Thoughts - Day Before Release

Well then.

I've really done a poor job of updating this blog this semester. There's not really any excuse either: I spend practically half my day in front of my computer so I can't really say I didn't have the opportunity. It's not like I didn't have the content either which is why I'm slightly disappointed I didn't do a better job keeping this blog up to date. Really, I think if we get down to the bare bones of it, I just don't care much for blogging.

Like a real life journal, it seems tedious for me to sit down and just record my thoughts. Let me explain. When I sit down in front of a computer, I go through a mini-series of tasks before I even surf or do anything spontaneous. It goes a little something like this:

1. Unlock computer
2. Hotmail (professional email) - Immediately read or reply back to work emails. 
3. Hotmail (old email) - Check for social media activity.
4. Gmail (main work) - Immediately read and reply back to any non-scheduled emails. Click the refresh inbox button a few times because it's lied to me before.
5. Hotmail (company email) - Check for any pressing messages. 
6. Facebook - Open every new notification in tabs. Alt + Tab, Ctrl + W, Repeat. Open Avatar Trials page and check analytics. Open Ubisoft page and check analytics. Create post for personal, game, or work. 
7. Umail - Scan for important emails from students or professors.
8. Twitter (personal) - Check for anything in Connect from interactions to new followers
9. Twitter (Avatar Trials) - Check Connect. Immediately follow back anyone not following us.

Repeat this all day, shuffling around the programs and channels. Also occasionally going on r/dodgers or the front page, and normal facebook and twitter activity. But also a lot of work. Especially when I make a post or check analytics.

Most of the time, I go through each of those 9 steps before I do anything else. Now, you might be thinking - "Ross, why don't you use hootsuite to manage your social interactions" and the answer is I have it, but it's missing some things I feel are important to my social network experiences. The lack of search on both facebook (while generally less useful) and twitter (kinda crucial) is what makes the site unfriendly for me. I also dislike that I'm limited to 5 areas with a free account. I could easily link many more social media or web platforms to it, but with five I have to really focus on what I'm sending from it. This might just be a problem of me having too many responsibilities for one website.

Oh, and I don't like web forwarding because while I know it's very reliable, I don't like the idea of losing any files. I also like keeping my email accounts logged in on different browsers so I can quickly shuffle between personal, old, work, and company accounts. It makes it so I can just focus on one task when I'm in a certain browser. Chrome is for personal and some entertainment, firefox is just business, and IE is...the company email. They've definitely made IE better, but I just supremely dislike how the preview screens show up when your mouse is hovering over the taskbar icon. On Chrome and Firefox, it shows one preview per window, but IE shows one preview per tab. This becomes a huge annoyance when I open more than three tabs in IE then go to Firefox to do stuff then come back to IE and I have to do a lot of unnecessary work to get to the right tab. /tangent

Anyway.

When I'm going through my previously mentioned steps, my goal is generally Lead Generation. What does that mean? Well, for my purposes, a lead is either a person who will buy our game or is a member of the press who would be interested in reviewing it. Wiki says: "lead generation is the generation of consumer interest or inquiry into products or services of a business" 

 Lead Generation is finding those people who will be a net sum for the future of Avatar Trials. They may talk about it with their friends or even just interact with us online, but as long as their is activity surrounding the game, I'm doing my job. Right now, we're almost to 80 followers and we just hit 100 likes on facebook. I want to continue to grow and with the game coming out tomorrow, bust out my marketing budget so we can get hundreds of people to see our game the first day.

So I guess my answer to the my question on why I suck at blogging so much is because I love to work. I'm pretty driven to see this game succeed and while I'm not counting on any mindblowing "Indie Breakthrough" success or press, there is a strong possibility this game is big seller.

Oh, and here's my work schedule for today and tomorrow. Fun times ahead, for sure.

My goal is top 20 downloads on Friday, but I think we can do better.
My lifetime goal is 1000 downloads, but I truly believe we can and will exceed that.
My personal goal is to beat Minions! lifetime sales. Let the games begin.

Late Night Design Thoughts

I recently had dinner with a group of old friends. As we caught up on the current state of our lives and the whatnot, my friend Lindsey inquired, "What's new with you Ross?"

I answered that I'm working on a team project and we're making a game on Xbox Live. I try to keep my response to that question brief because it can become quite lengthy to describe the scale of the project.

She responded that it sounded interesting and asked what my role was on the team.

I answered that I'm the project lead on the game now. I serve as the facilitator and designer for the game as well as fill into other roles when I'm needed. I said that the most important thing that I do is communicate.

"Communicate? Why's that?

This is when it generally becomes complicated. Over the dozen times that I've seemed to encounter that question over the past few weeks, I never seem to give the same answer.

Sometimes, I'll relay how much I value keeping up with each different developers progress during a sprint and making sure they don't feel too overworked or even worse underutilized. Other times, I give an account of how everyone needs to be on the same page in terms of the overall design of the game and how that means creating quest outlines, sending out extra emails, and publishing design documents. On other occasions, I emphasize deadlines and set up reminders so that we're always pushing forward toward the release of the title. Recently, I've stated that I've just finished the task of creating a business and the additional steps that need to be taken in order to maintain the finances for the studio as well as working to form a legal contract for the team. And during the last few weeks, I've added the supplementary task of promoting the game through social outlets and trying to create and maintain a website that's proven to be far more time consuming than I'd like to admit.

"There's just a lot more to being a project lead than you'd think about"

And damn, if I didn't love every minute of it.

Sound Design: Alpha Level

For the last spring before Alpha, I was assigned to produce and submit the sound design for our game. For Alpha, I created this list of foley and non diegetic sound effects that would be necessary for the initial build of our game:

• Collection
• Running footsteps
• Hitting the ground
• Ledge grab
• Loading Screen Music
• Victory Noise - Gong
• Victory Noise - Objective Complete
• Combat woosh
• Double jump
• Glide

My previous experience with sound design was with the course Machinima. As the director for both the short and final film in the class, I did a lot of sound design to have the correct natural and thematic music and sound effects.

Finding the clips took a large amount of research and comparison. It was interesting to me, because unlike the film projects I worked on previously, the sound I found for the game would likely be heard by the player multiple times. With that in mind, I had to find sounds that in some cases would sound natural and realistic when played together with other sound effects or when looped.

I used Audacity to manipulate and clean up the audio. With the effect controls, I changed the pitch, tempo, and length of the clips. Even the shortest audio file like the 'hitting the ground' sound effect required precision manipulation and work.

I enjoyed the process and look forward to seeing where I can improve in the coming weeks as we add more elements.

Ross

Alpha Prioritized To Do List

Here's the comprehensive prioritized list for our team for Alpha. There were some important design aspects that I'm glad I got to cover with the group - Getting the group to communicate on the most important features of our game is important and I'm glad I was able to help keep the team on task.

I'm looking forward to working on the sound design and user interface features in the upcoming sprint.

We have 9 days to get this sprint done. With Thanksgiving break, I think we should realistically have 10 / 14 of the tasks or features complete by next Thursday. It's gonna be close, but I know we can do it.

Ross

Alpha Prioritized To Do List

1.      Level structure : Max

a.       Objectives

b.      Layout

c.       AI storage

d.      Lighting

e.       Set Pieces

                                                               i.      Cemetery

                                                             ii.      Lighthouse

                                                            iii.      Buildings

2.      Collecting System – scrolls with counters, items : ART & CS, Mavin

3.      Animations – 10 different types of movement (done) : ART, Paulo

4.      Parkouring – climb cliffs, shimmy (done) : ART

5.      Ability/Skills – double jump (done), acquire : Blake

6.      Enemy – guard (done) : CS, Ron

7.      Way Points - “Purple lighting” to objectives; markers : Ron

8.      Combat – physical attack, magical attack (done) : Blake

9.      User Interface : James, Ross, Blake

a.       Flow chart

b.      Main Menu, In Game Menu

                                                               i.      Options, 1 Player - Multiplayer, etc.

c.       HUD

d.      Player Log-In

                                                               i.      Programming: Blake

                                                             ii.      Art – Functionality : James

10.  Sound : Ross, Adam

a.       Atmospheric

b.      Non-Diegetic

11.  Lighting (done) : Thaddeus

12.  Particle system – double jump : Thaddeus

13.  Clothing – hat for enemy guards : Kelly, Adam

14.  Loading Screen : Max

Scrum Meeting Results 11/15

These are the Scrum meeting results for our Thursday meeting. Everyone's progress is noted.

Scrum Meeting 11/15/12

Blake – better visual effects (not met)

Derek – Idle and update older animations

--Comprehensive list of animations--

·         Run

·         Idle

·         Vertical Wall run

·         Black flip off wall run

·         Horizontal wall run

·         Grab

·         Climb

·         Falling

·         Landing

To-Do

·         Shimmy

 

 

James – button mapping, dragging, HUD examples (not met)

Adam – Projectile system basic completed, AI searching (not met)

Paulo – rotating, front flip            

Ron – Tools and forms for later on, astar algorithm, AI pat

Ross – business plan (done), business done before end of the year, Game Design Doc, To-Do: Wiki, business law

Mavin – Code reviewing. Refining work

Thaddeus – lighting system (not met)

 

Not Present: Max & Kelly

Kelly –   To-Do: Modular objects – build cemetery and lighthouse  // Not accounted for

Max – Review art, research  // Excused

 

 

 

 

Design: Real Talk from Rahjur

Today was my 1:1 with Roger Altizer in class.

We discussed my role in the class as well as the state of the game we are working on. I'm really surprised by how much the idea has changed over the semester. When the game was pitched and accepted, multiplayer based Mario Kart parkouring was the big draw.

After MP was shot down (for logical reasons), we transitioned to a single player more stealth based ninja title. Over the course of the next few weeks, we realized that parkour and free running were our real bread and butter.

Talking with Roger today, a couple of key things were brought up that I feel are important for our game.

1. "Good Design solves a problem" -- Roger Altizer
http://twitter.com/Romar55/status/266678313790095360

I tweeted about it because I felt like it really framed how I need to approach my role as designer. One of the reasons we chose to embrace parkour was because we really wanted to focus on the non violent aspects of our game. With Avatars, we're limited to what's permitted with the characters and choosing to focus on movement gives us more freedom.

It solves a problem, but not completely. In order for our game to have a purpose, I need to really consider why the player will want to move around on the rooftops and natural terrain. Roger had a good word for that - payoff. What is the payoff for the player to be doing these actions?

2. Don't be afraid to express yourself on your blog.

I'll admit it. I've been neglecting this blog. A part of me is anxious about writing in general (for the most part, I consider myself an above average writer, but it's a love-hate relationship), but a much larger part is nervous about writing something that will make me look inadequate.

Is it weird that I want to maintain a professional presence online? But that's where Roger corrected me. To paraphrase, it's more important to give off a sense of development or growth from the blog. Recruiters aren't looking for student devs who are all powerful, well rounded game makers.

They're looking for students who show marked improvement in a specific discipline coupled with a strong work ethic.

I mean, yes, obviously every recruiter is looking at potential employees in a similar way, but as a student, I'm here to learn and develop the skills I have. Failure is merely an opportunity for improvement. No one got to work in a studio without some decent amount of hardship.

That's all for now. (And writing that really wasn't that difficult)

Ross

Sprint Objectives (ending 11/1/12)

I've almost completed my sprint objectives for the week:

• Complete basic game design document
• Print 4 copies for Thursday's class
• Complete company business plan
• Meet with Entrepreneurship Center on campus
• Meet with Brock Jensen (Business student and company consultant)
• Print 4 copies for Thursday's class
• Document & Log
• Team Razor, X Statement, Slogan
• Official Company Name
• Poll: Video Game Title (subject to change)

Our games gone through a lot of iterations and developments in the past week. Even just solidifying the concepts of where our game takes place and what we want to do with the avatar experience has gradually changed from the original ideas we talked about. Our game is a living, growing project, capable of moving in new directions and flavors. I love it.

Ross