MIDWAY.

Tomorrow is Midterms for my CSG-110 class and I know two things are happening: peer reviews and cuts. Dunn-dunn-dunn! Even though I'm pretty confident that I won't be getting cut, I'm still a little nervous. You never know when dealing with Emil. LOL. As far as peer reviews are concerned, I'm not too worried. I get along with pretty much everyone on  the team and I'm always contributing. I finally finished Udacity and I really enjoyed it. I've also decided to take the Computer Programming course that they offer because it's more visual and I want to learn everything I can learn. I learn better from seeing things. I'm a hands-on/visual learner. This will also be my eighth blog post. I'm really trying to cross my T's and dot my I's, so to speak. For I know that Overlord Emil is afoot!

Lerpz (Part Four)

 

Hello world!

I'm happy to say this will be my last post about that annoying Lerpz program. I talked to Mike about some of the problems I was having and he fixed them so fast it made me feel really silly! My scripts were right but they weren’t ordered correctly. Meaning, I had some functions in my comments. Because of that, my scripts weren’t running properly. I have no idea how I didn’t see that. I guess that’s what you get when you try to fix a script at 3 in the morning LOL. He showed me what I did wrong and showed me how to fix the issues. Trust me, I won’t make that mistake again! I had a problem with my cut scenes that were magically fixed when my script was fixed. Now my game is playable! It may not be perfect but it’s good enough for me to hand in. You have no idea how great it feels to get that little green brat off my back! Seriously though, doing Lerpz helped me get familiar with Unity in general and now I’m looking forward to moving on and learning some actual coding. Lerpz taught me that scripting is a very tedious and time-consuming job. The smallest mistake can have devastating effects and ruin a good game. I also learned the power of saving my work as I make changes. There were a couple of times where I got so wrapped up in what I was doing that hours had gone by without me saving periodically. And then Unity crashed and I lost much of my hard work. It was infuriating. Not even a cigarette and a drink could fix my hurt. But all that is behind me now. Now I can focus on the nursing simulator!

Success!

The Customer is Always Right

Hey, guys!

I've been really busy lately with pushing our survey. I posted it on a few forums and blasted it on Facebook. I even talked to a few people after they took the survey. I received some pretty good feedback. On udacity Steve Blake talked about getting out of the office and connecting with the people, and I see why: it’s very effective. The few people I talked to didn’t just tell me what they would like out of our game but also what they didn’t like about games that are currently out. It was interesting to say the least. Since then I’ve talked to my team about newfound data I came across and now I know we're headed in the right direction. With midterms only a few days away I feel more confident in myself and my team going in to the second half of the semester. Every week we understand a little bit more about the industry and the whole process of creating/ selling a game. I have learned a lot about being proactive, and also about really connecting to the customer’s needs and wants in order to provide them with a stellar product. I have learned that the type of game we want to create is sought-after. I know it sounds like cliché but there’s something to the saying “The customer is always right.” 

The following URL is the survey:
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/14h8BJJ4Fr7nLK8VU46v-aET_FuFb90vgfAxy01UTWPQ/viewform

Nursing Simulator

Hello again, world!

We chose to do the Nursing School Simulator project. It’s basically going to be a video game that lets the nursing students interact with a virtual patient in emergency situations. They would use the game to train students how to deal with patients with various illnesses or conditions. Right now the game only deals with cardiac arrest but we will find out what else they want us to include in the game at a later date. I couldn't be happier. I personally wanted to work on this project because it’s a dream of mine to use video games to help people. What better way to help people than to help train the people who save lives! These are the games I always wanted to make. I get sick of people ragging on video games or deeming gaming childish. I’m also tired of people assuming that people only play games to escape reality. People learn so much from games but the positive aspects of gaming are often overlooked by people who critique certain popular games for their violence or addictive nature.

The rest of the team wanted to work on this project from day one right along with me. So we've finally got our hands on it and it is pretty cool… basic but still cool. It’s going to need some work (to say the least) but that’s what we’re here for. I will say it looks pretty good already. It’s just a room with a nurse, patient and a few medical supplies. But it’s still pretty open so we can still put our own touch on it. In a few weeks we're going to make a trip out to the MATC-Mequon campus to sit in on a demonstration. We'll get to interact with the equipment and talk to the students and instructor to get a better feel of the project. I wish I had more to say about this but it’s still early so… stay tuned! 

You're Fired!!!

Hello world.

I'm back again with more news about our company. I'm sad to say, we had to make our first cut...Oh who am I kidding, its GREAT news! We had to let Nick go and, to be honest, I’m happy about it. I'm not saying he was a bad guy but, perhaps he just wasn’t meant for this program. He never participated in class, he never made it to any of our video conference calls and he never ever did any of the research assignments! So with that said... I'm very happy to get rid of the dead weight! No love lost, no love found. I know it sounds harsh but it's the best thing for the team. And that’s what matters. Even though this is only a class, I’m taking it serious as if I was already in the industry. I told myself before I even started the program that if I want to succeed this time around, I have to treat school like it’s a job. So, that’s what I’ve been doing.

But hey we're still doing great. We've been doing just fine with one CIO from day one. Since the Nick issue has been taken care of, we as a team can stop stressing about the situation and focus on the task at hand.