Well.... What an experience. Haven't kept to blogging every week, which which we are supposed to do, but it has been a roller-coaster ride tbh and I think I need to conclude this chapter and start again...
We have concluded the first part of the pre-production phase with culminated in the presentation of the work done so far on Monday to the rest of the group (more of that later)
The concept for our game has developed well through the weeks, with David and Max taking the lead on the design elements and documentation. Harry has taken the lead on the Art side of things as is happily sketching and painting away. As the lead programmer for the project, my personal goal to to get a list of mechanics that I could put together in the prototype needed for this first milestone presentation. We decided quite early on about the basic mechanics, walking, jumping, climbing etc. But also had more specific mechanics to deal with, like match lighting, darkness detection and the like.
As we had had the first term being introduced to Unity, I was glad to have the chance to go back to basics and go over building the basic mechanics again. This was however quite a struggle to be honest. Although, Unity is very good at throwing a game together quickly, when it comes to the C# scripting - It just doesn't do what you expect it to do. As a programmer, I understand C# but the way Unity implements it is different and it is very frustrating to begin with. This slowed me down no end and there is a lot of attempted code that is now just commented out. I wanted to keep it though so I knew next time - Don't do it this way !!!
There have been many discussions between me and the other programmers in the other teams on how to achieve things which usually ended up in head banging walls. This was actually reassuring that they were having the same problems and it wasn't me just being thick ;-)
It was so good when it was the programming tutors, Martin, turn to take us for the lesson as we can just have so many questions for him now. I told him this would happen at the beginning of the project :)
Anyway, once I'd got to grips with the annoyances of Unity, I started cracking on through the list of mechanics. The basic ones not so much of a problem. A couple of them caused a few issues such as throwing as it used gravity but managed it eventually. Collisions have been a constant bane of my life though, especially with the light/darkness element. Once I discovered that you have to use sub-objects and have a different collider on each of them instead of the main object, each with their own parameters / scripts etc, this was a eureka moment. Things started to fall into place from then on.
I have also been trying to put these different assets/mechanics into prefabs so that it is going to be easier later on for other people to pick the level design and just plonk the elements in where they needed them.
In the final week, we went into the crunch period. I put the hours in and made sure that we would have a workable demo for presentation with as many of the mechanics in as possible. I then sat back and waited for the day of the presentation on the Monday. I'd took the afternoon off work to go in college early to meet the other guys and get all the stuff together for printing and handing in....
This is where everything kinda went wrong.....
When we all got together at college, it became very clear that a lot of the documentation was not ready and there was quite a lot of work to make this ready. We had basically not kept our eye on the ball and just assumed each other had done all the necessary work we'd each been allocated without actually checking as much as we should have. The project management had gone out of the window basically..... At this point panic mode set in for me..... We had to get the documentation together, take it to the printers, get it bound, copy it all on to a cd. All this is time for hand in at 7pm when the presentation was meant to start.
The other teams were in the same boat but they all managed to get to the printers and back again before 7 (or maybe a little after 7). Us on the other hand didn't manage to leave for the printers until 7.20pm. Already late..... and I don't do late...... We ran to the printers and kept getting messages that the class wasn't going to start before we got back, even more pressure !!!!!
I went into meltdown.... The documents were the wrong size for the printers, they were in the wrong format, I was kicking myself as I stupidly had forgotten to bring my laptop (which has all the software for sorting this kinda stuff out), we hadn't really had any time prepare any presentation. Earlier that week, I had daydreamed at work about the presentation with proper projected videos and music etc.... Not a chance in reality...
We were last to do the presentation and I was not in the right frame of mind at this point and felt that we had had to just wing it, it was bad...... I didn't really do anything apart from demo the prototype and just left them to it. Not me at all... :(
I just bit my lip, kept quiet, made sure all the docs were copied to the CD for hand in and then left. Ben did say me to calm down on my way out saying it was all done now and I could relax... He could obviously see my anger and disappointment. I stormed off home, chatted to my mate on Facebook (vented my anger more like) then went to bed..... Worst mood ever :(
To be honest, I am as guilty as the other guys on the team for letting this happen but perhaps I should have known better as I work in team project environments in my day job. This is definitely a lack of communication problem.... so we are having a team meeting on Wednesday..... THIS IS NEVER HAPPENING AGAIN.....!!!!!!
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