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.