All Whales Aboard

A sort of first playable

This week was the deadline for our first playable which included the following things:

• Basic geometry (cube + sphere)
• 3 shared towers and 3 shared spawns “AI”
• Win/lose
• Basic networking (working on 2 specific computers)
• Basic path drawing
• Map made of cubes
• Basic resource functionality

We showed the playable to Stefan and received feedback. We also had some members of our team play the build despite the not-so-finished state.

End of second sprint, onto third

We finished our second sprint and got far. However, we only met about half of our goals. This week, I set clearer goals for the team to accomplish. We assigned deadlines. I am hoping the sprint will inform the team of how to set the next sprint's goals!

Welcome Programmers

The lovely programmers on our team have joined us in blogging about our project! They will be handling the more nitty-gritty underside of our project.

This week was mostly focused on clarifying any questions and moving towards our first playable. Don't forget to check out our Gantt chart! Note, the link might be broken...

Whale, Whale, Whale. What Do We Have Here?

This week I was responsible for working with Dylan to get the AI for generic units in a working state. I also kept an open communication with both Jeff Salvage and Gaylord Holder of the Computer Science department to work on getting our JIRA instance moved onto CS servers to make it not crash every 20 minutes.

Originally, Dylan and I set up JIRA on an Amazon AWS server, which we soon discovered worked, but not as well as we would have liked. As in, we didn't really feel like rebooting the server every time we wanted to use the software.

As far as AI goes, I was responsible for the Rush and Gatling units/towers.

Rush

The rush unit has a cone-like AoE attack, which is VERY MUCH NOT A SHOTGUN. This is accomplished through two public variables on the unit class: maxAttackAngle and pelletsFired.

• maxAttackAngle controls the unit's cone of attack, allowing the shots to be more controlled or more widespread.
• pelletsFired controls the number of "pellets" fired by each attack. Each "pellet" is a raycast that is fired at an angle to evenly spread the shots inside the maxAttackAngle. If any of the raycasts hit an enemy, that enemy takes damage.

This unit does not stop to attack units that enter its aggro. It instead does a "drive-by" and shoots units while sprinting to its destination.

Gatling

Gatling units have a single target attack. As the unit attacks a target, the amount of damage it outputs increases. When the unit switches to another target, the damage output returns to the base amount.

Short, sweet and to the point.

What I did:

• Rush unit and tower (3 hours)
• Gatling unit and tower (2 hours)
• Network testing (2 hours)
• Play testing to find out why path finding was breaking (3 hours)
• Assorted art direction work (1 hour)

What hurt me:

• Path finding exploded.

What I'm doing:

• Fully set up new JIRA instance and re-add tickets and workflows.
• Once path finding gets resolved, continue testing unit and tower behavior.

What's a Whale House?

I'll make this quick since I'm making some good progress on tower placement.

What got done

AI for units and towers

• Tank unit/tower with splash damage
• Support unit/tower with a buff sphere that gives buffs to allied units/towers
• Crippler unit/tower that slows down enemy units/towers
• Sniper unit/tower that does more damage at range

I also spent a good amount of time debugging our issues with pathfinding and looking into more robust state synchronization over the network.  I will be resuming network tasks once the pathfinding is in a more stable state.

What's getting done

A new approach to placing towers to avoid the issues where you just build a wall of towers around your opponent's base.  You will now have to start by building towers closer to your base and then expand your radius by building more towers outwards.  Here's a picture of a WIP:

That's just done with a transparent cube around the base of the tower, but it doesn't work well with varying terrain height or clipping with other towers, so I'm working on something a little more robust. My plan is also to address the problems with placing towers on invalid areas as well (such as stacking towers, or placing them on a ramp).  The picture below shows some really early work of a tile system that will determine if the position is valid for a tower.  Right now the tiles will show up green if they are open.  All of the tiles are also batched together into 1 mesh and 1 draw call.  Anyway, back to work on this...

Gygan Pain

We have models and a rig and it's all very exciting. I got to play the first digital build of our game, and it was crazy super broken; I had a lot of fun with the rough controls and janky pathfinding as did my opponent (Alex our marketing guy) which means it wasn't entirely the fact that I want to love our game that made me like it. We also came up with some interesting elements that weren't originally intended for our game by getting to mess around with it a little. I'm looking forward to convincing the disheartened faculty of the potential our game presents.

Accomplishments

Playtested (2 hours)
Sketched (uh..like 4 Hours)
1   2   3   4   5   6
Art Review (1 hours)
Wrote Backstories (1 hour)
1

WIP

I GET TO ANIMATE!!!!

Next Steps

Keep the production train running smoothly, there are a lot of dependencies between tasks so being able to handle setbacks efficiently is almost more important than fixing the reasons for the setbacks.

Debrief

I had a lot of fun with the demo this week even though our programmers were reluctant to give us a more or less broken build.

There Once Was A Whale Who Flu Up

I was completely out of commission this week thanks to the fact that I became a victim of the flu, and it showed me no mercy. As for the team we started production with Augher and the concept art is just being pumped out like there's no tomorrow. So good job team. I wish I could be more help

What I Did 

If it's any consolation I went to the doctor and didn't die! In terms of the project I only picked the tasks that I'm going to do for this upcoming sprint.

What I'm Going to Do

Continue to get better, as well as some modeling, and ALOT of texturing. Sickness be damned

Debriefs Not Deboxers

Just going to say what I said above. Good job guys! I love you

Keep Whaling Forward

Yesterday was the end of another sprint. We've been moving forward, amping up the speed at which everyone is working while creating a support network for those who are getting sick. My head is definitely back in the game. The whole team has been coordinating with each other, providing honest and open feedback. As I establish the goals of the project, major milestones, and sprints, I am getting a clearer picture of the project's lifespan. This also helps me communicate what the team needs to do. We shifted priority for the upcoming sprint to focus on the shared towers. As an aside, just as we work hard, we play hard! I invited our team over to watch Meet the Robinsons and have some pizza. Maybe I'll work on some cookies for the end of our current sprint.

Producing Things

• Update the Gantt chart (2.5 hours)
• Clean up task list and clear any conflicts in scheduling
• We met as a team Sunday evening to go through the goals of the sprint and assigned deadlines (1.5)
• I updated the task list with the superunit for each type of tower (1 hour)
• Turn on notifications for task list (0.5)
• I let my team know that they might get massive amounts of emails...
• Model! (we are doing a task list review tomorrow during the art team meeting!)
• Augher (4 hours)
• Kail (3 hours)
• Kamikaze Unit (3 hours)
• Kamikaze Superunit (2 hours)
• Make sure we're on task for our first playable, due 10/26!
• We ran into some issues with path drawing but more-or-less met the base requirements for our first playable!
• Made criteria chart for milestones with Dylan (1.5 hours)

Proof of Progress

Here are links to some important files:

• Gantt chart
• Task List

Augher

This is the second iteration of Augher. The poly count was decreased (will post stats in a future post) and Kai-Lin gave me feedback prior to start about changes to the model so he could rig the model.

Kail

This is the first iteration Kail. I consulted Kai-Lin before start but there were some issues with the orthographics that I took creative liberty with.

Kamikaze Unit

This is the second iteration of the Kamikaze Unit. Poly count was reduced and the spikes were made larger.

Kamikaze Superunit

This is the first iteration of the Kamikaze Superunit based on the art that was developed. I don't think Henderson put together the orthographics but I went ahead and modeled it anyways since Jonathan was more-or-less happy with the design.

Foreseeing the Future

• Model Augher Phase 3
• Test Augher in Unity
• Model Sniper Unit Phase 1, 2
• Model Rush Unit Phase 1, 3
• Test Tank Unit in Unity
• Model Rush Superunit Phase 2
• Test Rush Superunit in Unity
• Update Gantt chart
• Establish logo
• Give report to Stefan about First Playable

Some Other Comments

I had a pretty intense conversation with Alex about marketing our game. There were some changes to the design. The decisions I notified him about had me concerned because I was not sure what our game's unique selling point was. Alex expressed the same thought. We had a conversation about the opportunities in the market we would be launching our game in. The conversation will be continued on Wednesday with the team.

This week's kudos goes to Kai-Lin! He and I worked together almost all day Saturday to finish up work for the sprint. He also scripted a Maya tool for me to use when I am about to send my models off to the next person. The script snaps the geometry to the grid and centers the most bottom point at the origin. This will allow our programmers to more easily place our models right onto the ground plane. Not only that but Kai-Lin dealt with me for an entire day. Much kudos to him.

Anna

Overwhaleming Rigs in the House

Accomplishments

• Rigged phase 1 of Augher (3.5 hr)
• Made a video to explain the rig of Augher to my teammates (1.5 hr)
  https://www.dropbox.com/s/qlm561aodskse0b/kai_augherRigExplained.mov?dl=0
  (Note: I swore a bit in the video, hope you don't really mind...)
• Created more Mel scripts for the team and for rigging purpose (3 hr)
• Watched Alex and Jon play through the first playable of our game
• Went through task list with team members and set new tasks (1.5 hr)

Works In Progress

I've just finished the first phase for Augher's rig today. I'll be continuing on and finishing up the rig for Augher by the next two days. The image below is what I have so far. I haven't added any controllers yet since I wanted to make sure I get an approval from all my team members before jumping to the next step. That's why I made a video of me going through the rig.

Other than that, I have also been making Mel scripts. Anna requested me to make an Mel script for centering the entire model to the origin of the space in Maya since it would make productivity go a lot faster than manually trying to do it by hand. So I created one this week and shared the script with her to use. The current Mel script I am working on is creating a script that would generate specific controller for rigs. As of now I only have it generate a sphere nurbs curve and a cube nurbs curve, but I will be adding more features to it soon.

Next Steps

• Rig more models

Issues

• I wasn't able to start rigs until later this week since the models weren't ready yet. However, now that things are moving along, I'll be spending more times on rigging for the rest of the term.

Last Minute Comments

It seems like for this next sprint, there are a lot of things going on. I'm the main person in my team doing all the rigs so I do hope that there wouldn't be any issues when I pass my rigs to team members who are to animate with it. The meetings were productive and good. Stefan likes the playable demo even though it was full of bugs. But hey, it's getting somewhere. Alex and Jon had a ton of fun playing it as well during the weekend and they were able to address things that would need improvement. As always, there are a lot of wok that needs to be done, but I'm sure we all can take it.

Kai-Lin Chuang

Holy Mother of Whales!

Got a good amount of work done. Not as much as I wanted. We're definitely setting a pace now though. Some small setbacks.

Finish Line

• Discussing more design and meetings  (2 Hr)
• Set new deadlines (1.5 hrs)
• Did concept art and orthographics. All below ( 7 Hrs)

Progress

Augher Concept Art:

• Draft 12 (Perspective)

Kamikaze Unit Concept Art:

• Draft 4 (Orthographics)

Kamikaze Tower Concept Art:

• Draft 3

Phantom Tower Concept Art:

• Draft 2
• Draft 3

Battle Plan

• Keep pumping out art and keeping up with my task.
• I'll be doing a lot of concept art as well as finalizing the style.
• In the next sprint, I'll be doing more than just concept art (Weight painting, animating, etc.)

Damage Control

• Got done most of the work I needed to for the week.
• Going to block out more time in my schedule to devote to work.
• Felt like I didn't do as much as I did last week. 
• I think we have a good start to the project. 

tl;dr

This next sprint seems a bit daunting, but I have no doubt we'll get it all done.

-Henderson

Whale That Was More Difficult Than It Should Have Been

The initial goal for me this week was to roll out a hacked-together but complete version of the pathfinding system so we can start addressing usability issues and streamlining it.  However, the unexpected snag was the complete lack of documentation for the new pathfinding library we were using, in addition to it's asynchronous setup which made it tricky to use for the real time purpose of "show the player what the rest of the path would look like if we autocompleted it".

Once something was working for basic path drawing, issues came up due to how slow it can be to make a path across the map, and the fact that new path requests are added to a queue every fifth of a second or so.  Luckily, some solid optimization and the a workaround that could let requests "decay" in the queue made the problem significantly more manageable. 

Once this basic path drawing worked for drawing anywhere on the map, a bizarre issue would pop up where the entire pathfinding system would freeze up.  Some research led the team to believe that the problem might not be on our end, but an issue with the library (since it is fairly new and untested, and similar issues were mentioned on the forums).  

After extensive debugging and attempts to fix it (it wasn't even easy to reliably recreate the problem), the executive decision was made to incorporate another pathfinding system we had used in a previous project, which we already knew had its own set of problems.  Given that this system is significantly more robust and popular, I was confident that any third-party issues would be fixed faster with this library then the other.  Work was done to keep the game unchanged since a unified API for pathfinding was made, so the changed were largely restricted to a few code files.  Both systems were left in for testing, and it is trivial to switch between the two moving forward, so right now the only cost we are paying is additional resource consumption by running two fairly taxing systems at once, but it's simpler then having to port over between the two should something go wrong again.

The gist of it is that only basic path drawing was implemented instead of having some of the nice features like detours and notifications about invalid paths, but it's not been implemented in two separate systems and the framework is in place for improving and iterating easily.

Accomplishments

• Demystifying Apex Pathfinding's utter lack of documentation on anything but the simplest use case (3 hours)
• Hacked together Apex implementation (6 hours)
• Apex optimization (3 hours)
• Debugging Apex to find the root cause of the freezing (3 hours)
• Hacked together Arongranberg Pathfinding implementaton (7 hours)
• Assorted art direction work (1 hour)

Next Steps

• More pathfinding and pathdrawing stuff

Ryan Daugherty

House Cleaning

A lot of concept art was produced this week on a rapid roll by both Henderson and me. On top of that modeling has been moving along so the rest of the production line is following through too. Whale House is going full steam ahead. We had to clean up our tasklist as usual to weekly make sure everyone is on the same page and to set our goals for the new sprint.

Accomplishments

• Kail (3 hours)
• CA Phase 3 V4
• Ortho 1
• Ortho 2
• Ortho 3
• Action
• Brigade Tower (1 hour)
• Phase 1 V1
• Brigade Unit (1 hour)
• Phase 1 V1
• Rush Unit (1.5 hour)
• Phase 2 V5
• Phase 2 V6
• Tank Unit (1 hour)
• Phase 1 V1
• Sniper Unit (1 hour)
• Phase 1 V1
• Mushroom Reference Research (.5 hour)

WIP Screenshots

• Some Concept Art WIP
• Kail WIP 1
• Kail WIP 2
• Kail WIP 3
• Mushroom Research
• Brigade Tower WIP

Next Steps

• Sprint 3 Tasks
• Concept Art for Sniper, Rush, Tank, and Brigade all the way through the final ortho phase due this week

Debrief

So with things moving ahead, we also went back to our task list once more to clean it up for the next sprint and set our deadlines again. With the pace we're moving at now, we should have all the concept art done by the end of this week and the 2 gygans and 3 shared towers basically done by our sprint should everything go without a hitch. Also, for style consistency, it has been decided that Henderson will be taking over drawing all the absolute final orthos. I don't really mind just so that everything looks cohesive. In exchange though, we had set it up that I would take care of branding and marketing art anyway.

Desiree Ann Lim

Whale all in this together!

Cue musical numbers.

Goals, goals, goals

We've come a long way since the end of summer term. We established the dates and criteria for our milestones as a team during a meeting awhile back. However, for some reason or another I forgot to establish goals with the team for every sprint we do. Now that the team is expecting that, I can break down our milestones and really push the team to overachieve our goals for each sprint!

Can I get a whale yeah?

Our presentation this week went really well! Our team went last out of 7 senior project groups. We had a total of one "um". Henderson pulled through by saying sorry instead of using a filler word! Kudos to him! The second to best part was when we introduced our team and leaned back onto the slide so we would "fit" under the arrow pointing to us. The best part was when we ended our presentation with "Can we get a whale yeah?" and the audience responded! All in all we received good feedback. We closed the day by going out as a team!

Defining our player experience

One of the main critique we received was that we did not develop our player experience enough. We explained the game play as well as the reasons why we are creating Gygan Reign. However, painting the picture was rough even though we went through the gameplay loop. We hope to continue building our player experience, especially as our programmers are working on our main mechanic for the first playable!

Currently sprinting

We finished the first week of our second sprint. The team has faced many issues, but we are learning a lot from these conflicts! We will be meeting more often as a team with one of our weekly meetings a virtual meeting to check on everyone's progress. Not only that, we also meet more often in the spur of the moment to lock down deadlines together. As part of the sprint, I've been setting up a system of reminders to help the team along, in addition to catering some reminders to each member's style.

Rowing the boat that is our Whale House

Moving forward, we are in prime position to start cranking out art assets. Miguel and Kai-Lin have been doing a lot of review and putting documentation together while Jonathan, Desiree, and Henderson are working on concept art. During the second half of our sprint, we will start moving the assets along the pipeline with much spirit!

Major kudos to Desiree this week for being open towards feedback from the team. She conquered her artist block with one of our Gygans! The design of Kail is a lovely mix of fierce and cute. All sorts of awesomeness is happening. Don't forget to check out our Gantt chart!

Anna

So Much Whaleness

Accomplishments

• Went to weekly meetings (3 hr)
• Wrote Mel scripts to help the rigging process/followed some tutorials (2.5 hr)
• Reviewed a bit more of rigging (1 hr)
• Wrote a Rigging Documentation for the team (2 hr)
• Documentation (Will keep updating the documentation when needed)

• Drew 2 concept art for shared Tower 2 (1.5 hr)
• T2 CA 1
• T2 CA 2
• Reviewed Augher's model and made some comments on it (0.5 hr)

Works In Progress

Now that our production phase has been moving along, some of the models are currently in the works. I'll be rigging the models as soon as my team members are done with phase 01 for the models. At the same time, I'll be making sure if the model will work for animation. 

Next Steps

• Rig models

Issues

• Had a few scripting errors but I eventually found of the problem and fixed it.

Last Minute Comments

Production is going fast. Everyone is in the production phase and working on something. There are a lot of task to do and it will require us to spend a lot of time on. We did well in the presentation and all of the faculty members seems to be satisfied with our presentation. Just that we need some visuals for the game's look and feel in terms of the player's perspective. Alex is now officially in our team and we are all excited to work with him!

Kai-Lin Chuang

We Will Prewhale

OUR FIRST WEEK OF PRODUCTION!!! WOOT!

Accomplishments

We have begun to really expedite the concept phase, which is reassuring and I've had fun being a part of it, I completed the first wave of art for the Tank super creature and nobody liked my elephant bowman idea...which is fine...totally fine...but you know in case you wanna check it out, here it is:

isn't he cute? So he pulls the bow back with his trunk. This may show up in a game I make in the future so I should document its origin. 

WIP

working on Kail's first turret and hopefully I'll get to model something soon. Maybe I'll try to steal that from whoever claimed it on our glorious task list. Discussions were had about the potential of the game on a mobile or touchscreen device. This was made all the more serious because of the faculty response during our presentation. While the game would work conceptually very well on touchscreens it is not within our technical capabilities.

Next Steps

Get the current version of the game in the hands of everyone one the team as well as a few lucky participants

Debrief

The board game was put on the back burner for the time being, we have a functional demo and a spreadsheet for editing unit values. While the analog version was helpful and even mildly successful there isn't a current application for it; we'll keep it in mind for future iterations.

Whale Speed Ahead

The pitch presentation went pretty well according to our reviews, but our team definitely has a few big feedback points to consider such as possibly switching to mobile. Personally, I found out that there was a discrepancy between what I understood as towers and super-units with how it should have been understood. This led to my concept art which did not fit the criteria for Tower 2 and needs to be redone.

Accomplishments

• Concept Art Phase 3 for Kail with more to come (2 hours)
• Kail CA 3
• Rejected Concept Art Phase 1 for Tower 3 (2 hours)
• T3 CA 1
• Concept Art Phase 1 for Tower 3 Unit (1 hour)
• T3 Unit CA 1
• Attended meetings (3 hours)

WIP Screenshots

• Some Concept Art WIP
• kail 1
• kail 2

Next Steps

• Finish up Phase 3 for Kail and then move on to orthographics
• Fix Tower 3 Phase 1 Concept Art
• Move forward with Tower 3's Units and Tower 1 Concept Art

Debrief

The team pitch presentation brought to light that we practiced well and had a nearly spotless performance. However, we needed to cater more to showing the player's point of view of playing the game through our concept art and game demonstration. The faculty also really want a mobile/tablet version of the game to emphasize our path drawing.

The team got together to discuss mobile possibilities and to clarify some Concept Art misunderstandings. The production pipeline is definitely moving forward at a much faster rate now thanks to Anna redesigning it and making individual task reminders [which are super duper helpful and great to keep track of what's due from our super long task list]. Also, the team overall has picked up the pace to match up to the deadlines for our next sprint.

It's been a busy week and weekend, so after I post this I will be continuing my concept art that is due.

Desiree Ann Lim

Whaling Out

My team is going strong but this week I was unavailable for them. Last week there were issues as a team. This week, there were issues with me. I admit that my schedule is tightly packed with classes, student employment, homework for classes, and senior project. For some reason, I checked out. I was not dedicated as much personal contact time with my team mates. Tasks were not being delivered and I was not handling the situation as well as I could have been. One of the programmers gave me the down low on the situation as real as he could. At first I was resistant to what he was saying--until I remembered the rules we established as a team. I'm back in the game though, stronger than ever.

Producing Things

A huge disclaimer: the list I usually include in my posts do not include the time spent in meetings. I figured this was important to note as my main role is that of producer. There are about four weekly meetings I attend: whole team, art team, marketing, and a meeting with Dylan, one of our programmers. In addition, I also schedule one-on-one meetings with the art team semi-frequently to check in with them.

This is my task list from last week. Items crossed out are what I completed. Items in green are new tasks I completed that were not on the list from my previous post. Items in red are well.. everything that is associated with red.

• Prepare for our pitch this coming Tuesday (2 hours)
• Met with Alex, our marketing person, to review the presentation to ensure clarity
• We met as a team morning of the presentation to practice
• Work through NGUI and build a basic UI
• I prioritized getting my team back on schedule and creating mechanisms to handle reminders, late tasks, etc.
• Turn on notifications for the task list
• We redid the task list so I am waiting until we clean up the task list more to turn notifications on
• Set up JIRA
• The server hosting JIRA is unstable
• Finalize deadlines for the next sprint with the team (2 hours)
• Get our marketing (!) person up to speed on the project (1 hour)
• Model based on progress on concept art (6 hour)
• Most of the delay came from re-learning how to model on the fly, files not syncing, etc.
• Gantt chart update (3 hour)
• Project properties were not saving so I had to remake the Gantt chart...
• Web service automation for reminders (1 hour)
• I use IFTTT to help automate reminders for the team via Facebook
• Task list clean up (2 hours)
• We have a "naming" convention for the various assets in our game. I had to convert the list over to the proper names and delete assets that are no longer needed.
• Create individualized task list for everyone on Google Docs (1 hour) check it out!
• I've been testing this with Jonathan on a personal basis since we're also housemates. I decided to expand this to the rest of the team to help them get their to do lists together.

Proof of Progress

 Above are screenshots of the model ready to go into the game. The file was sent to Augher's rigger (Kai-Lin) for review. I would normally post images of the Gantt chart but...

Foreseeing the Future

• Update the Gantt chart
• Clean up task list and clear any conflicts in scheduling
• Turn on notifications for task list
• Model! (we are doing a task list review tomorrow during the art team meeting!)
• Make sure we're on task for our first playable, due 10/26!

Anna

Whale...what an unproductively productive week

This was a week of progress. So much has gotten done, and I'm proud of my team for getting all of this done. The first phase of Augher is getting finished, and a lot of concept art is pulling through. I really haven't done much to aid this, and I can't give a good reason why. This week just went by so fast, but this coming week will be the time I really contribute a lot of my assets.

What I've Done

To be frank I have not done much this week, and shouldn't try to say I did.

What I'm Going To Do

Accomplish everything on my task list which includes modeling, uving and texturing of multiple assets.

Debriefs Not Deboxers

Like I said before I am really happy with the work that has been done thanks to my group. I wish I could say I was apart of that, but my time is coming. 

CAN I GET A WHALE YEAH?!

Phew. That was one whale of a week.

We finally have the set look for Augher. This helps set the tone and look for the rest of the game.

Finish Line

• Discussing more design in terms of gameplay (1 Hr)
• Did concept art and orthographics. All below (12 Hrs)

Progress

Augher Orthographics:

• Version 1
• Version 2
• Material Test
• Version 3

Kamikaze Unit Orthographics:

• Draft 1
• Draft 2

Kamikaze Tower Orthographics:

• Draft 1

Phantom Tower Orthographics:

• Draft 1

Battle Plan

• Keep with the tasks assigned
• Help make perspective views to give modelers a better understanding of Augher

Damage Control

• Got a good amount of work done for this week.
• Need to make sure I stay on top of things and keep working away.
• Feedback from team members helped a lot. The more the merrier.

tl;dr

Got a good momentum going. Keep getting work done and have fun! WHALE YEAH.

-Henderson

Been a Whale of a Ride

The third week of the term has come and gone.

I've purposely left the overview out of my own post as to avoid reposting the same information. There were key events during the team's week.

Welcome Alex!

Since an objective of developing the game is to market the finished product, I invited a co-worker to be interviewed by the team. Alex will be joining our team as our PR/marketing guru and event coordinator of fun times. He was well received by the team and we look forward to working with him!

Welcome Programmers?

As part of their course requirements, the programmers on our team will hopefully be joining in posting on this blog. Soon the whole dev team will be on this blog to document our successes and our mistakes (probably mostly mistakes).

Communication is a two-way street

In debriefing the end of our first sprint, many of the team members expressed that communication is lacking in our team. I will be addressing this and proposing solutions at our next meeting. The lack of communication puts the team in waves of being on the same page and well... not.

JIRA

The programming team is required to use a project management software. We might be integrating this into the production pipeline for the art team.

Speaking of pipeline

During our weekly meeting, we redefined our milestones, what makes up each milestone, and address aspects of our scope. We also found a bottleneck during the concept art phases. I pitched a solution to this that was accepted by the team!

Time is time is time

While the team is acknowledging that there is a lot of work to be done, most members on the team have not been on top of their game. I have begun addressing this by talking to the team members one on one.

So all the things above happened. The Gantt chart was also updated for this week! Check it out here. Warning: You must have Gantter for Google Drive installed as a web app!

Anna

Swimming Whales in a House

This week has been an emotional rollercoaster. There were a lot of issues that were addressed during our weekly meeting and need to be addressed during our next meeting.

Producing Things

This is my task list from last week. Items crossed out are what I completed. Items in green are new tasks I completed that were not on the list from my previous post!

• Experiment with NGUI (2.5 hours)
• Schedule meeting between Ryan, our programmer, and our marketing person! (0.5 hours)
• Bump up our GDD to version two point oh (2.5 hours)
• Guide artwork while pushing development on the environment (1.5 hours)
• Update this blog with team description! (1 hour)
• Update presentation (3 hours)
• Schedule some other really important meetings in preparation for our pitch next week
• Meeting with Frank Lee from EGS (1 hour)
• Extended weekly meeting (1 hour added on top of our weekly meeting that I don't usually count...)
• Meeting with Alex, marketing student, about our pitch (1 hour)
• Clean up blog by (1 hour):
• Changing theme
• Labeling posts to make searching through them easier
• Gantt chart update (1 hour)
• Task list review (1 hour)

Proof of Progress

Foreseeing the Future

• Prepare for our pitch this coming Tuesday
• Work through NGUI and build a basic UI
• Turn on notifications for the task list
• Set up JIRA
• Finalize deadlines for the next sprint with the team
• Get our marketing (!) person up to speed on the project
• Model based on progress on concept art

Anna

Whale Meetings and Tasks

Accomplishments

• Met with our advisor, Stefan, with my team to go through and practice our presentation (1 hr)
• Attended other meetings and discussed about our project (3.5 hr)
• Met with Stefan Rank and Frank Lee to know more about the Entrepreneurial Game Studios.
• Got feedbacks from both Stefan and Frank.
• Rescaled/reassessed our assets and milestones of what need to be done and when.
• Researched more on rigging techniques (2 hr)
• Looked over some concept art and critiqued a bit (.5 hr)
• Went through tasks list and did tasks that were assigned to me by Anna (1 hr)

Works In Progress

My current progress is to continue with getting my hands on rigging tutorials and practicing the techniques. Even though concept art is not my area of expertise, I will try to help the concept artists to my best of my ability. The paper prototype still needs some fine tuning. I will meet up with Jon and Cory in the near future to refine it so that we can show it to strangers and have them play it.

Next Steps

• Continue practicing and solidifying my skills in rigging.
• Go through some modeling techniques
• Help critique concept art more often

Issues

• I've been mentally unstable this week, I felt like I have hit a wall so I wasn't able to do as much as I would like to this week. 

Last Minute Comments

Everyone in our team knows that this project is ambitious and will take a lot of effort to complete. We all try to find a way to scale down our project during our meetings and we are trying to make the most out of our production pipeline. I am sure that we can pull through this insane roller-coaster ride together. I believe in my team. 

Kai-Lin Chuang

Whaling About Tasks on a List

Whelp...it's that time again to write this thing, and I have to say I'm a little more willing this time than last. After meeting with Frank Lee about possibly joining EGS, the best thing (in my opinion) happened. We talked about scope and how ambitious our project is. We're most likely going to have to cut down how many Gygans we end up with (I believe we wanted 8,but are most likely going with 2 or 3) and I think it's for the best. I'd personally rather have 3 really awesome, distinct Gygans instead of 8 that are practically interchangeable. That's all I really got to say about this week in terms of the group stuff (GOOD WEEK!)

What I Did

I researched light map baking and am asking the group members whether or not it's viable since it would require us to make the models high poly first to be able to bake all that delicious extra detail, which just adds another step to our process. That's the only real notable thing I did, I did a few smaller things such as a bit more particle testing and a lot of complaining about the task list size.

What I'm Going To Do

This next week I'm really going to dive into the particles and start posting some screenshots of my findings (and maybe modeling? Not 100% sure if were near the ortho stage yet)

Debriefs Not Deboxers

Still love my team, shout out to Henderson for always asking to do more work. Love these guys and have a lot of fun with them. Not sure this section is going to change until Winter Term when we all want to kill each other.

Also I mentioned this at our last meeting, but I still have yet to play the paper prototype for myself, and feel that needs to change. GROUP GAME NIGHT!! CAN I GET A WHALE YEAH?!

Miguel 

House It Going

Accomplishments

I completed a first pass at concept work for three of the units in our game. I met with Ryan and Dylan to establish a revised direction for the unit archetypes both from a gameplay perspective and to some degree an art perspective (2.0 hours). 

WIP

Super Unit, tower, and regular unit. Aren't they pretty. (1.5 hours)

I also made this silly little thing to show off a potential way it might attack. (2.0 hours but I was watching tv...)

Next Steps

finalizing augher concept, cranking out the first pass of his model. creating a living GDD (or zombifying one from our previous iterations). Right now I think sleep is also somewhere on the list so that's cool. Oh and we'll need to get a cleaner looking version of our board game version of the game ready for our playtesters! How exciting.

Debrief

got to go home this weekend, see family and get stuff done. However I've mostly been stressing out about the size of our scope.

Jonathan

Whale Block Averted

This previous week I hit an art block. Though it did hinder my work a bit, the art block did not last very long because of the help of my team helping me redirect my vision for Kail by going over all my past and present sketches for Kail. We also started to pay more attention to what our potential map should be and brainstormed some concept ideas.

Accomplishments

• Concept Art Phase 2 for Kail [more to come though] (3 hours)
• https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B3hGqy6-ONqRaWFxMV9wRVU0R1k/view?usp=sharing
• https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B3hGqy6-ONqRZV84RlNveUFxNFE/view?usp=sharing
• Research and Concept Art Phase 1 for Environment (3 hours)
• https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B3hGqy6-ONqRV05sclg3WTFTUEk/view?usp=sharing
• https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B3hGqy6-ONqRWnlSWm0yMDVIajA/view?usp=sharing
• Attended meetings and helped reassess deliverables and timeline (4 hours)

WIP Screenshots

• Some Environment WIP
• https://www.dropbox.com/s/vlx8ez4t4x5hv5g/Screen%20shot%202014-10-12%20at%208.49.34%20PM.png?dl=0
• https://www.dropbox.com/s/ajmbxja9aecc885/Screen%20shot%202014-10-12%20at%209.19.05%20PM.png?dl=0
• Research / Concept Inspiration for Environment
• Prairie
• http://www.konza.ksu.edu/images/image001.jpg
• http://leavingbabylon.files.wordpress.com/2014/07/coyne-prairie.gif
• http://www.nature.org/cs/groups/webcontent/@web/@montana/documents/media/dancing-prairie-preserve.jpg
• http://www.freegreatpicture.com/files/28/22796-blue-sky-prairie-scenery.jpg
• http://images.nationalgeographic.com/wpf/media-live/photos/000/236/cache/grassland07-autumn-clouds-prairie_23668_600x450.jpg
• Mountain Lake
• http://tko0150.tripod.com/Kforce06/4/mt.jpg
• http://wolnature.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/nature-landscapes_other_crystal-mountain-lake_8561-1024x768.jpg
• http://www.imiaweb.org/uploads/images/AR%201.jpg
• http://mkalty.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/The-mountain-lake.jpg
• http://ppcdn.500px.org/2410404/a2543cad98250966a857e8a4241442e26f8a85a0/4.jpg

Next Steps

• Continue on Phase 3 for Kail
• Then move on to either Phase 4 or move forward to the orthographic
• Discuss more about what will be implemented to the environment to understand how that will affect design
• Possibly return back to designing the Kail specific towers or designing generic towers

Debrief

The team overall contributed to helping push Augher to the next step, so that Gygan is almost done. Kail, on the other hand, is still in a murky area of design and then I hit an art block. Thankfully, because I reached out to my team for help, we were able to quickly overcome that roadblock and continue iterating on Kail and hopefully to a design that everyone is happy with.

We also met with Frank Lee this week to learn more about his Entrepreneurial Games Studio. More importantly though, Frank and Stefan gave us insightful feedback to readdress our scope and timeline because there are worries about how we will manage to complete the project.

Under Anna's guidance, the team regrouped to address the issues Frank and Stefan pointed out together. With the new timeline and approach we are going to take to our iteration and pipeline, I think we can progress more swiftly and efficiently.

Desiree Ann Lim

Whally?!

This week made us realize we need to look at the design of the gygans in terms of the gameplay. Our programmers brought up that certain features have to stand out more in order for the gygans to be distinguishable. Now we're finalizing the design of the first gygan in order to set the tone for the rest.

Finish Line

• Discussing more design in terms of gameplay (2 Hr)
• Did more interations of Augher. (7 Hrs)
• Looking up References (1 Hr)
• Met up with our SPROG advisor (1 Hr)

Progress

Augher Concept Art:

• Draft 3
• Draft 4
• Draft 5
• Draft 6
• Draft 7

Research:

• Reference 1
• Reference 2
• Reference 3
• Reference 4

Battle Plan

• Refinalize design for Augher and make orthographics
• Once finalizing the design for Augher, I can begin to make towers and spawns since we will now have a concrete art direction.

Damage Control

• Finalizing designs of Augher got pushed back
• We seem to have a direction, but we don't have an exact destination.
• Didn't feel well this week. Didn't get as much work done as I originally wanted to. 
• I'm a bit behind where I wanted to be. I will be fixing that this week. 

tl;dr

Things are getting pushed back a bit. This week will have to be one to work more and to catch back up. Still excited to see where we're going!

-Henderson

Go Whale Go!

The second week of term passed by fairly quickly. With the change in season/weather, there's been a huge mindset change in Whale House.

In the words of Kai-Lin: We presented, we met, we conquered.

We met a whale ton during the second week to clear up a lot of misunderstandings about everything related to our game, from gameplay to art, from conventions to the pipeline. Everyone was extremely open about when they are confused and why. We aimed to mitigate any halts on production by identifying the hurdles during our mid-sprint meeting.

I've also created and updated a new Gantt chart for the team that will help us see the big picture in addition to our mighty task list. The Gantt chart needs the Gantter Project for Google Drive in order to be viewed! *While now the Gantt chart has the various tasks, I forgot to put the milestones back in.

We'll be finishing up our two-week sprint this week. The team is making some seriously focused effort in cranking out concept art and tutorials in prep for some heavy lifting in the next sprint.

Anna

Whale Yeah... Coding Happened

Biggest news yet. We're almost on the same page. The whole team! Well... almost.

Producing Things

• Fixed the code for Task List notifications (3 hours)
• Gave feedback for the team + some pretty images for reference (1 hour)
• Created a Gantt chart using Gantter for Google Drive (1.5 hours)
• Created necessary documents + reformatted some to link to headers (1.5 hours)
• Scheduled meeting with marketing student (.5 hours)
• Read NGUI documentation (1.5 hours)
• Baked cookies for extra motivation (2 hours if it counts!)

Proof of Progress

Foreseeing the Future

• Experiment with NGUI
• Schedule meeting between Ryan, our programmer, and our marketing person!
• Bump up our GDD to version two point oh
• Guide artwork while pushing development on the environment
• Update this blog with team description!
• Update presentation
• Schedule some other really important meetings in preparation for our pitch next week

Some Other Comments

During the summer I reflected on how I managed a previous project that involved almost 30 students. I developed a system for tracking tasks and deadlines that would best suit my team's behaviors and needs. More or less, the team tells me what they can get done during our two-week work periods and I give them suggestions on their deadlines. We tested the system during the summer and now it's getting put into some good use. The best moment of the week was when Desiree (not to pick on you Des!) told me she realized that she can't do as many tasks as she thought she did. This made me ecstatic because I wanted the new way of delegating tasks to help my team realize they need more time for certain tasks!

This week was spent in a lot of meetings, clearing up issues between artists, between artists and programmers, and with our awesome advisor Stefan Rank! We also interviewed a marketing student to help us out with the marketing side of the game. So far the team has given him the thumbs up, but we are waiting for the marketing student to meet with one of our team members that was unable to make it to the meeting.

This week's huge kudos goes to Henderson. Despite his crazy schedule, he cranked out some seriously awesome concept art for one of our Gygans, Augher! Check it out in his post somewhere down below.

Things are really pulling together for the team! I want to be able to put more hours into the project in the upcoming week as we prepare to finalize some of our first concept art.

Anna