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.