CSG-110 Retrospectives

This semester has been a great experience. I learned a lot about the game industry and the process of game development. Its been a very bumpy ride and I have a lot of things to work on before next semester. I really enjoyed the style of teaching that Emil and Mike implemented. It kept me interested and always on my toes. I loved working with my team and they taught me just as much as I learned in class. The CSG gave me a new appreciation for video games as a whole. I'm really excited to start next semester and move forward with my education in this program. I finally feel like I discovered what I want to do for the rest of my life.

CSG-110: FAIL, EPIC FAIL!

Hello everyone
So today in class we had our first sprint! I was really excited to actually attempt a sprint, but it didn't go the way I thought it would. We played a game my instructor created called Scrum Hero. Scrum Hero takes the whole scrum process and turns it in to a D&D style game. I was really lost since I was new to the scrum/sprint process and I've never played D&D. We assigned a scrum master (Steve) and product owner (Shea) to oversee the sprint. Steve was in charge of the burn up/burn down chart and Shea was in charge of our backlog. We gave each user story a value in our poker planning session. We did that to organize our user stories according to how important they were.  We took our user stories  and formed teams around  each user story. Each team gave each user story a time limit. each time you completed a task it was marked on the burn-down chart. Now, the game itself put a twist on the whole process. The  "Dungeons Master" would randomly hand out cards to each team member to to throw you off. An example of this is I could only talk by singing for 5 minutes. At the end of the day the sprint was a epic fail. We lacked communication and had poor planning at the beginning. It was so bad Emil stopped us, told us we sucked, and sat us down for retrospectives. The point of the game was to show you how bad a sprint can go if you do it wrong. We failed fast and hard but I'm sure the next time we have a sprint we won't make the same mistakes.

CSG-110: Agile in Practice: Planning Poker

Hello everyone.

We started scrum poker planning in my CSG-110 class this week but unfortunately I was really sick and missed class. I'm really kicking myself in the ass for missing it but try as I may I couldn't get out of bed. Lucky for me my team got me up to speed the best way they could and youtube has a lot of videos on poker planning. Poker planning is a scrum card game that helps you prioritize your user stories. By doing this it helps you answer some key questions while keeping your engaged and up to date on the project. I did a little research on how a poker planning game should go and I found this video. So check it out. It's a pretty cool method.

CSG-110 TEH Suck!

Hey guys.

Things have been shaken up in my CSG-110 class. For starters we're down to five people on my team now. Emil really wasn't joking when he said half the class would be gone by midterms.

To date we've now lost Chris (COO) Matt(CIO) Dowell(CFO) Ian(CTO) and Nick(CIO). Even though the workload is heavier on everyone, we get quality work on time now. Cutting the suck has made a major difference in the teams whole attitude. On top of all that, Steve was demoted by Emil form the CEO position. Emil's reasons were valid, he told Steve he was hand holding. The suck is like a cancer and it really screwed us in this class because we lost a great CEO. With all that said I stepped up to the plate and took over the role of the CEO. I'm confident that I will pick up where Steve left off and do well helping lead this project. Now that we have a quality team things should get easier for us in the coming weeks.

CSG-110: Box Art Project PART 3

Hello everyone.

Today is the day we print out our box! This has really been fun, even though it had its frustrating moments. This project was harder than I thought it would be simply because I thought we wouldn't create cover art until after we started the game itself. So we really had to think fast about how we wanted the everything to look. That was easier said then done but we pulled it off! Check out the finished box!

CSG-110: Box Art Project PART 2

Hello everyone.

So this week we put all of our ideas together and created the image for the whole box. Steve created a placeholder board for the game play image on the back of the box and Darrin kicked ass with the cover. We're starting to put everything together now so take a look!

CSG-110 Box Art Project PART 1

For the next two weeks we will be working on our box art for our final presentation.

For those of you who don't know what box art is, box art is the cover art you see on every game case.
We broke down our task on trello and each team member chose a task. I chose to work on the trademark/copyright statement seen on the back of all games. That was pretty easy. Then the gears in my head started turning and I went on a massive Google search to help find a cool image to put on the box. I came across this West African symbol! It means "he who does not know can know from learning."
I thought to myself, this is perfect. Our game Feats Of Enlightenment is an educational board game and it just so happens that this symbol has the symbols meaning has something to do with education. As I was patting my self on the back I looked at the symbol again and realized it looked a lot like a board game map. I made quick call to my team and shared the image with them and they were just as excited as I was. I feel like we're off to a great start with the project and we're going to have an amazing box!

CSG-110: WGDS13 :: Emil Harmsen :: Agile Game Development

Hello everyone.

In my CSG-110 class we're learning agile development methods. The video above is a presentation at the Wisconsin Games Development Summit 2013 (WHDS13) at UW-Milwaukee by my instructor Emil Harmsen. So sit back and check out the video. It is very informative.

CSG-115 Retrospectives

Hello everyone!

I've reached the end of the semester and I feel accomplished! It's been a crazy ride but i'm glad I was on it. Out of the three classes I had this semester this class was one of my favorites. I'm the type of person who understands and learns better with hands on task. This class was that and more. I really enjoyed working with my classmates on the Nursing Simulator and I even enjoyed Lerpz! I have a better understanding of the Unity Engine and the process of working on a video game. I know I have tons more to learn but I feel this was a great start. this class much like my other classes really showed me that this is what I want to do for the rest of my life. It was really hard at times and had its frustrating moments but nothing good comes easy. Mike was a great and helpful instructor and I can't wait to learn more next semester.

CSG-115: Working On a Inventory System

Hello everyone.

Today  Eric O and I teamed up to work on the inventory system. Neither one of us has any idea how to really go about doing this. So I did what I normally do, went right to Google while Eric was watching tutorial videos on how to write the script from scratch. If you didn't already know Eric O is something like a rock star! I ended up finding a lot of GUI's and not many scripts. This is by far the hardest part of the game i've worked on. It took Eric a nice chunk of time to get through the tutorial but the script was complete. Or so we thought... we ended up with  200+ errors. We continued to work on fixing the errors but every time we would fix one ten more would pop up. We spent the whole class working on this problem with no positive results. We left the class feeling annoyed and frustrated but we'll pick it up again next week. Hopefully with better results.

Pick up Script Part 2

Hello everyone.

So today I feel like shit. I've had a sinus headache for the past three days so I didn't make it to class.
I'm not sure what we're working on but I know we still never figured out the pickup script. I'm sure everyone in class tried at least once to figure it out. Since I'm at home today I figured I'd tinker around with it with the hopes of getting it to work. I know Anthony posted the script on Unity Answers but we haven't had any replies yet. I really don't have much to say today. I'll just talk to you later and try to get better!

CSG-115 Light, Camera, Action Script

So today Leroy and I needed to find an action script.We did a lot of power searching and came up with a few scripts. The only problem was they were all broken! I really wish I could have taken ITDEV-110 right about now. We even asked Mike for some help! He told us it was busted so back to searching we went. Out of nowhere I heard Ian scream "I did it!" I had no idea he was even working on the same script. I was a little annoyed but in the end he got it to work. He rewrote the Highlight script and added a GUI. It was a little buggy but he figured it out. now we need to figure out a inventory system to plug into it. You can already see the difference between what they did last semester and what we've done.

Hello Everyone.

So the highlight scripts that Anthony and I got aren't working with everything we need it to.
We have a few computer monitors in the scene that we want to be able to interact with. I thought it would be cool to have the screen Highlight when when the crosshair hovers over the screen. I thought it would be as easy a Putting a box collider on the screens and attaching the script.Wrong! For some reason it won't react the same way it did with everything else. I'm having the same problem with the patient in the scene. With the patient it's even more annoying because the hospital bed lights up like a Christmas tree! I talked to Steve about it and he couldn't figure it out at the time. Later on he got it to work. I'm not sure how he did it but I'm happy it worked!

CSG-115 Pickup Script Problems

Hello everyone.

So I have a problem this week. I've been working on this pickup script that Anthony came across.

I feel like I'm going insane! For some reason the script will let you pick up the floor but it won't work for anything else. I spent all day trying to get it to work. I put box colliders on our test object but it still won't work. I even attempted mimic everything that was attached to the floor on the test object but it still wont work with me! Frustrated is an understatement. It's bad enough I'm sick with a headache. Oh well, I'll just keep at it. Hopefully i'll figure this out!

CSG-115 Absorbtion

So: my team 414 Interactive Studio absorbed the other team Sub-Zero Games.

Mike gave Sub-Zero the option to join us and work on the Nursing Simulator for the rest of the semester.
We didn't mind them joining us, to be honest. We were really happy it happened. The more people we have working on this project the better. Sub-Zero got off to a bad start and it was impossible to make up for time lost. Their client was way too busy to really guide them and give them all the information they needed to come up with a MVP. Our team, on the other hand, had been very busy trying to figure out what else we need in this game to make it stand out from what last semester's team created. It's not going to be easy by any means, but we should get a lot more work done now that we have more people.

Thats all for now.

CSG-115: Highlight Script

Today in class Anthony and I took on the task of finding a highlight script for the nursing simulator. It seemed like an easy job but it wasn't. It took us about 45 minutes of searching until we finally found the right script. Anthony found the script, along with two others, and had trouble getting them to work. I eventually figured out the problem. Every object that we wanted to highlight needed a box collider to interact with the highlight script. Something so simple gave us so many problems. In the end we figured it out so everything ended up working out.