Week 10 - Jamie Was Too Scared!

(During the talk, Jamie was to display this picture for the Perfect End to the presentation. But reached an 'it's over, just sit down' mentality. For shame! As a result, I have posted it here to ensure the picture isn't going to feel overly rejected.)

Good golly, the snow! The snow, it's everywhere! Ensuring I don't slip and become concussed was priority one of the day for me. Huge success. Other's priority was to ensure concussion and avoid the presentation, but seems they failed, thus we got on with it.

Not too much to say, really, I feel the practice paid off rather well, as we said everything we wanted to say, didn't really stumble over our words and even got a nice wee team picture!

Meanwhile!

We'd already gotten a few responses to the questionnaire I'd fired out, though some of them went out as a Word document before I had finished the Google Documents version, which I wasn't aware had the option of being able to have the form embedded in an email. As a result, I filled about 5 or 6 out into the Google Documents version before moving on to overseeing Jonny and Euan's progress with Blender and Chris' progress with map building in Unity for the prototype.

Things seemed to be going rather well, but uneventfully in general, as the rest of the week was spent on more Java. Actually getting a bit panicy about it, as I'm not the strongest coder in the world, thus a bit impatient that there's not more time to spend on coding to create a more room for errors.

Week 9 - Huzzah For Busy!

(Rather random, unrelated really to the week, but was actually a rather enjoyable week none-the-less. Perhaps next week's blog will explain more, depending on Jamie's willingness to go through with a joke; will explain next time if he doesn't!)

Rather a busy week for us all this time around! Having decided that our design document is to be in for this week, we set about trying to create a greater level of presentability to it, mainly just fixing the formatting of the text and adding in some of Jonny's finalised concept art. And yet, despite last year's documents being hosted on Wikispaces, I had forgotten what a struggle it can be to format the site; so very counter-productive and frustrating it can be to change a font size!

Another thing that Jamie and I got onto this week, especially, was the scripting of Unity. We'd been doing tutorials to an extent up until this point, but we were looking to get the basis of our prototype done, allowing for the other three to properly input their assets.

After being able to find a basic model (which would actually be used just in the prototype, thinking about it, it's a very, very basic model of a human after all), we set up camera and movement controls, basic rules of the world like collision detection with fencing (so people don't fall off the side of the map), regulating the angle of an incline the player could scale, and, awaiting Jonny's assets, the ability of switch between the different models for the different paths.

Finally this week, we were preparing for the talk we have to give next week on our progress and planning for the project. Jamie had already made up a rather spiffy Powerpoint presentation, so from that we went over what we would be saying, which was rather a nice thing to do, because thinking about it sometimes it does feel like we could be doing more, so sometimes it's good to be able to look back around this time before the big panic mode comes along and remind ourselves we've done a lot.

So when Friday came along, the design document looked to be in a rather nice, appealing layout, one we'd be willing to submit. Now, how to do that? Post it on one of John's Wikispaces? If so, which one of the half-dozen? Wait, we email him it? Oh, phew, good, panic over ...

Week 8 - We Need To Do What Now?

(Watched Haruhi Suzumiya this week and while I did rather enjoy most of it, I must agree with others when they say the series of episodes called Endless Eight, which featured a time loop with a scant level of plot progression across all of them, was rather naff.)

This leads me to a thought at the moment: Haruhi felt that there was something key missing from summer that forced the time loop and I have to wonder if perhaps myself, and others in the group from Kitsune, are feeling a bit of burn-out after not really having a holiday over the summer period. It shows itself most in Java, where I find it difficult to engage with the coding side. Still, though, the projects do tick on ...

And Derek this week made sure of it. We were asked for self-imposed deadlines for our key pieces of this module's coursework and reminded us that, actually, we need a marketing analysis done. Fortunately, this is where I have some experience; I had organised one from my group from the second year design project.

Having originally created an updated version of the previous questionnaire I had, I spoke to Gordon Bailey who recommended the functionality of Google Documents, especially the ability to automatically generate graphs, which would definitely come in handy; the questionnaire has a variety of differing question types and allows for multiple choices to select.

We also spent more time fleshing out our design document and technical document on the Wikispaces page, adding more detail to the characters and any win / lose conditions.

You know, I honestly didn't notice until this point that this is the eighth week's blog post as well ...

Week 7 - Phil Fulfils His Debt Obligations

(He's a very lucky penguin. That is all.)

This was a rather slow week for us all; out time was focused a bit more on Alistair McMonnies' module than the other two, which means that I spent most of the time on this module going over the extra concept art Jonny had done, checking any updated concepts and new monster designs.

I also helped set up and add some of the documentation to a new Wikispaces website we will use for our group's submissions.

Now, if you excuse me, I have to watch more Saki, who's super-power seems to be extendo-arms and a left eye you could cook a Sunday breakfast on.