Work Pile Up!

My week has been and will continue to be filled with a pile up of assignments (mainly business). I've taken a huge chunk of my time this week working on business course assignments in order to make sure the group stays on top of things in this area as our current business lead has not been doing a very good job.

Looking at the project management assignment, I can say that our group is actually doing okay this year in terms of staying on schedule. Some of the things I had hoped would be done weren't really done but they're nothing major and I'm happy to report that everybody is doing what they are supposed to and we are currently on track when compared with the schedule originally created.

The remainder of my time (time not spent on business) has been spent on playing around with wildmagic and exploring everything it has to offer. This is for helping me with programming for our game, getting Dr. Hogue's assignments done, as well as preparing me for the midterm, which seems to be working out well. Below are some screenshots of what the homework assignment look like:

The first one is taught me some of the basics of working with wildmagic such as translating, zooming, and rotating, which have all been applied to a textured object. The second one is of a ball smashing into a wall of cubes/bricks and having knocked them down. After the workload dies down this week I'll be able to spend more time on programming some more stuff for our game. I'm currently considering spending more time on getting the xbox 360 controller to work with wildmagic but I guess that all depends on whether or not the team needs me to work on something else that is more important first.

October 17 Update

Not much to report for this week's GDW update. Milestone 2 is due today and the design is finished for the most part. Everybody has gone over the GDD and final changes / edits are being made at time of writing this post.

Since I will be working on mainly programming for this game, I have taken some time out to work on programming assignments and see how everything will tie in when it comes to programming the game. One program that has helped me a lot is 'Visual Assist X' (http://www.wholetomato.com). It makes the code THAT much more easier to work with and has allowed to me grasp the basics of working with the wild magic engine. I have been choosing questions from Dr. Hogue's homework assignments that I think will be most useful for programming our game.

Unfortunately I am not spending as much time on programming as I hope to due to midterms and other assignments from other courses piling up with due dates in the same week, however, once most of it has been taken care of I will definitely be working full time programming our game.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Happy Thanksgiving everyone!

The character model assignment from last week's post was extended by another week, so I've had some more time to work on it. Here's what it looks like now:

 

A big thank you goes out to all of my friends that helped me out every now and then throughout this here. It would probably still look like a poorly sculpted building right now if it weren't for all the help (for those that have seen the original version of this from when I first started).

As for programming I haven't really had the opportunity to get down and dirty and start programming like crazy for the game yet. I have however, been working on getting Xbox 360 controller support working. Fortunately, I've was able to find a good simple tutorial and was able to get it working. What still has to be done is to get it to work with the game / wild magic. I may or may not have the time to get to finishing that for next week but what's for sure is I'll be studying hard for midterms and also programming hard in order to finish some of Dr. Hogue's programming assignments before the midterm.

Also, now that design for the game is pretty much complete, I will try to plan a group meeting before the next milestone class so that everyone knows what the game is all about and what everyone is supposed to be doing.

Weekly Blog Post

I've been working hard at finishing a project management assignment this past week and now that it is done, I believe it will be a big help for the group. All the work has been broken down into individual tasks and each one has been assigned to group members and everybody knows what they are doing. On top of that, there is a nice schedule in MS Project to allow us to see where we should be on a particular day, which will help determine if we are ahead of schedule, on track, or falling behind. Hopefully this will help our group stay on top of things this semester.

Besides the assignment, I've been working on a character model for both an assignment and another game on the side. Here's a sneak peek of what he looks like right now:

The character is nowhere near complete and still needs a lot of patching up. This is only a sneak peek of the 15-20 hours that I've put into it this week. Hopefully by Wednesday it'll be complete and looking much better than what it is right now (when it's due).

Unfortunately, my GDW game doesn't have enough characters and only 2-3 people in the group are actually modelling a character that will be used in the final game. This is why I decided to go with modelling a character from my own game this semester.

Most of the design is starting to become finalized and hopefully programming work for the game will start soon.