Final Week

As this semester starts to come to a close and the final week before our capstone presentations are underway every team begins a crunch time rush. Working the labs we see that most of the teams are present throughout the morning into the next. We as well are working on our pitch which all teams are critiquing with one another in an effort to help everyone out.

As we work on our final pitch we also need to make sure every piece of the game is in, even if its extremely basic. This is one of the criteria when moving forward we need to put in every feature that will be corresponding with our final product if we are to move forward. I believe that our game has a decent chance to move forward because it is something that has never been done to our knowledge and to our classes. This is also a large risk, what if that is a reason they are worried about letting us move forward. With this in mind it seems that it could go either way. We have had the same types of reviews in both faculty reviews as well as peer reviews during testing. The negative to our game it seems that it has a love hate relationship which doesn't allow for us any sort of middle or wiggle room with the sway. We need to perfect the pitch. However the day before the pitch we were told that it could be no longer than 12 minutes. Previous to this we have been told 15 minutes is were you need to be. This forced us to cut out a lot of material. This hurts the overall presentation for our group drastically. It also is a bit upsetting that we have been receiving updated information the day of or before something is to happen. Dates and times seem to change right before and some people have work because we are students and it tends to cause conflicts. If we were in the work force a last second meeting change to a half hour earlier where we were just showing up wouldn't affect us drastically. However working and being in school and all free time going to work the half hour earlier being told 3 hours before does hurt many individuals. Not only our group, but many feel there is a lack of communication this year and many things are not understood or told to right before it matters. This has a large impact on how we as a group feel and its not as positive as I would have liked.

Week 11

As we come closer and closer to the end of the semester we are really forced to make a push on what is needed and what can be shown in an older form to be reformatted next semester. The goal is you have everything you want next semester, but in a more basic way so we can get everything in our vertical slice of our game.

As well we were attempting stage 3 this week which we passed, that felt very good and raised our teams morale. For the presentation however our group was quite lucky that we work extremely well together and have no problems with a lot of long group meetings. Devon our designer was sick and unable to present most of the design slides. I stepped up and gave the presentation for the stage. I was also not forced just to read each slide and put the class to sleep because we have worked in groups so often. I was able to take a slide know what it meant and how our group wanted it and give them explanations from how I saw it which may be a little different, but still in the same direction as we needed it to be. So even with this last second swap as I said we passed.

Now we started looking forward to the pitch and realized that we didn't have enough time in a day to do everything we wanted. Of course everything we want in the long run is hours among hours of polish and very little basic stuff to add. This works well overall, we were able to take what needed to be finished by next Saturday night(2 full days to bug fix) As well as what we could polish if the time arises. With all of these we feel a hundred percent belief that everything we need will be in the game to go on the Monday of presentations. Key points will be polished and in final states. As well as what we are uncertain of how they will finish for example the dreamlike blur will be raw, but still have the desired visual affect.

Week 10

From our meetings we have decided that we need to create a better method to dull out the surroundings and focus on the player and his followers. With this we came up with a plan to create a dreamlike affect now. The rest of the world is blurry except for the position around the player. This entitles that the players sphere of blurriness will shrink and actual view will get larger as the player gains followers.

As we can see this gets the point across slightly. The center is a rectangle with no blur and as you go out it gets blurrier. Next step would be to create a Radial Blur effect. Not only this, but we would like the only spot of color in the world to be that in your sphere. Similar to a sphere of influence which is a strong factor of our game. We have begun implementing a tutorial level with speech as well. This is what we would like testers to play in the coming weeks to see how our game is received. The only problem with the testing sessions are the players are forced to be there. We also get skewed data by people not really caring about helping our project out. They see the online reviews and questions we ask as school work that they don't really care about. Our project needs a higher level of testing. Devon had a meeting with Professor Wehr and he agreed that the normal testing sessions would not give the results we would like to see. This worries me a little because although I believe we have taken great strides. The testing sessions although most received well done feedback. A lot of the feedback seems just to be answers to questions they testers had to us the developers and worded as they understood it maybe after getting their questions answered