What’s there to say?
Well, a lot has happen4ed since my last post. I’ve become an officially licensed security guard in the state of Connecticut, and have begun looking into jobs pursuing that line of work. In regards to my game and book, I have put my game on hold while I focus what little free time I do have on my book, as it is the personal project that is closer to completion.
That’s about it, for now. Things have been going well.
Well, progress on my game has been slow. I started work on it, believing that I wanted it to more fall into the boomer shooter style of FPS, but with how over-saturated that market currently is in the indie game scene, combined with my love of the “Half-Life” games, I’ve realized that I would rather make something more similar to “Half-Life”, than to “Doom” or “Quake”, like a lot of these other recent indie FPS games. But with that, has come a need for me to retool what I’ve already made. I need to re-balance my game around reloading, and I’m not sure if I should have the player run at full speed and then walk while holding shift, or vice versa. Combine that with me still lacking any real polish on my enemy AI, and a lot of huge movies coming out recently, meaning I’m being given more hours at my theater job, and progress has slowed down significantly. But that doesn’t mean the game is abandoned. It’s just that life keeps happening, so it’s not happening as quickly as I’d like. However, I have made progress on my book. I write about half a page during my breaks at work, if I’m not too exhausted. So that’s good, at least.
Progress on my game has been slow. A lot of big movies have been coming out, so I haven’t had as much time to work on anything. I’ve been trying to work on a mirror-type enemy, but beyond mirroring the player’s movements, it isn’t done.
Outside of that, I’ve had a lot of game companies reach out to me in recent days, so I have high hopes that I’ll have something lined up, down the line.
Hey again. It’s been a while. I haven’t really had time to focus on this blog, because of my job at the movie theater. But in my free time, I’ve been working on a new game. It’s still in the really early stages, but I can show you some footage of what I have so far. Here’s a link if you’d like to see what I have so far:
It’s been a while since I posted here. For a while I didn’t have much to say, I was just trying to find a job during COVID, and then I had issues logging in to write this, for a while. But I actually got a full time job back in June. It’s not game related, but it’s a good way to make money while I continue looking for a game related job. I’ve continued to write my book, and work on my own games in the small amount of free time I have. Combined with the new job, and the fact that me and my family got an adorable new puppy since the last blog post, means I don’t have a lot of time to do either, but that has not stopped me from doing what I love. Now that I can log in again, these blog updates should be coming out whenever I have some big updates.
From a personal perspective on yourself:
What went right about your development process?
Everything was genuinely going great! I couldn’t have asked for a better team. But then Covid-19 hit, and everything got messed up. It was totally outside of my team’s control. But again, given that, that was outside of our control, I’d say everything else went great.
What went wrong about your development process?
Honestly? Not much. We had a dream team, everyone loved the project, they loved the rest of the team, and things were going really, really well. But then, again, Covid-19 hit. After that, the team did everything it could to keep working efficiently, but with many members having poor internet back home, and all but a few members not even owning a VR headset, we were just never able to get things back on track. Which was sad, because we would have absolutely accomplished all of our stretch goals, had this not happened.
What did you learn that you can take with you as you begin a career in the game industry?
I never truly understood how much of a difference having a team full of friends would make. You would think everyone being friends, and making memes half the time would kill our progress, but no, it made things smoother. This probably won’t be applicable in most companies, but if the environment is open to co-workers just goofing around with one another, making jokes and whatnot, then it might never even feel like work, and we’ll all get more done than if we didn’t interact beyond the bare minimum.
From a team perspective:
What went right about your development process?
The team is in agreement that we would have been solid to accomplish all of our goals and stretch goals, had we not been quarantined to our homes, with some members having no access to VR or decent internet.
What went wrong about your development process?
We agreed that there was a clear dip in most things, once quarantine began, whether it was due to lack of resources, or lack of motivation. Some members, without access to the school, were left with basically nothing to do. They had to scrounge just to find stuff to help with. But then the quarantine also brought some other detriments to productivity. Since members were now at home, it was very difficult to remain in the “work/school” mindset, resulting in many instances where work would be put off to the last minute, people would fail to keep up with daily scrum, and so on. All of this, sadly, lead to all members of the team suffering in a slow down in productivity, and the scope of the game having to be down-sized, last minute.
What did you learn about team work that you can take with you as you begin a career in the game industry?
The team as a whole came to the consensus that we’ve learned what to avoid, should this scenario occur again, when we have a job in the industry. Should we be forced to stay home, we’ve all learned how much of a detriment that could be to our efficiency and output so we know what we need to do, to avoid that happening, in the future.
It’s been a while since I’ve posted here. I probably said something along the lines of “Hopefully we can get back soon”. That didn’t happen, and I’m not going back to campus. It’s sad. I didn’t get to say goodbye to anyone, and my graduation is going to be over a video call.
But, that’s not really important. What’s really important is that things with the game have been going somewhat smoothly. I say “somewhat”, only because we weren’t able to do much of QA, at least not as much as I was hopeful for.
I’d been working with my professors to try to get some kind of QA session going, but we only have like two and a half weeks left now, and there just isn’t any time left. So we can only test with the other VR team in our class, and with the family members of anyone on the team who has a VR headset.
It’s been tough to get hours in. I’ve been doing anything and everything I can to help my team, but they’re also running out of things to do. If we’d been back at campus, this wouldn’t have been the case, as we planned to include a third playable level, and would have been able to, but this whole COVID stuff has caused us to have to be fine with only 2.
Other than that, the team has continued to work together very well, and I’m glad that all of this craziness hasn’t caused rifts within our team.
Well, this could be better. The coronavirus, thankfully, hasn’t spread to anyone I know. But outside of that, it’s basically shut down the whole country.
My college was also closed during spring break. My spring break got extended by two weeks, and now classes will be online for the foreseeable future.
Sadly, this leaves me unable to give any meaningful updates on my team’s progress. A lot of my team all live in the same off-campus dorm, so they’re all able to work together, but I’m not close to any of my team. Plus, my lead role was QA, and we’ve all been asked to keep out of large groups, so even ignoring my personal lack of a VR headset, this makes it impossible to do my job.
Now, I absolutely cannot complain, and I’m not. I’m simply explaining what the situation is, and why I don’t really have any updates. My team is trying to find something for me to do, as I’m typing this. My main concern is obviously all the poor people who’ve gotten the disease, and I pray they get well soon.
Anyways, stay healthy, and stay safe.
Well, sadly GDC has been cancelled. I was planning to attend, and I was going to introduce Champlain representatives to my connections at EA, so they could help future Champlain students establish connections at EA.
Outside of that, progress has been great. I’ve been getting along with all my teammates, I’ve been getting our game to QA about 1.5 times per week on average, and I’ve been cataloging our QA results into more and more understandable and easy to read presentations for the rest of my team. I would usually have more to say, but things could honestly only be going better if PAX hadn’t been cancelled. We spent two weeks trying to set up our PAX build, and it was for nothing, sadly.
In terms of the game itself, things are going good. We’re basically done with the original level, and progress on the second level, and hub level are going good. And the system I suggested, where players get their saved photos in a pile back in the hub level, allowing them to physically place them in their photo album, rather than having them automatically be in the photo album, is also coming along well.
So overall, everything is going good, either exactly according to plan, or being slightly behind due to the PAX speed-bump.
Overall, things seem to be going well. However, my “genius” strategy for the QA form turned out to be incorrect. I had wrongly assumed that the testers would be able to tell that the level they were testing wasn’t a Witch’s hut, and would naturally move themselves into the correct areas for the QA. Unfortunately, quite a few did not understand that they weren’t playing in the Witch’s hut, and wound up going down question paths they weren’t meant to.
I had hoped to use this QA form could be used regardless of which level we were testing, to have a higher level of adaptability, because things like “What are we testing?” is subject to change right up until the last minute. But I see now, that I was wishfully thinking. I’ll just need to either make two separate QA documents, or ask my team to stick to QA plans as best as possible. It’ll probably be the first option.
In terms of the process for QA going forward, not much will change, but things might become a bit more tedious, having to make two separate QA forms, each sprint. I’ll make a form that relates to one level, and whatever progress we’ve made on it, and format it so only the testers who would know where we were before, would answer questions about the changes we’ve made, and new testers would answer questions better suited to people seeing the project for the first time. I’d then repeat this process for the other level.
But, at the end of the day, I’m still angry with myself. I still made this mistake, and now our QA results for the last testing session are all messed up. I made things more annoying for my team. I should have seen this coming, and at least done something. But, I can’t change the past. I’ll just have to make sure to change things in the future, and not let this happen again.
