4/7/19

O.K., we hit the WALL.

As of right now, three weeks left to finish our project, we have not had a proper QA session with our game, because things keep breaking. We all worked for hours, trying to get everything ready for QA yesterday, but the programmers had to tell the rest of us that they couldn’t do anything. Our game was just not going to be ready for QA.

So, one of our teammates went on Discord, and told everyone on the team to get to CCM 444. There, as the second production manager, he made it crystal clear that he didn’t even think our game would be ready by the deadline, much less for the next QA session. We all talked, those of us that were there, at least, and we realized that from the start, communication has been fundamentally broken on our team. So it wasn’t just me who felt this way, it was everyone.

I said that the segmented discord channels, dedicated to one specific major, probably played a major role in our failure to communicate properly up to that point, as subconsciously, we all probably didn’t think to go to those channels, because they “were made for another major”.

A few people agreed, but there was no time to dwell on the idea. A few people then shot out of their chairs and said “O.K., enough talking about what we did wrong before, lets get to the labs NOW, and work together NOW.” We all agreed, and for the next 2 and a half hours, we all did work regardless of what major it would fall under.

This turn of events has probably strengthened our team bond, but at a personal cost. I probably won’t get my systems project done on time now, as I desperately needed those hours to get help from friends, who could only help me during those hours, but that’s besides the point. Ultimately, for Production II at least, I think we have a shot of moving forward in strong strides, now.

I’ll come back at some point to let you know if I finished my Systems project on time.

4/2/19

A lot has happened since my last post.

My team has entered what I would describe as “panic mode”. Our teacher has told us that he’s genuinely worried about our ability to finish our game in the time we have left.

As I’ve said before, I’m not worried about us finishing on time. I’ve done far more in much less time. What I am worried about, however, is the health of my teammates. One of our artists was recently told by the doctor that he had a benign tumor. How am I supposed to think about anything other than his well being? He’s a really good friend.

I want to always ask how he’s doing, but I don’t want to keep reminding him of it.

Speaking of which, I had a talk with one of our group leaders and two others. Up until now, I hadn’t really asserted my need for written feedback on the story, as i didn’t want to annoy my teammates, but after receiving my peer evaluation, I decided I’d had enough.

Several people said that I “didn’t listen to feedback”, or “rarely implemented feedback”. This was blatantly absurd, several people in our team hadn’t even read my story until this week!

No one outside of the other designers has ever given me feedback, and even then, they only give me verbal feedback, which I sometimes forget because I can’t write it down, due to me trying to keep off my phone during meetings, as a criticism I got after the first peer review.

So I asked “what feedback?” How am I supposed to implement feedback I’m never given?! I’ve asked for feedback several times, and I’m never given any! I can’t iterate if I’m not told what’s wrong!

And my teammates who stuck around to hear me out at the end of the meeting totally agreed with me.

And as of now, I’ve finally received my first piece of written feedback during this entire assignment.

I just hope the rest of the team follows this example.

I love everyone on my team, but I see now that I need to be more assertive, or they won’t realize that they aren’t helping me be a better teammate.

3/24/19

Things have been going good recently. The team seems to be panicking over a lot of things, but I feel good about everything. I’m making good progress with the story and everything else I have to do, and even though they don’t seem to believe it, all my teammates are making good time, too.

Hopefully they’ll be able to calm down once we get this game turned in.

3/18/19

Just got back from Spring break. I accomplished literally nothing, but my group did have a discord meeting on Thursday, where we all confessed to having done nothing. I mean, none of us had access to computers, what could we do?

But, my Game Systems teacher didn’t care about that. From his perspective, this week of break might as well have been a week in school. We usually have three weeks to get our games done for this class, but this time we only have two. Well, I suppose it will get us ready for the industry.

3/5/19

These last two weeks have been insane. I just barely managed to turn in my second systems project, which I am VERY proud of, but I only just barely got it in, because my group assignment has been consuming my life. We have meetings every other day, and they always last two and a half hours or more.

And even after all that, me and another group mate brought a physical prototype of our game to QA last night, only for him to realize that our mechanics are fundamentally broken, and we could not fix it before the end of QA.

Two weeks of work, wasted. Well… Let’s hope it goes better from this point forward.

2/23/19

Well, we’re well on our way to getting adjusted to our new teams. I was assigned to the Duck game. I don’t really know how to describe it to you, mainly because I’ve still only just joined the team, and haven’t gotten a look at anything solid, yet.

I’ve already written a rough draft for a new story for the game, however. I made sure to keep it simple. Hopefully they’ll like it, we’re going to talk about it during today’s meeting in an hour and a half.

2/19/19

My team did not go forward. Oh well. I’ll do my best to do all I can for the team I’m being transferred to.

2/16/19

So my team finally brought our chosen game to present in front of everyone in the game major for the class of 2020.

I think we did pretty well, our game was clearly better than some of the competition. However, we were completely outclassed by many other teams. There was a 2D space shooting game which I think it going to win overall.

However, none of the games that blow my team out of the water, or the ones that are clearly inferior to our game are in our class. So we’re not competing against either of them for the moment.

This will make it a lot more difficult moving forward. I really, really like my team, and I like what we’ve accomplished, but knowing my luck, my entire current team will be split up among the two games from our class that are chosen to move forward.

However, this is all hypothetical. This would only be a concern IF our game isn’t chosen. I have confidence in “Village Cast in Stone”. It’s absolutely the most fully developed concept in our class, and it has the most potential to be made into something great with the help of half of our class moving forward.

2/11/19

See? I knew we’d be able to come to an agreement.

We all calmly talked about what issues we had with the other’s story ideas, and we came to a conclusion that works, and is a story we can all be proud of.

I have now written a very short summary of the story, so that it will only take up 1 minute of our presentation, rather than 4.

At this moment, I’m still waiting to hear word from the team on what they think about the summary, and I hope they respond soon, our presentation is tomorrow.

2/9/19

We presented our final game for Production II a few days back. That game is probably going to be the one we go forward with. The dog game and the space game are good, but we as a team just take this Gorgon city game more seriously.

It initially began as a game about Medusa, and how you were given a task by Hermes to steal her treasure, and because he gave you magic teleportation shoes, whenever you turned to stone, you were able to teleport, but leave a perfect stone replica of yourself where you were about to die.

But now my team has completely flipped the script, we’re keeping the enemies as gorgons, but that’s our only connection to Greek mythology. I’ve been busy trying to write the background story for our game, per the request of our team leader, Jaymee.

But the team keeps changing what they expect from the story. The first two miscommunications were simply that; miscommunications, but for the past few days, Garrett and Jaymee have basically been scolding me for continuously not including story aspects that one of them either only mentioned off-hand at one of our meetings (and which aren’t in our meeting logs), but also ones that I simply cannot include. But if they don’t like what I wrote, that’s fine, we can work together on another solution that does work, but they need to be willing to listen to my criticisms of their ideas for the story.

Because I do want to be able to work out these issues, as I can’t give them what they want; a coherent story, if I also do everything they’re telling me, but this is the kind of thing that might take some time to discuss, and Garrett gets very angry when that’s the case. He’s berated me twice over these last few days, telling me to shut up and move on, if things I bring up concerning the story take too long to discuss. But these are things that concern our game, if we don’t get them worked out now, when are we supposed to do that? We only have 8 days to finish everything.

I’m going to try to get these issues worked out in our meeting today in as little time as possible. I don’t want to make my teammates mad, and I’m sure they were just tired these last few days. It’s been stressful, they probably didn’t get much sleep, it’s Saturday, so everyone is probably more relaxed and rejuvenated, so I’m sure we can discuss this calmly, and work something out.