doc feedback. It was not up to par, to say the least. I think the whole team is guilty - some to a higher degree than others, perhaps - of not taking it as seriously as we should have. We were all ready to get into proof of concept and start programming. It could have been reviewed more, and there are some things we really needed to expand on. The feedback we got was a bit hard to take at first, and i think it bummed us all out a bit, but now we have to put the time in and get it to where it needs to be. The advice we recieved on what we need to fix was great, and I think it is plenty to help us get on the right track with the documentation. I am confident in my team, i just hope the morale isn't too low now and that everyone continues to give their all both in fixing the tech doc and getting everything we need into our proof of concept.

Hell week starts today, for us at least.

RIP H2

I would like to take a moment to pay my respects to the Halo 2 multiplayer that will no longer exist after tonight. I never was a big fan of it myself, since i can't play console shooters very well - but i respect what it did for online multiplayer on consoles. I'm sitting here watching my friend Kevin play for the last few hours, and i can't help but think what it would be like if someone told me i could only play Quake 2 online one last time .... it makes me feel sad.

On another note, it's been a good couple days for our project. Today is a little bit slower after going to town on the TDD yesterday. I am hoping that all will go will on Friday when we get feedback on it, i still have a few concerns about it - but i think the first turn in was pretty solid.

Day one of PoC work went pretty well, too. We all got started on some of the basics. I should have the state machine working how we want it tomorrow, and hopefully have some time to test out the event system after i finish writing all the functions.

Let the 3 month crunch begin!

Back to work!

Well, after a week of rest, it's time to jump back in to the workload. It was a nice week - I started playing tennis, very nice for the stress relief. I was also able to go back home for a few days and see my mom and sister.

I was glad to see everyone back and well rested. We got plenty of work done today, and i think after combining a lot of what we had done of our technical design doc into the actual design document we realized we were a little closer to being finished than we though. Still a long day of work tomorrow to be ready for turn in on Wednesday.

It's good to be back in florida. I'm ready for a solid few months of work, and I think my team is too!

Spring break!

This break could not have come at a better time. It will be nice to have some time to rest up and get over this cold/cough. But, other than a bit of rest it isn't going to be much a break ... plenty of work to be done.

Our tech design doc still has a lot of work to be done, mostly just module descriptions. And we have started putting together a solution to work from for the game. We are hoping to piece together something we can run with over the break. Sometime this week i will begin working on an object manager and/or factory for us to use, although i am not sure if what we laid out in the module description will need to be changed - we'll see what happens.

Enjoy your vacation fullsailers! Don't forget to relax a little bit.

Sick and tired ...

Not of anything in particular, but literally sick ... and tired. Whatever cold or sickness was going around last week finally caught up to me. My throat hurts, and I started to lose my voice right as class started. I made it through class ok though - hopefully i will survive until the weekend so i can rest up.

On the up side, class is going well. We are making progress on our TDD, and are hoping to get most of it finished tomorrow so that we can start on our PoC soon. Breaking down all the features into different milestones has been challenging for us. A lot of the time we feel like there is too much in one section or not enough in another, and sometimes we end up wondering "well what do we put in alpha/beta?" so we have to step back and look at it all over again.

One month down, four to go

To sum up GDC ... making connections was a combination of stress and enjoyment. I learned that there are quite a few developers whose experience has made them despise students, but at the same timer there are plenty who are willing to give their advice on how to get into the industry. Aside from the people i met, the summits and tutorials also helped me learn a lot more about mobile platforms than i had learned on my own.

The first month of final project was enjoyable, even though documentation is not my favorite thing in the world. It has it's own form and level of stress, which i expect to increase exponentially. All the documentation and the prototyping we were allowed to do went well, and i hope we can manage to stay a little ahead of the curve so that maybe i'll be a bit less worried over the next few months.

I love San Francisco

Already turning out to be a great week. Learned a lot at the summits today, although I missed out on one of the ones I had planned on attending due to getting lost during lunch time. Tons of great people here. From students to producers, it's amazing how friendly everyone is, the fact that almost anyone will stop and have a conversation with you is absolutely amazing. My brain hurts now due to an overload of new information/people. Time for some sleep.

Hello World.

So, this is my first foray into the wide world of the web. In preparation for GDC I decided I defiantly need a place where anyone who is interested can come to find out a little bit about who I am, and what I like to work on. I hope to update about my experience at GDC and about my upcoming final project.