Lab D: Wrap Up Entry

Yellow Lab

Wow, this sure has been a fast-paced week! This week, we showed off our prototype to the world at the first year opening house and then handed our prototypes in for marking. I was told that the Mustard Seed wanted our prototype afterwards, which tells me that it reached a threshold of usable quality. On the whole though, what did we learn? What worked well? What didn't?

On the plus side, we learned the value of teamwork. In this project, it became clear that there was no alpha student. Rather, a group of motivated individuals took the helm and pushed the project in the directions they saw fit. Some people made the poster and brochures have the luster of professionalism and quality. Others brought teams together and unified software into a single product. What used to cause chaos and confusion became a matter of working together and keeping each other in the loop.

In summary, some of the lessons we learned were:

-assign specific deadlines and responsibilities for individuals to complete assignments or perform tasks.
-regularly talk to people, including those outside your group, to review the accomplishments of the week and identify what needs to be done next week.
-create an environment of trust and support, with minimal blaming.
-be socially constructive, not critical.
-keep members of Project Management accountable to the groups they represent, and to each other.
-check your phone and email regularly.

It was a very busy week for the White C lab. First off on Tuesday, we had to get everything ready for the individual marking of the game. No marking guide was provided for any of the students, but that didn't seem like to be too much of a big deal as everyone in the lab did considerably well. After Tuesday, most time available for ENGG253 went towards the preparation for Thursday's open house.

Jamie Bertram, Jovana Cuzovic, and Julia DiPalma took charge in the Open House presentation, but I stopped by a few times to check up on how everything went. They said everything went well for the most part, except for the fact that Professor Onen didn't seem too impressed with the game, but they said every other person who went around marking/interviewing all the groups seemed to be quite impressed by the game. Hopefully when we get feedback in a couple of weeks, it's going to turn out that our lab did a good job on the game and overall presentation.

Although the game seemed to fulfill all the requirements of the challenge presented, some changes could have been implemented in order to make the game more authentic, for lack of a better term. First off, since our theme was time travel, we could have been more consistent in our time jumps, so we could have solved this problem by having more lab meetings and increasing communication between tables. Another problem again falls into the line of consistency, our game wasn't really consistent in the sense that it was just a whole bunch of separate games tied together, we could have fixed this problem by having one common element between each of the games, something like having the same character going through all the levels.

Last Post for Lab B

This week:

All games were finished up by the individual teams and compiled by Dan on the weekend. Public and private testing was completed. The poster team worked hard on finishing the poster on time for the Open House (good job team!). Also, the presentation for the Open House organized there presentation so all members would be prepared. Remaining group members worked on completing the final report during the short and long lab. Also, the design manual team assembled the completed design manual.

Individual team prototypes were presented during the long lab. During spare time during lab time loosed ends were tied up, such as logbook finishing and portfolio finishing.

Conclusion:

The lab worked well during the entire project. No deadlines were missed and no major lab issues occurred. Teams dealt well with the learning curve with gamemaker and each teams games turned out well. The final stretch of the project went smoothly. This is largely do to the fact that teams stayed on top of their work load and managed their time properly.

Green Lab B: April 5 - April 9

Accomplished this week:

B1

· Finished our level

· Tested our level and fixed glitches

· Worked on final report and our portion of the game manual.

B2

· Finished the programming for the game

· Applied level specific sprites

· Finished created objects

B3

· Finished game part, but it might need a bit more touching up

· Did our part of the user manual

B4

· Finished End Game interface

· Assigned jobs for instruction manual

· Assigned parts for final report

B5

· Finished our portion of the video game

· Created a room for the interface between our level and the next groups

· Began testing the video game

· Distributed work loads for user manual and final report

B6

· Completed programming of all areas

· Tested for bugs

· Submitted program to be compiled

Monitoring and Control:

To be accomplished next week:

B1

· Prepare for presentations

· finish final report

B2

· Prepare for Monday’s presentation

· Finish and compile manual

B3

· Do final report

B4

· Finish final report

· Finish instruction manual

· Compiling instruction manual

B5

· Prepare the prototype presentation, then present on Monday

· Do our section of the user manual

· Do our section of the final report

B6

· Final testing of program

· Work on supporting documents

· Prepare for presentation

Additional Information

Each group completed their level for our game. Although a couple groups were a day or two late we got the video game together and compiled on schedule. Each group should have tested their individual levels before sending it to be compiled, so all that’s left to test is the interfaces between each level. Next week each group’s project management representative is expected to do thorough testing of the complete game by playing it. Also, as a lab we have to complete the entire and poster and user manual next week. The design prototype presentation is next week, so on the weekend we will be preparing a presentation for Monday.

Red Lab D

March 26,2010

Well, with all the pressure of other classes bearing down assignment after assignment the mustard seed challange would only prove to be the same. The past week had brought us the due date of our functionality and design report. For most groups, getting all the research information together and trying to come up with new refreshing ideas for games, underlying principles and theories, proved to be a more difficult task then first anticipated. All groups seemed confident in their ideas but where uncertainty lied was in the actual requirement of the report and lack of grading guide to use as a road map. The greatest fear or concern for the report was the judgemental eyes of the person marking.
All groups as far as this project manager knows of, handed in all reports on time and got right into the more pressing action of theorizing and designing a working model of our package.

Short lab on Monday March 22, consisted of each group independently work on their component of the project. Working with a theme of "adventure" definitely caused a lot of gears turning in the minds of all groups throughout the lab. Designing a "successful" video game with limited knowledge of game programming caused many groups to focus more on their overall idea rather than implementation into a prototype.

Long lab on March 23 proved to be a major transition in the tempo of Red D based on the implementation of a game idea. The majority of groups have little or no experience in programming video games (or none that any is willing to admit). This had caused many groups to doubt the idea of a successful prototype. Inability to transfer a great idea into a great functioning game was easier said than done. A project manager brought up the theme of the lab to other managers on the weekend before the functionality and design report was due. The limited time frame and the fact some groups had already completed their reports, this idea was was not explored any further. One lab member was particularly troubled with the theme of the game, he took it upon himself to approach each group within the lab independently to discuss the theme of adventure. His motive was not to sway ideas, but rather to gain input into how others were implementing the theme into their game, and to find out opinions to the current theme.
Project management was called upon to re-evaluate the theme of "adventure". Adventure created a vast range of ideas but that was the the object of its demise. A theme too vast only caused groups to wander in every direction, which could cause the theme to be unrecognizable in the end and defeat its purpose.

The project management team discussed these issues in the meeting. Some groups were well on their way, already having adventure as their theme included in their game. This posed a problem to the PM team. Does one or two groups eagerness and efficiency in designing their prototype warrant reason to keep the theme the same?
An idea was passed that within the games already being designed, changing sprites within the game, the setting and background could let those teams keep their idea in a new theme. It was agreed upon that the lab shift its theme from adventure to City Center.

City Center prompted many ideas right off the bat. wether it had to do with construction, shopping, maintenance, gambling, and even adventure. This theme also gave groups the opportunity to create more realistic and familiar components into their game which could lead to material being more easily absorbed for the user.


The Expectations for groups next week is to have their ideas imbedded in concrete and designs well underway. Because of only a short lab on march 30th it was stressed upon that groups ignore all other subjects that arent important and focus solely on their mustard seed proposal.

This Blog was submitted by Jay Wiwchar, Project Management Chairman.
with permission from Jessica Kisell

Lab A Weekly Update - Week 3

The following is a breakdown of each team's progress since last week.

A1

• Completed functionality report
• Met with team A2 on Saturday Mar. 20 to complete use-case studies and develop content for our respective game levels
• Content creation chair (Annie) divided up responsibilities for various content needing to be developed
• Team consisting of members from A1 and A2 responsible for all content in our levels
• Brainstormed potential solutions for audio/video needs for levels
• Cam is on programming team and has been working at learning flash and developing program requirements assigned to him, mostly completed intro screen for first level

A2

• Organized and seperated the content creation parts
• Met with group A1 and have begun to design some graphics for the game
• Have organized a meeting for Saturday March 27 @ 11:00 am to shoot the video content
• Separation of parts is as follows:
• Kyle: Audio content
• Sunny: Create the bow and arrow, title screen for game, success screen

A3

• Decided on graphics (background, images and sprites) for our level
• Started experimenting with using Flash, and recording sounds
• Started programming in Flash
• Typed up a testing template to be used to test each level

A4

• Members assigned to write the text, create the visual and audio content for the program created by table A4 and A6
• Graphics work done on PhotoShop by Nitish and Henry
• Kevin wrote the script for the audio
• Venki prepared a check list of all the testable material for this group

A5

• Kevin N. will work with programming team; Canaan, Karim and Robbie will work with content team
• Teamed up with A7 to make one game that deals with conversation training as a whole
• Team A5 met after lab to work on the content of the game
• Finished entire use case of the game, (overall overview of how the game works)
• Divided functionality report and assigned everyone his portion; everyone is to finish their portion and sent to Kevin before Thursday in order to compile everything
• Paul gave the rest of programming team useful tips and tutorials on how to use Flash MX program (program we're using to make game)
• Made changes to the usecase and content of game in order to fit with team A7's
• Finished content of the game (we'll have 12 questions with brief tutorials outlined before questions come up)
• Canaan and Robbie teamed up with Alex in A7 to get working on content for conversation training, while Jerry from A7 and Kevin N. finalized all the concepts that we are going to use to make up the game. The game will have a total of 18 questions: 6 that deals with informal conversation, and 12 questions that deal with formal

A6

• Finished planning out our portion of the game
• Combined our game concept with group A4 game concept(also facial
• expression)
• by dividing our section of the games' difficulty into easy(group A4)
• and hard(us)
• Began development of our integrated section of the game (ie,.
• Programming, Graphics..)
• Set more lab group meetings for next week
• Created the questions and answers for our section of the game
• Began writing script for our section of the game

A7

• Worked on the functionality report
• Further divided the group into smaller work packages

Figure 1: Project Progress Chart

Each team's plans for next week:

A1

• Shoot all video requirements
• Develop all audio effects
• Develop all graphics
• Continue developing programming for level 1

A2

• Have all the video and audio content edited.
• Have audio and visual content in to in to the programmers by thursday
• Give all the graphics for the game into the programmer by thursday as well

A3

• Program the level, and begin to incorporate the sounds and graphics
• Record the sounds
• Design the graphics for the level (including background, images and sprites)
• Begin testing levels as they are completed

A4

• Complete the audio script and the visuals by Tuesday March 30th
• Complete checklist for testable materials by Thursday April 2nd

A5

• Canaan, Karim and Robbie plan to complete all the graphics they're responsible for by Friday
• Canaan, Karim and Robbie plan to work on audio on Thursday
• Kevin N. and Jerry plan to meet this Saturday to work on programming
• Kevin N. and Jerry from A7 plan to program at least 1/2- 3/4 of the code needed to build the level (conversation training)
• Kevin plan to meet with programming team on Tuesday at 2pm to go over what every programming member has done so far

A6

• Finish script
• Finish video
• Most of the programming (shooting of the targets, questions asked,
• and answers)
• Setting yet some more lab group meetings for the coming week

A7

• Work on assigned work packages

Lab B Status Report 3

Accomplished This Week:

• Functionality report was completed and handed in


• Began exploring the capabilities of gamemaker 8


• Started early stage creation of the games: possible game ideas explored, early levels began to be created


• Lab theme was defined by the lab: Each team chose a different country as their theme

To Be Accomplished Next Week:

• Continue work on the game: create, test, and edit


• Assign tasks of: Open house presenters, poster, design transfer package, compilation of the program, and opening menus of the game


• Determine the title for the game based on a lab vote

Notes:

• A lab member has identified themself as a potential poster rep for their group


• Each group will need to nominate a poster rep for their group


• If any lab member is having difficulty programming, you may contact: Brandon Crap at gyrosese@hotmail.com - he will be happy to answer any questions you have

Common Questions:

• To what extent ( and how ) will the product be integrated in its entirety?


• Who will compile the game?