Eleventh Week Semester 2

There isn't a ton to really say for this week, like I mentioned in the last blog but I thought I would just put something in anyway. Had to grind out the essay submission all of last week to get that in good enough. I actually quite enjoyed researching the different areas for my essay so hopefully that one comes back with a pass. Haven't  had much of a chance to do anything for the group project, been starting the grind on Flash which goes in at the end of this week. After that goes in though it will be the last bit of work before we submit this modules work. It shouldn't be anything too major though, just packaging everything up properly and submitting our project proposals on the crowd funding sites. I'll post up one last blog next week just before we hand everything in to properly go through what we got done, along with some final thoughts.

Tenth Week Semester 2

Went in to see Dr. John again this week but had to make it a short talk. Just pretty much went over how things were going with the project, letting him know we were on schedule with the project and should  be able to get a number of things on our disk for submission in a couple of weeks. We had put up some stuff on one of the crowd funding sites, to get the ball rolling and see exactly what they were like. It was pretty easy to understand and set up, we didn't publish it since we need to put up some screenshots and videos for the game. At this point we are hoping to have the finished game, design document, project proposal, crowd funding proposals, these blogs, end report, screen & vidcaps, game graphics to be on the disk for submission. If we are able to, maybe put on some extra things if we think of any. Really just to try put as much as we can think of and get finished in for submission.

The next couple of weeks are the hand in's for the other two modules so we probably won't be able to do a ton of work for this module until after the hand in for advanced flash production which is at the end of next week. After that we will come back to this and just tidy and finishing everything off and make ready for the submission when we next go into see Dr. John. I'm personally a bit unhappy with how the actual game has come along, I tried to learn some C# but definitely didn't take to it well enough and have had to rely heavily on tutorials to get working functionality. I'll let Dr. John know when we hand it in, but I think our documentation could be enough to get a pass. I've had to spend quite a bit of time using Flash lately and looking back on it, the project would of been much better if I had my experience using Flash earlier. I found Flash easier to understand and it would of helped me get into C#. Don't really know why but it felt much longer than it did from doing code in second year to coding the projects this semester and I've found it quite tough. Hopefully all goes well though.

Ninth Week Semester 2

This week we had a productive meeting with Dr. John. We talked about the actual submission for the module and some points in that which had changed. The biggest change was the removal of a formal presentation of the project and instead a proposal on a crowd funding site. My initial thoughts were positive, since I was very much not looking forward to a presentation of our project so this suited much better. I hadn't heard of these sites before but after Dr.John explained it to us it wasn't anything worse than I presumed. They are basically sites were people put up projects that require funding. Most of the sites have tools to propose a project nicely by including screenshots or videos and often including offering benefits to contributors. To me it definitely sounded like a good way for going about getting money for a project. Though in our case, we would definitely not be looking to actually get any funding from these kinds of sites since we have no plans of continuing with this project or any game related projects for at least a year or so. We were to include a couple of crowd funding proposals as part of our final submission, so we would look to make them up in the next couple of weeks. To ensure the unexpected doesn't happen we will set up our crowd funding projects fairly late on in the module and as soon as we get word on our marks we will remove the project proposals from the site to make sure nothing bad happens with people giving us money we don't plan to use.

Other than that we just went over a couple of other bits and pieces, we were really just advised to try work on as many different things that we could include in our final submission. So we will try think of as much as possible between the two of us. Our game is definitely quite weak, but we hope that we can make a good effort on the documentation side of things and be able to pass.

Eighth Week Semester 2

After talking to Dr.John last week and moving the group formally to a two man team, me and Scott talked about reorganizing ourselves for the last few weeks. It was definitely better suited that we worked as a group of two, since as mentioned before it was just myself coding (weakly at that.) the project. We talked a bit about the different bits and pieces we could throw together for our documentation, based off of how much of the game was finished at this point. It was mostly finished, it was quite simplistic but considering our time frame and the weak coding ability between the two of us it was pretty much as far along as it would really be getting. We should be going in again next week to see Dr. John so we can go over the different things we need to get done for submission then.

Seventh week Semester 2

Over the last week we were able to get in touch with Dr.John who was back from being ill. We agreed a day to go in and see him regarding our group project which was good since it had been a while since we had been in after the lectures finished for the essay class on Mondays. The first thing we talked about was about our overall group scenario, since we hadn't seen him in a while and there was some strange information we were made aware of. We told Dr.John what had been happening with, that we had made a good start on the project but hadn't heard from our other member Max in a number of weeks. He then let us know that he had actually received a design document for our game at some point. We let him know that we had never seen or been sent anything of the sort. We talked about a bunch of the options for the group, Dr.John suggested letting us use the design document he had produced and continuing separately. Me and Scott thought it would be better for us to just continue as a group of two and we would just make our own documentation. Scott would do the bulk of the documentation and we would split some of the asset creation that was still needed for the game. Personally I felt that since it was just me doing the coding for the game, and considering I'm really weak at it, that two people doing documentation and such for a game being worked on by just me was too many anyway. So myself and Scott will sort out what we should be doing for the last half of the semester.

Sixth week Semester 2

Been making a bit of progress in some areas and none in some others this past week. Got a bunch of assets to use for the game, things like different enemies and some UI components that we can put in. Also been working a bit on getting in different enemies, including some mini boss style ones that will have a health bar attached to them. I got the health bar functionality working in a separate program and will try to incorporate it into the games functionality soon. Haven't heard from Max and at this point things would be simpler if myself and Scott just worked on the project ourselves anyway. The scale of the project would be better suited to a two man team anyway since it is only myself doing the coding for the game. We have just kind of been making the game up as we go along and will probably continue in this style a bit longer but it would be good to get some draft design document stuff done just so we have some more to show for. Haven't been in to talk to Dr. John in a while either but I think he is sick at the moment, but when he gets better myself and Scott will go see him about splitting into a two. I suppose thins are kind of on track, if slightly behind but the sooner we get the group issue sorted then the faster we can get it finished. If it goes to plan and we do just split off into a group of two then we can just churn out a bunch of design stuff to fill out the project and then just add as much as possible into the program. At this point we're both just looking at this as the home straight to finishing University and we don't want any slip ups.

Fifth week Semester 2

Like I wrote at the end of last weeks blog this week was mainly focusing down a submission for a different module. Did spend a little bit of time on a tutorial I had been working on the previous week. Got about half way through the tutorial now and unfortunately hit a wall against an error I can't debug. Spent some time trying to sort it out but couldn't, so I decided to leave it til after this other submission finished. If I still can't sort it then I'll move onto something else and reference the parts I did get to work. Probably move onto one of the tutorials from Scotts College. Got the hand in sent away so I'll be starting the tutorial soon. Haven't heard from Max in a bit and we need to get the design fleshed out a good deal since I want to have a design document produced for submission as well as a couple of other bits and pieces like test logs. Possibly even a technical document. Some sort of storyboards and other similar things need to get done as well so sorting that out is pretty important as we reach the half way point of the module. I'll end this here since there really isn't too much more to say and I'll update again sometime next week.

Fourth week Semester 2

Not a ton to report in this past week, mostly just working on a couple of C# XNA tutorials to prepare for the project. I've not used C# before but did use C++ visual studio for the first two years of uni so the similar interface is making the transition easier which is a plus. The previous C++ and Java experience is definitely helping a lot since C# feels like a bit of a cross roads between the two. So far I feel this was definitely the best idea for starting over this semester. Unity went badly last semester and I don't think it would of ended much differently this time round either. Found quite a few different tutorials for a bunch of different game types in C#. I think there had recently been an update to XNA C# since a bunch of sites have had to update their tutorials. From what I gather though it isn't a huge update and the bulk of code in an older tutorial would still be useful. The main tutorial I'm working on just now is for an asteroids style game which I think is a good place to start since it has a few of the fundamental things we would look to do. I did an asteroids game in Java SE about a year ago so it's familiar territory and really just feeling out some differences in C#. I haven't looked into purchasing a book for C# but the level of the tutorials is quite good thus far so I might not need to get one. On top of the online tutorials there is the C# tutorials from Scotts College course which cover a bunch of different game types and he recommends. Though I think they are from the older version of C# so might need converted to the new version. We didn't have a meet up this week since there was no lecture on the Monday so we'll need to get in contact with Max sooner rather than later. The game design needs a lot of fleshing out as well still. Got a hand in for next week for a different module so will probably focus that down next week and pick this back up after that.

Third week Semester 2

Following on from the previous week, we mostly went away to have a think about what the design of our game was actually going to be. I have always been pretty impartial to what the game designs for projects have been since I normally do coding and have always been happy with what is suggested. The previous semesters game plan was to develop a platformer so we discussed sticking with a platformer and we all agreed we would be happy to make one but thought we should at least explore some of our other options. Whilst thinking about what game to make during the week I talked a bit to my brother about what type of game we definitely did not want to do. The one that we definitely didn't want to do was a fighting game, since we had previously attempted one in a previous project and found it to be quite a difficult style of game to implement that wouldn't be realistic in our time frame. Also making a fighting game would need a lot of sprites which nobody in the group excels at so that would make things much harder as well. Other than a fighting game the only other type of game I would prefer not to make was an FPS since I've never looked into making one before and would prefer to do it on something were I'll have a bit of a background on.

During the next meeting we shared our thoughts on the game design and I basically made the points I previously explained about not developing a fighting or FPS game. Both the other guys were fine with that and agreed we wouldn't do those two. Much like the previous week, the general consensus was that nobody was very opinionated about what we should make more that we just agreed we needed to do something. Scott suggested working on a top down bullet hell game which appealed to all of us, it was something a little different and myself and Max hadn't thought of that. After a bit of discussion we decided that though it was an interesting idea, nobody really had any idea how to go about making the complicated patterns and sprite management that would be required. So we worked it back a little to what we could handle and agreed that a top down wave defense style space shooter would be doable. Since we weren't considering anything else and agreed we should just get started on something we agreed to work on this idea as the game project. We didn't really set any specific goals for the following week, I said I would look into C# tutorials and maybe look for some that would help us with some of the techniques we would need to implement for our game.

Second week Semester 2

This week we had a group meeting after the lecture to primarily decide on what platform we where going to develop our project on for this semester. Max said since myself and Scott would be doing the bulk of the coding for the project that the platform was mostly up to us and he was easy on what we would pick. Over the last few days we looked mostly into C# XNA studio for our development environment. It checked a lot of boxes for us and came out as the strongest candidate. It was fairly familiar to Scott, who has previous projects and a bunch of resources from College that we could use to start from. I personally thought it looked ideal and fairly similar to C++ so I will hopefully get to grips with it to some degree fairly quickly. As for the other possible candidates I personally don't like Java and am happy to not touch it again for some time. HTML5 and Android where the other two and even though I've heard quite a bit about them as being the up and coming platforms that would be worth while getting into. Myself and Scott are not looking to pursue a career in programming and having to put in more work to learn a completely new platform this late in the game is not something we want to do or see as being worth while. So C# comes as something fairly new but familiar enough that we won't have to spend a long time just learning how it works and instead just make the project on the fly.

Having decided on our platform we began to talk about what type of game we would actually develop for the project. Myself and Scott are of the position that neither of us are particularly bothered about what kind of game we make. Since we have only ever really done programming, and game design doesn't particularly interest us. So we let Max know that the game design was pretty much up to him, the only prerequisite being that it isn't something crazy ambitious considering our timescale. He didn't really jump to the chance for designing an entire game and he is also very easy going in terms of what we make. So I suppose our only real problem is that nobody is actually bothered about what we make. We talked about some very unspecific game ideas but never got anything really solid. So we agreed to come up with something each for the following week and would work on just getting familiar with C# XNA over the week.

First week Semester 2

After the Christmas break and starting back the second semester our group split into two due to the way things went in the previous weeks. Myself, Scott and Max are now in a three man group which at this point hasn't been named and are going to work on a fresh project this semester. We had a brief catchup with Max and had a conversation with Dr John about the plans for this semester. After briefly talking about the problems from the last semester we began discussing options for the project this semester. We agreed that the Unity platform that was promoted quite a lot the previous semester and was originally the target platform was not best suited for our time scale. As well as being a little bit to hands on for what we would realistically be looking to implement. We talked about some alternative platforms and development tools to use. A bunch of options were brought up and we were to have a think about what we would use for the following week. The main options being C# XNA, HTML5, Java SE/ME, or possibly something with Android. There were mixed incentives to use each, ranging from having experience in some (Java, and limited experience in C#) to up and coming platforms like HTML5 that could be useful to learn about. We talked a bit about each and decided we would look into each of them for the following week and then agree on which to use. As well as thinking up some ideas for exactly what to develop.

Personally I see C# being our best option. I personally have never used it but Scott used it for a few projects in college and recommended it. I remember seeing a few of the projects he and some of others in his class made and it looks ideal for what we could make in a semester. I did C++ for my first two years in University and Java the past two years so C# should be fairly in my comfort zone to some degree so I'm not to worried about using it as a coding language. Between myself and Scott I think we will have the code side of the project fairly well covered. Max is going to take more of a design role for the project but we will discuss this a bit more extensively over the next couple of weeks. For now it's just finding some ground to get started on.