And we're back on air

Right, so i realize this is my second post and you're already not happy with my group but i'll keep trying to pass anyway.

Last night i put together the .xml for the entire first level and put all the walls in our gigantic sewer level, they all fit really well and it is now the basis of a level. I've told Josh, Sam and Hadley to start at midday to get the platforms sorted, i put together the coordinates they gave me and made them into a separate xml file so it's nice and easy, though it turns out they were wrong (hindsight again) i had updates that the teleporting code is finished and just needs putting into the xml, craig has done a cut scene for the beginning and its looking really nice, sam has said its easy to put that before the game starts. and has i think tried it out. All is going smoothly if a little behind shedule.



That is what i would've written last night if i hadn't fallen asleep due to an all nighter the night before to do this and my INDN class which is due on the same day as this game. (fail) and i woke up nice and early this mornign to a text from sam saying that the game wasn't working as we had planned and i should come in. so i suited up (international suit up day) and came into uni to find flash hadn't wanted to start until about 1am and since then they've made quite a bit of headway with the bottom level.

so i figure i should probably try and list out what i did to assist in the creation of this monstrosity. I became the benchmark, the go-to guy with probles and i tried to help, in fact, to reference a past lecture i am my groups SCRUM master. I organised everything (much more work than i origionally thought) and i thought i could get everyone on track early though i don't think this worked as i'm in a tea that loves the last minute way of working which made me kinda appreciate what you must go through as i was constantly giving out extensions and wondering to what standard people were working.

I also put the .xml file together and worked out the placings of everything and making sure it was possible to jump between things. i approved everything that went into the game, i rendered the banisters too.

but my main job was organizer. and that it turns out is a full time job. i think this project gave me a really good insight into what it would be like to lead up a team and i think i'm better for it, even though this project resulted in the most work i've done for a project at all in my degree so far. and the horrible thing is that most of the work i've done isn't tangible, its not easy to write down either, there's no real way to describe how you feel after being told that the thing you want will be easy and then finding out a few days later that no work was done to base that on and it suddenly becomes a bit problem. I also found out that delegation helps, but is not the answer, in a temperamental program such as flash you can't have more than one person working on the main file at one time as it doesn't like merging library's and such.

*sigh*

I think i'm just glad its over

Right, Cearing things up

Right, Cearing things up

Admittedly this may seem like the first post i've put on this blog.

Fortunately this is not true

I've found myself at odds with this blogging business recently so i'll try and sum it all up in one big lump, yet still work to a timeline.

Firstly lets start with the 8th of september 2010.


Today was the day of initial presentations. my Medic idea ended up coming 5th and was one of the ideas chosen to create a group around, the Panthers were formed.
in those first few days i did a lot, i assigned each individual in the group a job. below is the origional list

Myself - Project architect
Craig - Illustrator and Aesthetics Technitian
Hadley - Code Director and animator
Josh - Terrain Designer and Assisstant to the Code Director
Sam - Animator and Assistant Code Director


These were updated in our first meeting and constantly tweaked during the course of Game Creation, Ending with:


Myself - Project Architect and .swf master
Craig - Illustrator, Aesthetics Technician, Cinematographer
Hadley - Code Director and Animator
Josh - Terrain Foreman
Sam - Terrain Underling, Assistant coder and Animator

Also in those first few days I did summaries of each jobs and a Need, Want, Don't want and options list including such things as walking and vaccinating as well as some maybes such as a powerup of putting on a biosuit (didn't end up happening)


our first out of class meeting was that friday at 4pm, while there we discussed everyonees jobs, extended and refined the needs and wants list and i put together a timeline stating things like when i would like alpha testing to be ready and such shown below:

and so the race was on.  from that forst week we met as a group twice a week to update each other on what happened. only once did it not happen at all. i wrote list for each person each week to have done by the next time we met and this worked well. unfortunately i was so good at delegating that i didn't leave myself all that much to do except organizational stuff. so i came up with the pickup, i also tried really hard to get a group blog going, though seeing as i was the only one who posted on it it kinda failed, so as a sort of midpoint i created a facebook group which worked really well, we could put meetings as facebook events as well as posting pictures of what we'd done and tag each other in posts so that we could send information to a specific person.


By the 22nd of september i had done the presentation for the day and neatly compiled the work to date of the team members. and so we carried on

by the 29th of september i started working on the .xml for the level, this being a trial and error stage for myself i spent 16 hours all up getting all the platforms to line up with their corresponding image in the background, for instance the balcony on a house.  this was initially done with placeholders, vectored outlines sent by the aesthetics technician and terrain designers. this made it much simpler when the final assets were created to just replace them in the flash file. which was my next step.

so now i truly became project architect, or rather, game builder, all the parts were coming to me from all directions and i was having to learn to put them all together

unfortunately at this point we lost contact with our code director, resulting in mass panick and an attempt from me at doing some code work.
but then we got back in contact and all worked all night to present a working game for Beta testing (why didn't that happen again?) on the 6th of October. and so i worked on .xml and overseeing others for the most part. then took an active role in image management, saving and re-skinning files to fit in with Flash.

and now i'm trying to re-render the backdrop for the game except that flash keeps eaither crashing or thinking theres something wrong with the code, so i've mapped out the coordinates of all the underground platforms instead:

which took a hell of a long time seeing as the level is 13000 pixels long (or at least this bit is, it think its closer to 30000 all up)

apart from that i'm re-saving all the images in photoshop to make our whopping 300mb flash file a little more easy to use. and now i'm going to go home and work on my nice user friendly PC before i punch this freaking mac for once again unexpectedly closing flash

goodnight

i shall update on anything i've forgotten later

ITS ALIVE!!!!!

The first Post

Right, so after an hour or so of searching I've found that i cannot find a public RSS feed aggretator.

this was a problem

so now we just have group Blog.

this is M.'s blog.

post here you sex panthers