Week 9, Design stuff

I'm not sure why I'm so terrible counting up by 1, but I think I got my post titles sorted now.  Also, I should have written this last week, but whatever.

So this week we had to come up with our third game prototype idea.  We have to develop a game to help preserve the Shoshone language, which has caused quite the stir within the cohort.  First of all to start, everyone during our Design class this Wednesday simultaneously decided the way things were going weren't exactly how we wanted them to be.  To remedy this most of the groups are taking a more iterative approach to the prototype and less of a finished product to pitch type approach.  The way my group is doing that is by keeping the scope smaller so there is more time to iterate and possibly still make the game look decent for the pitch.

That said, our game underwent several major design changes before a line of code was ever written this week.  Everybody pitched a similar Zelda-esque adventure game idea that loosely teaches the Shoshone language and culture simultaneously, which is part of what caused the controversy.  Everyone is worried about potentially offending the Shoshone with the game, meanwhile Roger has been insistent we all artificially added the burden of teaching Shoshone culture.  All the client asks of us is a fun game that teaches Shoshone, be it robots fighting lizards in space or whatever.

Long story short, I think we all are sticking to our guns and including culture into the game.  Our game is going to be a series of mini games tied together by a top down semi open world environment that the player can explore to discover said mini games among other things.  Should be a good time and easy enough to implement that we can iterate.  We shall see.

Project 2 Post Mortem - Kinect Gardening

It's kind of hard to write a post-mortem when nothing really goes wrong on the project.  When we all filled out post-its and put them on the board, we all struggled to come up with anything negative.  The biggest hurdle we faced while developing this prototype was making the Kinect behave nicely.  I got the base functionality working rather quickly, but like I'm sure I said in an earlier post, it's very easy to get the Kinect working, but very difficult to get it to work well.  When we had a bit of time to spare, we spent several hours experimenting with and tweaking the Kinect controls.  In the end however, we decided we were only making it worse and figured we'd put some serious manpower behind it if it got picked up by the client.  It functioned well enough for a prototype, and we had mouse functionality built in as well.

The only other issue was some of the final art was delivered so late that it didn't make it into the final presentation.  It did however make it into the final prototype, so it was hardly a big deal.

I guess we should focus on the good then.  Imaginary Jason and I decided to use pair programming for almost the entirety of the prototype and I think it worked very well.  The basic structure of the design came together very quickly, because he was well-versed in XNA from a previous project and I had dabbled in it a bit before.  Our memories were both incomplete, but together we knew enough to bust out every feature quickly.  We also benefited greatly by being there to keep each other on task during class time.  Typically anytime someone would come up to me and start talking I'd lose all sense of workflow and progress would halt for awhile.  With both of us there, we tended to just ignore distractions.  I don't think pair programming is the best solution for most situations, but it definitely has its uses.

I'm sure Bob would agree, I remember your talk!

Anyway, like I said, all in all it was a very successful project and I enjoyed working with Jason, Alice and Mike.  We were way more focused than the last group while still remaining very laid back and casual.  Good stuff.

Week 8

Well this might be slightly late, but whatever.  The prototype was more or less working by this point in the process, so we just added a few extra features we thought we wouldn't have time for.  Mainly a little whack-a-mole mini game that ended up being quite easy to implement.  We also added in all the final art assets as Alice finished them up.  I don't even think I could come up with something interesting to say if I wanted to this week.  It was super straight forward and the presentation went well.  The client is supposedly going to get back to us about potentially making this into a real product, so that'll be cool.

Week 7, Fall Break!

Starts early for the engineers, we don't have none of that Thursday class nonsense.  Anyway, nothing terribly interesting to report this week.  We busted out most of the main features this week.  Still waiting on a bit of art and will probably try to implement a few extra features when we get back.  We spent all day yesterday trying to make the Kinect suck less, but to no avail.  We had a half decent solution, but realized it made it too easy to control and defeated the purpose of making the game for physical therapy purposes.  Also, we didn't have a good way to stop the cursor once it was put in motion.

We might mess with it a bit more later, but I would rather implement features to make the prototype more like a game.

Anyway, catch yah on the other side.