The whales of our team

Producing Things

Instead of typing out everything, here is my Google Keep entry.

Total: 24.25 hours

Foreseeing the Future

I will be continuing work on GUI while planning out next term in terms of marketing and art based on the changes in scope we made right before going on break.

Fall Term Reflection

A lot has changed since the start of fall term. This sentence is an understatement. We have come a long way since even the beginning of co-op (spring 2014). We were all ambitious, ready to join a team of our choosing since we all have had bad team experiences. However, we all underestimated what an endeavor our senior project would be.

In selecting the members of the team, I was aware of the immense amount of talent our team would have. My concern was more on how well everyone would be able to meet the demands on the team, knowing that our project is rather ambitious to execute and polish in a timely manner. We established the expectations of the team early on in the term so no one would be surprised about the demands. As production faltered, I began auditing hours, analyzing patterns of productivity, and addressing issues regarding the team as a whole during our meetings. We also resorted to some amount of public shaming when team members failed to deliver.

With the constant changes we had to do in how "things" were running in the team, the members were put under more stress. The term was only 12 weeks long. As soon as a problem arose, we often did not have time to let it sit. I would devise solutions to implement and processes would change every few weeks. While the problems are being addressed--though the intended effects lagged behind a bit--I have witnessed each team member experience personal growth.

We are, without a doubt, behind schedule. The camaraderie within this team can and will overcome that.

Break Break Break

Overall, I got a good amount of work done. However, I did not get the amount I wanted to.
First week of break over! Two more weeks to go.

Finish Line

• Orthographics and Concept Art (13 Hrs)
• Researching Different kinds of Concept art for Inspiration for gygans (1.5 Hrs)

Progress

Kamikaze Unit Orthos:

•  Draft 01

Kamikaze Superunit Orthos:

•  Draft 01

Kamikaze Tower Orthos:

• Draft 01

Rush Unit Orthos:

•  Draft 01

Tank Unit Orthos:

•  Draft 01

Tank Superunit Orthos:

• Draft 01

Kail CA:

• Draft 01 

Angu CA: 

• Draft 01

Gatling CA:

•  Draft 06

Crippler CA:

• Draft 04
• Draft 05

Battle Plan

• I will be making mock ups of what the game play will look like
• Finishing up orthographics for any remaining units (Rush Superunit and tower, Tank tower, all of Support)
• Concept art finishing up Crippler completely and the new Gygan.
• Starting up concept art for Gatling.

Damage Control

• Definitely thought I could get more work done over break.
• Still finding a way to design the new gygan based on the attributes we want. Having a bit of a struggle, but just gotta work through it.
• Things seem to be flying smoothly, but much work to catch up on.

tl;dr

It's been a relaxed week, but plenty of time to do some work work work.

-Henderson

Lost At Sea

Where to begin? I'll save most of it for the debrief since it'll be a lot, but I at least need to apologize to my team for the lack of work and communication from my end for the last two weeks.

Accomplishments

• Rush Unit (.5 hours)
• Draft 22 Top
• Rush Super Unit (2 hours)
• Draft 5
• Rush Tower (1.5 hours)
• Draft 6
• Researching Coral Ideas for Kail (1 hour)

Screenshot

• Coral Ideas Reference
• Folder

Next Steps

• Enjoy Christmas and New Years with loved ones
• Return to the Rush
• Have fun playing with ideas for Brigade and Support

Debrief

Fall term could have been more productive, but I believe everyone on the team went through a valuable learning experience together. Though most of the team worked together before, I felt like the odd ball out who rare to never worked with the majority of the team on a collaborative and long project. I trusted in Anna to put together an elite team and was happy she chose to invite me into that team. Though we've had our bumps along the way from redesigns to illnesses and hospital things to miscommunication and we've had to begrudgingly scope down as we haven't met our goal for where we would be at this time now, I still believe that Anna assembled a great group of individuals for our senior project.

It would have been great if we had stuck with a more simple idea that could have a more polished project in the end, but I will stand by my team with their ambitious dreams as a senior project is meant to be. Though it would have been better if we listened to scope down much earlier, but at least we're learning.

I think I started out well and did my best to ramp up my production and communication as the term went on, but I could not keep up anymore at the end of the term. I would remind myself redesigning is always a possibility if we want to remain flexible to obstacles that pop up and when we fall behind and need to rethink our abilities to reach our goals. It's begun to be deeply frustrating though when miscommunication occurs and designs require a lot of reworking and tweaking where I feel like I'm floundering at sea because I feel like maybe I'm missing something or my designs aren't adequate. It's been a rough two weeks since my last post and I've basically accomplished nothing. To my team, I apologize for this. Personal issues that I would rather not post about have affected my work and I am going to do my best to correct them. I am seeking help by talking to Anna about this issue. I promise I will be working hard to stay positive and to help make our project awesome though!

Wishing everyone a very Merry Christmas and very Happy New Years! And with the new year, as a team, let's make it one whale of year!

Desiree Ann Lim

Break, Family Reunion, and Bunch of Hospital Visits

Accomplishments

• Further animated/edited Kamikaze Unit and Superunit (3 hrs)
• Readjusted the rigs to the resized Units and Superunits (.5 hr)
• Did a rough animation for Sniper Superunit (2 hrs)
• Spent some time looking at reference videos of walk cycles and limp walking cycles (1 hr)
• Look at shader tutorials and Dylan's shader stuff (2 hrs)
• Tested if the resized rigs with animation would work in Unity (.5 hr)
• Started animating/weightpainting Tank Unit (1 hr)

      Total hours: 10 hours

Works In Progress?

Tank and Sniper animations.

Next Steps

• Continue with animation

Debrief

From the beginning of the break till now, I've spent most of the time with my family and recovering from a small surgery. With that said, I wasn't able to spend a lot of time on the project. 

Fall Term Reflection

Fall term went kind of slow. There were a lot of concept art iterations and less production. With the progress that we were going at, we had to scale down our game by a lot at the end of the term. Team communication was weak in the beginning at first but then it got better as the weeks went by. There were confusions here and there between the concept artists and the game designers. I also think it would be nice if we could have a day where everyone in the team can together together at a specific place for the next term. I feel it would boost productivity and team morale and at the same time, bond the team together more. Overall, I think each of my team member did a great job trying to reach out to each other and change their working habits. Though to get to what we hope for, we still need to put a lot of effort into it.

As for myself, saying that "I think I did pretty good" would be a big lie. Yes, I did make mel scripts for myself and for the team. Yes, I rigged the units in a day and made screen captures for the team to see. Yes, I helped with some animation and researched a bit of shader writing. However, I didn't feel like I did put enough effort. I didn't meet the hour requirements for some of the weeks. I didn't ask for work when I didn't have things to do for some of the weeks. I didn't really know what to say when it comes to concept art stuff. I still lack confidence in suggesting ideas and stuff. So did I did pretty good? I don't think so. 

Kai-Lin Chuang

End of the term

What Got Done (last 2 weeks)

• Finished up the project with Mesh Baker to automatically generate texture atlases for all entities and update prefabs.
• I spent a good amount of time figuring how we would handle team colors when all of the textures were baked into an atlas before runtime.  I tried at first to use PSD files where each layer was the texture with a different team color and then split them up in Unity.  This turned out be a lot of work for artists and generated a ton of different files, so this was scrapped.  The way to go was to use a custom shader for team colors.  Since we have no shader experts I had to spend some time researching shader programming.  What I ended up with was a shader that takes a color as a parameter (for team color) and then overlays a transparent texture on top of it.  This works pretty well and the artists only need to make certain parts of the textures transparent.

• I updated the project to Unity 4.6.1 and the NGUI package to 3.7.7.  I had to spend some time fixing some of the functionality that broke with the NGUI upgrade.
• Added events that get fired when units or towers switch states (walking, attacking, idle, etc) and an example script showing how to use them.  This was for Jonathan to help him get started with implementing particles.
• Fixed a few more bugs with the map editor.
• Added some debug options to expand territory and switch teams.
• I also spent a good amount of time during the last 2 weeks at design meetings.  We have been restructuring some of the units and towers to reduce the workload on the artists.

Total time:  44 hours

Fall Term Review

I'll keep this quick.  We got a lot done over the last term, but it's been a bumpy ride.  We had a bit of a rough start going into production with constant bottlenecks and setbacks.  Although where we are today is not what I expected I do think, as a team, we've learned a lot from the last term and have improved.  I am really proud of the amount of work that you guys have been putting in for the second half of the term.  We've caught up a lot but we still have a long way to go.  I hope that we can continue this momentum and keep moving quickly after the break.  Whale yeah!

Whale Whale Whale, How Did I Get Here?

I first met Anna Nguyen at our mutual workplace, Drexel University’s College of Engineering Dean’s Office Annex.  Here we mostly exchanged typical water cooler small talk, such as “Wow check out that weather acting like weather” and “It is Friday; societally we like that.” However, these polite and brief exchanges eventually gave way to the reveal that Anna’s path of study and career aspirations amounted to making video games, which in my eternally youthful mind translated to “the coolest stuff in the world.” So, I pestered her until I got the chance to talk to her senior design team and pitch my skills as a marketing major/professional/dude.

Fast forward a few months and now I’m not only marketing guy, but also music guy, a possible sound design guy, and somehow an art directing guy. What? Yeah, that’s what I said. Granted, I brought this all on myself by sticking my nose in everything. The art position is especially peculiar. Basically, to help out I sat down with Jonathan and got the lowdown on how we want concept art to play out so I can assist in guiding the process and speed along iterations. I am merely an opinionated oracle, but the team has been supportive in bringing me up to speed and initiating me as a qualified reviewer. This is yet another situation in which I’m confident in the outcome chiefly because I believe in the team.

Another one of the crucial elements of the game that I’m involved with is tone. This is because tone will not only inform the marketing process, but the musical process as well. As such, I am attending more of the design meetings than I’d expected (which was about zero) and I’m all about it. It is fun to see how people with different skills and passions work. By the end of this I expect to be involved in more unexpected ventures, and truthfully, I eagerly await the opportunities.

Regards,

Alex

Internet is Broken...

The internet at my parents house is not working. I will be SOL until that gets fixed. I will be making offline edits until I am able to proceed further.

C is for Whales!

This week was pretty uneventful as far as work for this project goes (for myself at least). Went to watch our faithful DIGM compadres do their presentation and then us CS people did ours.

We both received "Best in Show" awards, naturally.

We had a lot of good talks this week between unit sizing and towers unearthing. Also picking out team uniforms (get excited everybody).

I am very tired. It is time for me to go to bed now please and thank you.

What I did:

• SRS edits (2 hours)
• CS Presentation (7 hours)

What hurt me:

• I'm not sleeping yet.

What I'm doing:

• Design Doc.
• Gygan Specific Units?
• Updating Unit prefabs with any models we get

Final Whales

End of term presentations

This week both the DIGM and CS side of our team gave a presentation for our respective senior project lecture classes. Overall, both presentations did well but we will have to wait for the grade to see how well we actually did.

Over Thanksgiving break, I (Anna) worked with Alex to make a flashy video highlighting the work we created over the last several weeks. For the art team, we collaborated online to flesh out the content of the presentation. We did not go over the basic premise of the game at the beginning of our presentation so many of the faculty were lost. However, once we answered their questions during the Q&A section, we received very specific, valuable feedback. I reflected on the comments made and decided to reach out to specific faculty.

For the CS N, the programmers gave a very structured presentation to CS freshmen. They then ran through the presentation during our Wednesday meeting for Stefan.

End of cycle

This past week marked the end of a cycle (renamed from sprint). In our debrief, everyone on the team expressed better communication and initiative in all members despite the lack of hours put towards the game over break. Everyone was in good spirits about the work we are doing and was in great emotional health despite complaining about their hunger throughout the meeting. Several members of the team play tested the newest build. We were all excited to see the units, superunits, and towers in the game. There were less errors that crashed the build as well. All in all we ended the cycle ready to start the next.

Making the public-facing side of Whale House Studios

One of the biggest issues we have as a team is consistently and concisely explaining our game to others. Alex, our marketing amazingness of a person, started to address this in gathering key points of our game when we casually explain the premise to friends during our marketing meeting. He is using the information to put together a press kit for Whale House Studios.

Initiate

Previously, an issue across the board was time management (and this is still somewhat an issue). With everyone on the team addressing time management in their own way, the next step was to take more initiative. As a team we are too humble and modest about our work, often not showing off the effort we put towards the game. In hiding our confusion, members within each disciplinary and across disciplinary are not fostering conversations about issues they believe are important. While I (Anna) highlight the key issues during the team meetings and encourage discussion, there is too much confusion going on when we are away from each other that everyone else including myself do not know about. The first week of each cycle usually goes well, but the initiative levels off in the second week. The team started addressing this towards the end of the Friday meeting, which was great to see.

I ran out of whales and started modeling

Producing Things

• Make presentation for Tuesday (2)
• Plan meetings for the week (1)
• This involves planning the meeting agenda that I then decided against for the following meetings:
• Monday art team meeting
• Wednesday check-in meeting with Dylan
• Wednesday meeting with Stefan
• Friday meeting with the team
• Reviewing Alex's meeting agenda for Friday marketing meeting
• Discuss deliverables for Wednesday with Art Team 
• This was pushed off as everyone was spending time practicing on the presentation and addressed during our Wednesday meeting
• Test textures and animation import pipeline for Unity
• This did not happen as I was focused on pushing concept art for our Cycle goals
• GUI (0.5)
• Dylan and I discussed an approach to this during our meeting but I started some preliminary work towards the solution.
• Model
• Tank Unit clean-up (0.25)
• Tank Superunit clean-up (0.75)
• Tank Tower (0.5)
• Support U Phase 2 (0.5)
• Support SU (0.5)
• Update Task analysis and Gantt chart (0.5)
• Supervised music teaser track with Alex (1 hr)
• Finished video trailer (3)

Total: 10.5

Proof of Progress

Links

• Gantt chart
• Task Analysis

Tank Unit

Tank Superunit

Tank Tower

Support Unit

Support Superunit

GUI

The idea is to stack these three to make:

Foreseeing the Future

• Update Gantt chart, Task Analysis, Task List
• Model
• Rush Unit Phase 2
• Rush Superunit Phase 1
• Rush Tower Phase 1
• Support Tower Phase 1
• Iterate on all other models
• Plan meetings for the week
• Define cycle goals based on previous accomplishments
• GUI

...Whalep what did you expect

Accomplishments

Design meeting with Dylan and Ryan after our Friday Meeting (1 hour)
Talk with Kenneth Oum (1 hour)
Particle task list (.5 hours)
Art Critique (1 hour)
initial unit balancing algorithms (.5 hours)

Next Steps

Tons of work will be done in the next week.

Debrief

Finals took priority unsurprisingly. I don't feel bad about it, but I do feel responsible for the work I haven't done yet. After Wednesday, my finals will be done and I will have a week of relative free time until I go home, a week in which I intend to get some serious work done.

Whale I Went and Hurt My Wrist

END OF THE TERM WOOOO. We're coming to the end of term and Concept art is still being churned out like crazy, and models are getting done and rigs built, and the team is just really together. I, however am an idiot (you'll see in What I Did).

What I Did

After a really stupid accident that I would rather not mention on the internet; I crushed my (dominant) wrist, and after a few days of just dealing with it I lost the ability to use my fingers. The doctor thought it was broken and after x-rays I am happy to say it is just a bad sprain. I didn't learn the results until Thursday, meaning that I didn't do much (or any actually) work for fear that if it were a break that using it even for small tasks would cause long term problems.

Even knowing it's just a sprain didn't do much to help my progress. I can only use a mouse for 30 mins at a time before needing a break, and when I did work it was not a lot for the amount of time it took (even just typing this is taking a ridiculous amount of time). I so far have only redone Sniper Unit, Super Unit, and Tower UVs (a whopping 4.5 hours), and I plan to reUV the Tank Super Unit, and Rush Unit by the end of tonight (# of hours unknown at this time)

What I'm Going To Do

Start texturing once I am able to apply pressure with a pen, and hopefully get Tank Unit, and Sniper Unit textured during these next 2 weeks.

Debrief Not Deboxer

I feel this accident has put me even more behind than I would normally be, and I really want to apologize to my team for that. They have all been busting their butts and I'm busting my wrist :/

One Week till I fly halfway through the world and back to my house!

Accomplishments

• Rigged the Support Unit (1.5 hr)
• Fairly simple rig. Spent most of the time testing out different ways for rigging the spine and trying to fix some rig issues that I had. Decided to stick with an IK Spline rig since it would work the best for animation. 

• Did a brainstorm session with Desiree and Henderson with the help of Kenneth Oumn (1.5 hrs)
• Started to weightpaint the tank unit (1 hr)
• Didn't know that Anna was going to update the model until I mentioned to her that I was weightpainting the Tank Unit. So I had to stop weightpainting.

• Looked over the Rush Unit model and made some reviews (1 hr)
• Spent some time figuring out the best way to correct the model. Asked the rest of the art team to help with critiquing if they could. 
• Animated Kamikaze Unit (3 hrs)
• Fleshed out the walk cycle and the recoil cycle.
• Improved the animations of whatever Jon did before
• Video of the walk cycle can be seen here.
• The movements on the spikes and snout are exaggerated. I wanted to see how it would look and see what feedback I will get from the team. This will give me a better idea of how far I should go with the animations. The result is, I will need to cut down the exaggeration by a lot.
• Looked up limping walk cycles, took some notes and made simple sketches (1 hr)
• This is for me to get an idea of how units would move if their health are low
• Started editing animation for Kamikaze Superunit and Augher (1.5 hrs)

Total Hours: 10.5 hrs

Works In Progress?

Currently editing animations for Kamikaze Unit, Superunit and Augher. The animations right now are limited but I will be adding more animations to them. Right now, the mostly only have a walk cycle and recoil cycle. I will be adding limping cycle, death cycle and variations of recoil cycle. Most of my finals will be done early next week so this will give me more time to work before I fly back home on Friday. 

Next Steps

• Animations
• Continue research on shader writing over the break
• Rig stuff when the time comes

Issues

• Maya rendering issues and crashing stuff. Typical Maya stuff so nothing too much to worry about.
• Finals are approaching so I couldn't really focus most of my time on Senior Project. Tried to squeeze in as much as I can for this week.

Last Minute Comments

I'm not surprised if people can't meet the 12 hour requirement for the past 2 weeks. Last week was Thanksgiving and this week we have finals. I know this is no excuse as well (Anna probably wants to shout at me if she is reading this) so I'll make up as much as I can next week and hopefully over the winter break. Communicating with my team member from across the world shouldn't be too much of a problem. Though the internet connection back in my home is slow since my family doesn't really need fast internet speed. Welp, we'll see how things goes over the break.

Kai-Lin Chuang

This week I drafted the media kit, or rather, drafting. I am editing the press release right now. Interestingly enough, I've noticed that the process of attempting to communicate the concepts present in Gygan Reign to others is helping me understand them better myself. The premise of presenting the game to an uninitiated audience in a limited timeframe has forced me to condense everything I know about Gygan Reign into the most concise essence of what it is.

Building the media kit hasn't just been about the game, however. Writing about the company background required delving back into the substantial history before my involvement with the project, revealing motivations about why everyone came together in the first place beyond the simple necessity of the senior project. Personally, I just enjoy knowing more about the people I work with and what they care about. On this note, writing the executive biography required an interview with our glorious leader, Anna. Again, it was satisfying to learn how she developed the skill and drive to take on her current role and future ambitions.

In closing, my future tasks will include finishing the media kit up and beginning to create additional web and social media presences. Brb, gonna go play DnD.

Regards,
Alex

I whaley wish it was break already.

Awesome week! Got some work done before a long weekend in Boston. Break over and now back to work, work, work.

Finish Line

• Brainstorming session with Kenneth Oum (2.5 Hrs) 
• Made more Concept Art (Gatling, and Crippler) (4.5 Hr)

Progress

Gatling Unit:

• Draft 04
• Draft 05

Crippler:

• Draft 02
• Draft 03

 Battle Plan

• We need to get down certain features for each design as well as a complete motif
• Focus on finalizing designs and finding the constraint on specific towers, units, and superunits
• I probably won't be able to get that much work done this week because of more final projects and papers

Damage Control

• This week was busy with a lot of final project assignment.
• While we come up with a central motif, we need it so that it fits all of the other designs by changing them as little as possible.
• It was good to see our game from a fresh perspective. Advice from the outside helped us see some underlying issues we did not realize before. Granted, we only need to fix a few things and not everything.

tl;dr

Busy week coming up. Will get more work done in the following weeks.

-Henderson

Good news everyone!

Obligatory Farnsworth picture:

This term is almost done!

What got done

• Worked on the CS presentation which went pretty well.  (9 hours)
• Added the foundation of a pause menu with in game options while you are playing and I added it to the map editor.  You no longer have to quit the game to switch scenes!  (3 hours)
• Since there's been talk of getting a "grey box" build out to more people, I started making the game less error prone when we aren't walking someone through it.  I reworked the way the bases are assigned to avoid situations where a player doesn't get a base or there is an incorrect number of players for a map.  I added validation to the map editor and the lobby to force an equal number of players per team to leave out the guess work of assigning bases to player.  So far this has been working out pretty well, but we will probably add functionality for uneven teams in the future.  (12 hours)
• I continued working with the MeshBaker asset this week where I made some awesome breakthroughs.  A few weeks ago I added functionality to combine the mesh and materials of the map into 1 mesh and 1 material at runtume.  This takes about 2 seconds on average and can easily be concealed in the loading screen.  What I set out to do this weekend was find a solution to combining the meshes of entities (bases, towers, units and superunits) as they spawn.  I tried using MeshBaker to bake the models into prefabs, but I was met with an endless stream of errors.  It turns out that MeshBaker breaks very easily.  Even assigning values in the inspector in a different order can cause errors.  I had previously been using the runtime API, so I figured I would give that a shot.  After a few hours of fighting with it I was able to to get some pretty good results.  I set up script where you could just drag all of the models into the scene, press the "Bake" button, and then you would automatically get the new texture atlas and material.  Then at runtime, as entities are spawned, I could just add them to a big combined mesh for next to no performance hit (it takes about one thousandth of a second).  At that point I had every mesh in the game as 1 draw call.  Unity has a hard limit on texture size of 4096x4096.  Once we have textures for all of the models we will probably surpass that max size once all of the textures are combined.  I reworked my script to now support 4 different textures atlases.  One for all bases, towers, units and super units.  So now we have a setup where we will have 4 draw calls for all entities.

So what does all of this mean?  For starters, artists will no longer have to spend time creating texture atlases.  This could save hundreds of hours of work.  It is now just a few clicks to automatically generate texture atlases.  We no longer have a huge performance hit when a ton of units and towers are on screen.  This will be especially useful for larger multiplayer games.  I've still got some work to do on this but this is coming along nicely.  (15 hours)

What's next

• After I combine the materials into 1 big material, I still have to manually go update all of the 15+ prefabs.  This is very time consuming and needs to be automated.
• (In the coming weeks) Refine behaviors for AI.
• (In the coming weeks) Continue testing 8 player support.

Almost Done Support & Rush

This week again I was focused on the Support and Rush lines again along with preparing for the final presentation for this term. A couple team members and I also had an informal brainstorming session with Ken Oum about environment and keeping our designs cohesive.

Accomplishments

• Support Super Unit (4.5 hours)
• Draft 1
• Draft 2
• Draft 3
• Support Tower (3 hours)
• Draft 1
• Draft 2
• Rush Unit (1.5 hours)
• Draft 22
• Rush Super Unit (2 hours)
• Draft 4
• Rush Tower (1.5 hours)
• Draft 5
• Meeting with Kenneth Oum, Henderson, and Kai-lin (1.5 hours)
• Brainstorming Ideas

Screenshot

• Some Concept Art WIP
• Support 1
• Support 2
• Support 3
• Support 4
• Support 5
• Support 6
• Support 7
• Rush 1
• Rush 2
• Rush 3

Next Steps

• Finish up Rush and Support lines

Debrief

The presentation on Tuesday went well. We got a lot of specific feedback from the professors and learned we also probably need to do a clean recap of our game every time we present though that makes it difficult to squeeze everything into 10 minutes. Our team is full of great presentation speakers, so I'm not too worried about figuring out how to condense verbiage and be concise with our words in order to meet the time limit.

As for my work, the Support line seems to be moving quickly with most of the team a fan of the design. The Rush had a setback with concern over the footprint shape, so I was asked to go back and make it more round. Though I need to revisit the orthos, both lines are moving along with modeling in progress.

The team brought environment design back up again this week, which was sort of brushed aside again. Henderson, Kai-lin, and I ended up informally having a discussion and brainstorm session with Ken Oum on keeping our designs cohesive with things such as a design bible and what we want our environment to look/feel like and how that can affect our designs to bridge everything together.

Desiree Ann Lim

Whalesgiving

I'm not really sure what to say other than Thanksgiving happened this week. The art team set up tasks where things would be due on Wednesday regardless of whether members leave for break earlier or not. A second deadline was set for Sunday. Several tasks were done on Wednesday before everyone started feasting on Thursday.

Because most of the team was off campus by Tuesday, only the art team met for the week. We will be addressing several things in the coming week while continuing production.

There's only about a month until Whalemas!

Narwhal Near Enough Work

Accomplishments

animated Kamakaze Unit and Super Unit (3 hours)
        included some minor weight painting edits as well
Created test animations for Support Unit movement (2 hours) (1) (2)
        included creating lore to explain the reason for this uniqueness
Family Playtest Sessions (2 hours)
        took videos which might find their way into our teaser trailer

WIP

Particles and balance are the things that I usually place here but since I've been uninspired by my own progress here, I'm going to put them on the task list and be sure to detail the assignments out so that I and the rest of my team will have a specific expectation of what will be accomplished by next week.

Next Steps

I need to make sure I hold myself accountable for what I commit to getting done, while I'm pretty sure I didn't fall behind on any of my agreed upon assignments (call me out here if this is incorrect), I also didn't take on enough responsibility to pull my weight this week.

Debrief

I slept too much over Thanksgiving, though the time spent with my family was very rewarding and left me feeling happy and supported. They even took the initiative to talk about my project and not just listen to me prattle on about it. They engaged with it and seemed to genuinely want to play and discuss which strategies they thought were strong and why, it was AMAZING!

Nothing Stopping the Steam Boat

Let's just get straight to it, shall we?

Producing Things

• Update Task Analysis (0.5)
• Update Gantt Chart (0.5)
• Aid Jonathan in designing presentation (1)
• Promotional items (flyers, etc.) (2)
• Trailer for End of Term Presentation (3)
• End of Term Presentation Planning (0.5)
• Modeling
• Sniper Superunit Phase 2 (0.5)
• Sniper Tower Phase 1 (1.5)
• Rush Unit Phase 1 (3.5)
• Support Unit Phase 1 (2)
• Kamikaze Tower Phase 1 cleanup (0.5)
• Update task list and budget spreadsheet (0.5)
• Set up renders (2)
• Meeting planning for the week (1)
• Bring assets into Unity (2)
• Work with Alex on sound for video demonstration (1)

Total:  22

Proof of Progress 

Links

• Gantt chart
• Task analysis

Sniper Superunit Model

Sniper Tower Model

Rush Unit Model

 

Support Unit Model

Kamikaze Tower Model

 

Promo

Foreseeing the Future

• Make presentation for Tuesday
• Plan meetings for the week
• Discuss deliverables for Wednesday with Art Team
• Test textures and animation import pipeline for Unity
• GUI
• Model
• Update Task analysis and Gantt chart

Some Other Comments

Now you know what I did during Thanksgiving.

Vacation over!

Awesome week! Got some work done before a long weekend in Boston. Break over and now back to work, work, work.

Finish Line

• Made more Concept Art (Gatling, Sniper Tower) (1.5 Hr)
• Kamikaze Unit and Superunit Weightpainting (5 Hr)

Progress

Gatling Unit:

• Draft 03

Sniper Tower:

• Draft 04

Weightpainting:

 

 Battle Plan

• Getting back on track with work
• Focus on finalizing designs for units, superunits, and towers

Damage Control

• This week was shorter because I had something planned for Thanksgiving
• There are some things to still talk about for Tower design
• Once we get one design in for towers, it will set the pace for the rest like previous design hurdles such as for the Gygan and unit.

tl;dr

Good Thanksgiving. Time to get back to work.

-Henderson

Whale I'm Thankful For Something I'm Sure...Probably Unfold3d

Happy belated Thanksgiving to all of you (un?)fortunate readers out there! This was a week of many thanks, but also a time when our team was divided (dun dun dun!)...because we all went our separate ways for the holiday (not as dramatic :/). Models got done across the board, and I even achieved what I set out to do. However after calculating it I somehow had a drop of hours from last week. Perhaps it was because The team tried a new method where items were due Wednesday and Sunday instead of scattered deadline which caused a more concise work schedule. I personally have to reevaluate what I did that caused the change (I blame the holiday).

What I Did

I modeled the Tank Super Unit and Tank Tower (approx 3 hours), asked and confirmed questions I had for my sections in the Final presentation (not sure if that counts for time, but if it does then 1 hour) and began my long journey of UVing all of the approved models so far. I so far finished that Tank Unit, Tank Super Unit and Sniper Unit (5 hours), and am in the process of finishing the Sniper set, and starting on whichever other models are available.

Modeling                  3 hours

Presentation              1 hour 

Uving                        5 hours

Total                         9 hours

What I'm Going To Do

Finish UVing what ever is left after my UV binge. Begin working on textures. Celebrate that the other classes are going to go away for three weeks.

Debrief Not Deboxer

Thank you to Alex and Ryan for helping me out with questions I had with the presentation...I now hopefully will not sound like a confused little boy, and a shout out to Anna for being a modeling machine.