Wednesday, May 22, 2013

My Reflection on CSG 110

After being thoroughly reemed out by my professor during my CSG 110 class I decided that i needed to reflect on all of the things that went wrong this semester. One of the biggest fuckups that happened this semester was that our group did not kick people out who were dragging down the motivation of the rest of the group. This was definetly the root of all the problems in the group. Most of my team wasnt motivated to make cuddle bloodies. and that consequently brought down the moral of the people who had been keeping moral. People wouldnt do the things they were told to do and many people stopped showing all together. I learned that i need learn how to let people know they suck because im awful at that. If a person is sucking ass they deserve to know it. I learned this semester that the buisness end of game development is by far the most important because at the end of the day the guy with the most money will be able to do more cooler stuff than anyone else. Even if i am not going to be working with the buisness side very often i still need to learn all the buisness stuff because I need to know how and why the industry runs. It is also very important for me to learn agile which i felt that i should have taken it more seriously. If i could redo this semester I would definetly start out more enthusiastic than i did  this semester. I would do this in the hopes that it would inspire other to work hard and care more about what we were working on. Also I think that if more people cared they wouldnt be so layed back about people not working and they would work harder to get rid of them. I look forward to working with Raid+ on Lucidity this summer and next semester. It appears that their team functions much better than Firehelm did.

Tuesday, May 21, 2013

Wow! Leadership Is Important

Walking into matc as a noob to video game development I thought that much of my education would be focused on actually making the games but as it turns out the most difficult part of making games isnt actually building the games. One of the harshest lessons I learned was that in game development leadership is key. Right from the start I realized that we didnt have any born leaders on team firehelm. At first an awkward lad named Kevin took up the lead position just because he thought it would be funny, but he was dreadful. I decided to take up Kevins position and pretty much became leader. I was the CEO of my csg 110 group. I was team lead of my 115 group. At first I started off strong. I researched a few things about being a good leader and i was enthusiastic to start creating new ideas for games we could make. About half way through semester I saw that moral was dropping fast. This was where I made a fatal mistake. I lost moral too. I was only going to class for the grade and so were my classmates. If I could go back and do things differently i would definetly be more enthusiastic. Another way that I failed as a leader was that nobody feared me which ment that nobody respected me either. I wish that I had fired all the people that fucked up and didnt deliver work consistently I wish that as a leader I had been more organized and kept track of peoples absences. At the time though I didnt realize that things were so bad. It was only after seeing how our opposing team Raid+ functions did i see how screwed up my team was. Raid+ had been structured just like an actual company. And they got rid of people that didnt work. I am disapointed that my team fell apart but im excited to work with all these hardworking people next semester.

Wednesday, May 15, 2013

The Evolution of Cuddle Bloodies

My group project for my Vicom 110 class is that me and my group have to design a game that will make more money than the opposing team that shares the class with me. Our Idea  was that we could market a free to play first person shooter where you play cute cuddly teddy bears. The characters you were playing were really cute but did terribly violent things. This idea was sort of inspired by the show happy tree friends because we needed a theme that was likable but memorable. The gameplay hook of the game would be a destructible limb system where a players would be penalized if if they lost a limb. For example if one of the bears lost his arm the players accuracy would decrease. The way that this game was to generate revenue was that we would charge for cosmetic upgrades similar to League of Legends. Me and our one artist did some concept work for  what a bears would look like and the rest of the group discussed what classes we would have in the game.

We eventually realized that this game was best played in a third person perspective so that the player can see their character constantly and be more encouraged to upgrade their characters appearance. We eventually decided on 6 classes. The soldier( basic class), the cyborg(The heavy), The sniper, The ninja(stealthclass), The seamstress(medic class), The scientist(the engineer class). Each of these classes has a differing play and visual style.

Thursday, May 9, 2013

WID Journal 4

Its been a few weeks since my last blog post and the deadline for Wait Im Dead? is drawing closer. The 16th of may is portfolio night and the night that we will be showcasing WID. I feel that in terms of art we are still very much behind. I havnt seen any models for ground or flying enemies and there is still no background image just a solid blue color. There is also no model for the skeletons boomerang attack and I hope that the designers will come up with much of this stuff when i go to class today.
I myself have been working on the ground enemies because it seemed that the previous enemy scripts had been lost somwhere or had been deemed unacceptable for some reason. I based the scripts of the normal enemies on the timer type scripts of the main boss. The designers will place enemies down in an area and then adjust the timer so that the enemy wont ever move out of bounds. If this game were larger I would have written a script that detects if there is an object in front of the enemy and that will turn it around but seeing as this game is so small i figured that manually setting each enemies timer wouldnt be such a hassle.
I also finished the boss about a week ago i couldnt get him to ever jump so the designers said it was ok to just have the boss move back and forth in the arena and then damage the player on contact. I really wish i could have gotten the boss to jump but we are running out of time.
~Jon