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