2/2/20

Well, I’ve settled in pretty well into my new position. I am first and foremost, the QA Liaison for the team. I’m not the QA lead, but I am making sure we’re always signed up and prepared for the next QA session we want to bring our game to.

Speaking of QA, I’ve actually begun implementing various paths, so we can see how valuable a lot of the feedback we receive is. I’ve split the QA form into six sections, and plan to divide it up further. Each section is a category of tester, those being:

1.) Have played our game before and played the new level

2.) Have played our game before but didn’t play the new level

3.) Haven’t played our game before, but are familiar with VR, and played the new level

4.) Haven’t played our game before, but are familiar with VR, and didn’t play the new level

5.) Have never played VR, and played the new level

6.) Have never played VR, and didn’t play the new level

I have been taking the feedback we receive, and have been turning them into presentations for my team to easily understand. And I have been dividing up our results like this, so we can determine which feedback is most relevant.

Our target market is middle-aged parents, who are unfamiliar with VR, and are only familiar with the 8-bit era of video games. In terms of getting results that resemble this market the closest, the sub-group of testers that are unfamiliar with VR is the closest, so I felt it made sense to separate their answers, to see how they felt about the game.

And of course, I also separated out those who have played our game before, because their feedback is useful in a different way, and should be viewed separately. With the remaining people being the most common, being the people who haven’t played our game, but have played VR games, before.

And then all of these three groups are further divided, so we can get feedback on the new level, and/or the old one. I added this, so that we can use the new questionnaire in most potential future circumstances. If we’re only testing updates on the old level, then people will only give responses related to the old level, and won’t see any questions related to the new one. This should hopefully make things very convenient, moving forward.

To end things off, I will be trying to improve my results presentations. Feedback from the team has made it clear that, how I’ve been doing it, isn’t as efficient as it could be. So I will be working to improve on that.

1/19/20

I’ve been doing my best to integrate into my new team, and things seem to be going well.

We had our first class on Thursday, and then we had our first real team meeting on Friday, where we discussed the current state of the game, among various other things, to give me and the other new team additions a better idea of where the game stands, and where we plan to take it. After that, we all broke off into groups based on what we’ll be doing for the team.

I was put into the group for QA, which only consisted of me, and two other people. The fact that they’ve put me in this position, right off the bat, must mean that they know about my QA track record. Or, maybe it’s because I was the only new member to put that in their team resume. But regardless, this is a great position for me, and I’m sure I’ll do it well.

But of course, I’m also still a designer, so I made sure to talk to the lead designer after the meeting, to get a summary of what they discussed, since I couldn’t be in both discussions at once.

After that, I spent most of yesterday and today doing my homework for Monday, and working on getting us signed up for Monday QA. We as a team have decided to test the waters with Monday QA for the time being. Our class is on Thursday, which makes QA a little impracticable, since the QA sessions are on Monday’s Thursdays, and Saturdays. You would think the Thursday one would be great, but Thursday is when a new sprint starts, and going to QA at the very start of a sprint is inconvenient in a lot of ways.

But we’ll see how things go. I’m looking forward to seeing what we can do together as a team.

1/15/20

First Blog of the new decade.

The new semester has started, and I’m getting back into the swing of things.

I went all the way to California to do an in-person interview with people from EA, and to shadow one of their employees. It was a very good experience.

I got the head of diversity over at EA in contact with professors here at Champlain, so hopefully what I did can actually become a program for future students to go to EA through Champlain.

I’m excited to see if it can go in that direction, it would be nice to know I helped my school in such a major way.

12/12/19

Well. We didn’t move forward. It’s fine, I suppose. We were up against some very stiff competition.

And my team really worked hard on our game. It’s sad that we won’t be able to work on it from here on out, but that’s life.

Me and my teammates have all been chosen to be added onto new teams, and so we’ll be working on new games next semester. I’ll keep this blog updated with all that, when I can.

11/10/19

Man, I have NOT had time to post here, recently. I haven’t even had time to even really update this site. I’ve been adding in videos of my games, so people who don’t want to download a .zip file can still see my work, but a lot of my newer games are, naturally, a lot more complex, so it would take a lot longer to record and edit them, time I just haven’t had recently.

I mean, even now, I only have time to post this, because the rest of my team is on break.

But, my lack of time to do literally anything aside, I am really excited about my team’s game. And that’s good, considering how it’s eating up 90% of my time. But yeah, we decided to move forward with our blacksmithing game. I can’t remember if I mentioned our three games we were deciding between in my last post, but I don’t have time to check.

Anyways, the title is still a work in progress, and we’ve decided that we’ll be pushing off combat until the second semester when, hopefully, we’ll win, be chosen to move forward, and get a larger team to work with. When that happens, implementing combat will be a lot easier.

All right, my teammates are sitting back down, I don’t know when I’ll be able to post next, but hopefully it won’t be in another few months.

9/22/19

I’ve been extremely busy since the last post. I love my current team, I’ve been taking our games to QA, and I think we’re making good progress. I have a personal favorite of the three games we’re required to make for this first project, and I hope my team chooses it to move forward with, but we’ll have to wait and see. I’ll do my best to keep this blog updated when major things come up.

8/15/19

It’s been a while since I’ve posted anything here. I’ve been pretty busy this summer. I did manage to get some work done on my latest game here and there, but I’ve mainly been helping around the house. Cutting down trees, painting the shed, helping my grandmother do some cleaning around her house, etc. So I’ve been very busy these last few months. But again, I did manage to update my latest game a small bit. I’ve been working on adding a dialogue system, new animations and more in-depth fighting. Nothing too grand at the moment, but I do hope to make more grand improvements when I get the chance.

However, none of this is even close to being done yet, and I don’t know if it will be anytime soon. I’m heading back to school in less than a week, and then I start Capstone, which is going to consume all of my free time. So, unfortunately progress on my game will be halted for the foreseeable future. But I am looking forward to Capstone, I think it will be very fun, working with a team on a game again. I really enjoyed that last year. I’ll probably start posting here more often again, once that happens, since there will be more game related things to talk about.

4/30/19

Well, I just finished my last game related final. I’m all done with games for the school year.

My personal project went well, I got it in on time, and people really enjoyed it, when they played it during our final period. That was yesterday.

And today, the duck game got presented. I made the trailer for it all on my own. I designed one of the levels, made all the story elements, and brought it to all the QA’s. I haven’t really talked about my involvement with this game up until now, so I felt I should clarify my involvement with the project.

And actually, here’s the link to the trailer I made for the game: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cF8pNFZV4hM&feature=youtu.be

I’m so proud of my team. I love everyone I worked with, and I’m sad that I probably won’t get to work with a lot of them again for capstone. But, what can you do?

Oh, and after I finished the trailer, I made a joke edit, just to make the rest of the team laugh. I’ll link it if you want to get a sense of what I find funny, but it’s not really something anyone needs to watch.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T5SjVUrpRw8&feature=youtu.be

4/23/19

It’s been a while since I’ve posted here. I have less than a week until finals when I’m writing this.

My Duck Game group is doing well. We had a really bumpy ride to get where we are. I think half the team wanted to just completely throw in the towel twice over these last two weeks. I did my best to keep moral up.

I’ve been in this position before. Everything seems hopeless, you think you will never get your game done with the time you have left, but then you put your nose to the grindstone, and you get it all done, and prove yourself wrong. I knew this was going to happen with my team. You wouldn’t guess it from talking to me, but I’m an optimist, and I try to make sure everyone else feels a bit of optimism.

Up until a few days ago, key features of our game design weren’t even fully implemented. Kind of bad when your game is due in less than a week and a half. But the artists, programmers, and designers, all came together, and worked on everything together.

We got 6 out of 10 levels ready for QA on Monday, and I hosted our game at QA, once again. Our game has never been more well received at QA than this last QA, and we’re going again tomorrow night.

And with the work me and the rest of the team are going to be doing today, and up until QA tomorrow, I think we may have a fully finished project ready for QA.

4/8/19

I had nothing to worry about. Everything got turned in on time. I got done by 11 PM, got back to my dorm by 11:25, and was able to have a good night’s sleep.

I worry too much, sometimes. Everything will work out if I put in the effort, I keep forgetting that, because I expect the universe to pull the rug out from under me.