James Swanick | Week 7 - Colors on Things in Places

WEEKLY NARRATIVE

This week I helped out with the lack of furniture and decor in our levels by UVing and texturing a whole bunch of our models and making prefabs for them. I did the texturing using the Custom Gradient shader i made last week. This required me to take the models back into maya and re-UV them. This was very easy though, because the Custom Gradient shader requires a simple planar projection on most objects to work well. It's a process that only takes a few minutes per object.

I prepared the hospital gurney table, office desk, alarm clock, corner light, overhead light, cabinet, and books. I also prepared a few different preset colors for the books.

Additionally, there was an issue with the door scripts that led to levels which were not set up correctly initially being unable to configure their doors correctly. I fixed this. 

CONTENT WITH HOURS

• UVing and texturing (6 hours)
• Fixing models for texturing.(2 hours)
• Door fixes (2 hours)

POSITIVE OUTCOMES

• I didn't get much time to work on effects. 

NEGATIVE OUTCOMES

• I didn't get much time to work on effects, and this entry is a little dry.

NEXT TASKS

• In the coming week I'm hoping to figure out volumetric lights for use with our enemies' vision cones!

TOTAL HOURS LOGGED THIS WEEK: 10 hours

Zak Olyarnik | Week 7: pls fund our gaem

WEEKLY NARRATIVE

The good news is that I was able to get a ton of playtesters at my work this week, but the bad news is that they were playing with a pretty broken game.  One of the disadvantages of the "hands-off" delegation-style management I've been enjoying is that I didn't see our Beta Build until I was presenting it to my friends, and...ouch.  As soon as I brought up the problems to the team, they were quickly fixed, but this was still a build we made and put on our website, not to mention submitted for grading...uh oh.  The plan to avoid these problems in the future is to institute a production freeze a day or so ahead of the deadline, and allow that time for dedicated QA.  Good in theory, but it also means that all the planned work for the week needs to be done that much earlier, and that's a new challenge itself.

I keep popping into Rewired to make quick changes to things.  Doors were only responding to a hardcoded keyboard keypress, so I hooked it into the manager instead and made sure to verbally haze the coder who originally did that.  The rest of my time this week was spent on updating the sell presentation, both in terms of content and overall message.  It was easy enough to make gifs from the video capture we'd already made for the trailer this week, but more important was reorganizing how we're talking about our game.  We have just as many ideas about where to go with it as we do content already in, so it was important to balance both in the presentation.  And of course, the most important part was to keep circling back to what truly makes our game unique, because that does the most work towards truly "selling" it.

CONTENT WITH HOURS

• Meetings (2 hours)
• Rewired doors (0.5 hours)
• Sell presentation (8 hours)
• Scrum (2.5 hours)

WORKFLOW EXAMPLES

POSITIVE OUTCOMES

• The Sell presentation turned out great!
• The game trailer is pretty fantastic too!

NEGATIVE OUTCOMES

• The build issues mentioned above

NEXT TASKS

Probably dedicate some of my own time to doing the QA testing.

TOTAL HOURS LOGGED THIS WEEK: 13 hours

Noah Nam | Week 7: IV Nutrient Therapy Now Available

WEEKLY NARRATIVE

This week I worked on the trailer, and some code changes.

I recorded the raw footage for the trailer. It was either re-recording outdated clips or creating new ones for the new features added since last quarter. I made special builds for recording, such as builds where enemies ignore the player, UI isn't present, or where the player is invisible. 

The camera no longer causes the player to run in circles if they hold left or right. It's closer to a strafe now, but it still needs some more work. I got some help for the camera from the Sole development team.

We had a bug where the player could get stuck in a dash, unable to move. It was an issue with raycasting knowing when the end state of a dash is reached. I couldn't fix it 100%, so I added a quick fix to just end the dash after 1.5 seconds. Dashes never reach 1.5 seconds naturally, so this works for now. I'll need to look into it further.

CONTENT WITH HOURS

• Setup/Recording Raws (5 Hours)
• Camera (1 Hour)
• Dash Bugs (2 Hours)

• Meetings (2 Hours)

WORKFLOW EXAMPLES

One of the raws I recorded.

POSITIVE OUTCOMES

• Raws

NEGATIVE OUTCOMES

• I need to research Cinemachine more, but the documentation is sparse.

NEXT TASKS

Enduring love and justice.

TOTAL HOURS LOGGED THIS WEEK: 10 hours

Daniel Shalala | Week 7: The week of tired

WEEKLY NARRATIVE

This week I worked on finishing up the concept art work and the orthographics that were required of me. I managed to finish them when I got my new wacom tablet pen in, replacing the one that I lost recently. That being said, the memento orthographics have been handed off to the modelers to work on. The other half of the week was spent trying to get playtests in as well as getting started on the crayon version of the story slideshows.

CONTENT WITH HOURS

• Orthographics (5 hours)
• Group Meetings (2 hours)
• Story Slideshows (2 hours)

WORKFLOW EXAMPLES

POSITIVE OUTCOMES

• Orthographics are done
• Story slideshows are coming along well.

NEGATIVE OUTCOMES

• It took a lot longer than I would have wanted.

NEXT TASKS

Finishing up the slide shows for the group as well as finishing up the asset cards for everyone to use.

TOTAL HOURS LOGGED THIS WEEK: 9  hours

Matthew Napolillo | Week 7: Express Train to Designville

Matthew Napolillo | Week 7: Express Train to Designville

WEEKLY NARRATIVE

This week we reorganized our design schedule to fit better with the weekly class schedule! So now we're going to plan on getting design sketches approved by Tuesday, have the final design done by Wednesday, the model done by Thursday, and the implementation done by Friday. Then the art team can spend the weekend and the first few days of the next week to texture and decorate the scene. We also figured out which designs we need to prioritize to get the MVP by the end of the term.

The rest of the week was spent primarily on design and modeling. I modified the Scanner Challenge 02 design after receiving recommendations from Tony, then designed and modeled the Library Atrium, and the Scanner Challenge 01. Matt Wagar designed a new challenge for the Library Wing, then Eric Lee and I workshopped it. The Library Atrium and Matt Wagar's new challenge were brought into the game this week, they just need to be textured and decorated. 

Lastly, I also worked on a few small things here and there; fixed a bug with the way doors were functioning, and moved some of Jimmy's lights into the Dash Tutorial. 

CONTENT WITH HOURS

• Design Layout Creation (6 hours)
• Design Meeting (2 hours)
• Team Meeting (1.5 hours)
• Modeling Library Atrium (2 hours)
• Modeling Challenge Design 01 (3 hours)
• Fixing Door Issue (1 hour)

WORKFLOW EXAMPLES

Scanner Challenge 02 (Modified)

Library Atrium Design

Scanner Challenge 01 Design

Modeling Library Atrium

Modeling Scanner Challenge 01

Fixing Doors in Unity

POSITIVE OUTCOMES

• Created a new challenge layouts
• Took care of suggested changes
• Lots of fixes in game and the new designs are moving forward
• New organization/prioritization of design flow

NEGATIVE OUTCOMES

• Things taking longer than hoped as always

NEXT TASKS

Work on Hero Room design and more challenge designs. 

TOTAL HOURS LOGGED THIS WEEK: 15.5  hours

Eric Lee | Week 7 : I want a weekend where I can just sleep because work is done during the weekdays

WEEKLY NARRATIVE
This week was a roller coaster of events and the start was the going down and the end was the going down and backwards.
There was some going up, slow and nice.
Anyway, this week I populated the levels and united them and put some props around and fixed some bugs.
One of the big issues was doors. Some doors were not aligning correctly.
Not like three weeks ago where they opened weirdly, this is another one.
It had to do with the rotation of the mesh in the world and what the script was taking in.
I had to find out what to do to fix this and well, it's kinda weird now how some levels go from point A to B. JUST SO THAT THE DOORS WORK.
I also imaging no one has touched the x-ray level because the doors are broken there and only there. If it was an easy boolean check anyone could go in and fix it.
I am too exhausted of doing that, so until someone else tells me to do it, I am not touching it(but is not).


CONTENT WITH HOURS

• 1 hour - meeting
• 3 hours - Merging new xray to game + bug fixing it
• 2 hours - Scripted events / level layout / fixing a bug no one saw but can be seen in previous builds
• 1 hour - Level design critique.
• 30 min - Review models
• 8 hours - Adding 3 floor level and scanner challenge 02 and making it fully functional.
• 30 minutes - merging that level.
• 1 hour - adding new enemy prefab.
• 30 minutes - Fixed issues with perforce. twice.
• 1 hour - Adding the enemy to the new levels.
• 6 hours - Merging the levels for the "open" world.

WORKFLOW


Here's an example of a door that is broken. That's the closed stated. It has a rotation of -21.74 degrees. Even if you put 0 in the rotation, the script will still take the -21.74.

This is a scene of a level that I kind of changed since the document said 4 horizontal bookcases but I put 2 big ones and something in the middle to walk (yes, you can dash through a wall to get here).

Positive outcome

• Last week I said I wanted a QA, we got a QA.

Negative outcome

• Perforce is some times dumb.
• We should have a list of what each level requires and how they are built, otherwise it slows down progression because it has to go back.
• People think that a fix to something is just turning a boolean. Is not.

Next Tasks
No clue. We normally don't get information about what to expect next week.

Total hours: 24.5 hours

Felipe Lai | Week 7: U and I

WEEKLY NARRATIVE

This week I was assigned some UI work as primary work, fixing the pause menu UI which seemed easy enough but proved to be a little bit more complicated than expected, mostly with getting the right buttons to highlight at the right time. And worked on the checkpoint code but didn't get a chance to finish it. 

CONTENT WITH HOURS

• UI fixes (2 Hours)
• Checkpoint programming (0.5 Hours)
• Blogging (0.5 Hours)
• Playtesting (1 Hour)

POSITIVE OUTCOMES

• UI is looking good, still some placeholder art however

NEGATIVE OUTCOMES

• UI code is a lot more confusing than I thought it would be, wasted a lot of time trying to figure out highlighting

NEXT TASKS

Keep up with tasks and meetings, help around.

TOTAL HOURS LOGGED THIS WEEK: 4 hours

Trung Tin Pham | Week 7: QA

WEEKLY NARRATIVE

Spent the week doing a lot of code review, and testing the features that were implemented throughout the week. Involves checking that things were loaded in correctly, levels were working, enemy behaved as they should, powers were working, etc. 

CONTENT WITH HOURS

• Quality Assurance (7 Hours)
• Programming (1.5 Hours)

WORKFLOW EXAMPLES

Trello was helpful in assigning tasks and seeing what tasks I had to do/review.

POSITIVE OUTCOMES

• Memento Revolves around the Shrine.
• A lot of the features were reviewed and approved, along with bugs being found and taken care of.

NEGATIVE OUTCOMES

• P4 issues (not allowing prefabs to change).
• Missed the meeting on Friday since someone put their stuff into the locker I was using at the gym and locked it. I had to wait for two hours until they came back and I could get my wallet and keys back.

NEXT TASKS

Whatever gets assigned to me on the Trello (new features, fixing bugs, or testing different implementations). 
Review code and features.

TOTAL HOURS LOGGED THIS WEEK: 8.5 hours

Kane Fitzgerald | Week 7 PPJ | If light travels so fast, how come it's never caught a ninja?

WEEKLY NARRATIVE

I wasn't able to attend this weeks team meeting because I wasn't feeling well but luckily i already knew what my task were for this week. This week I created more level designs for the library. The level for this week was a bit more complex than the previous ones. Unlike the other ones this one had a 3 story floor plan. Lining the rooms up to fit perfectly presented a bit of a challenge at the start but i was able to make it work.

CONTENT WITH HOURS

• Scanner challenge (2 hrs)
• Library level (5-6 hrs0                                        

POSITIVE OUTCOMES

• completed a more complex floor plan

NEGATIVE OUTCOMES

• nothing really

NEXT TASKS

Next tasks are to complete more level designs as needed and help where i can. 

TOTAL HOURS LOGGED THIS WEEK: 7+ hrs

Sierra Dreisbach | Week 7 PPJ | Coming To A Theater Near You

WEEKLY NARRATIVE

    This week I was assigned to the trailer. I worked on the game trailer last term, and I really enjoy video editing and such, so I was happy to do it. I even tried my hand at voice acting and using sound effects on the clips. At first I was nervous about it, because I hate the sound of my own voice, but hey, I actually don't think it turned out that terrible. Cast me as the role of Rem's sister when the Remembrance movie comes out. I didn't really get a chance to work on the concepts I wanted to that much, so I probably do that for the rest of the night. The fireplace room and a finalized version of the clock room is what I need to do next. 

CONTENT WITH HOURS

• Concepting (2 hours)
• Trailer (4 hours)
• More concepting after this (3+ hours probably)

WORKFLOW EXAMPLES

"Clock room"

                                          

POSITIVE OUTCOMES

• Cool trailer I'm kind of proud of

NEGATIVE OUTCOMES

• Small hold on concepts

NEXT TASKS

Continue working on concept art, and whatever else we need art wise. 

TOTAL HOURS LOGGED THIS WEEK: 6+ hours probably