—- Week 9 —-

Group Work

This week was when the groups production really took a backwards turn. I had provided the asset files and the other artists in the group had done likewise. However, during this period our groups programmer had disappeared. Sadly, they were the only group member with the code files so even if I could have assisted with coding (which in truth I couldn’t) I wouldn’t have been able to.

Individual work

I was a little stuck in terms of what to do during this week. There were no lectures due to the Easter break and so I had to try to do something to contribute. I wanted to do something that would help the groups programmer should he work on a different schedule to us. Following this line of thought I decided to play the current build of the game and provide a full organised breakdown of the bugs and glitches I encountered.

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I was worried at this point that the groups schedule had put to much emphasis on our sole coder to deliver by deadline day. Honestly, this experience has shown how easy it is to fall into the ‘crunch’ mindset you hear of so often in the industry. I wanted to give a well-structured report where I described the bug encountered, and where it is located in the game world. A number to represent how sever the bugs are in my opinion and the steps taken to encounter the bug so that the programmer can see it for himself.

—- Week 10 —-

I’ll place both week 9 and week 10’s progress together as they were very similar. Again, as this was during Easter, I hadn’t been able to consult with Stuart about what artists should do once they had in essence finished their assignments. The groups programmer did reappear towards the end of this week and provided a new build. I did playtest this and updated the bug report to follow. There wasn’t any that needed to be removed however as most bugs found in build 3.0 were also present in build 4.0.

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In this build the programmer had added my environment, however during my playtest I found the scale to be way too large for the player. In truth I don’t know why this was the case as I had used the environment walls and floorplan provided to me by the group. Also, there was a strange sheen to the environment with the lighting used in the game. This could perhaps have been fixed however by this point of the games development I made it clear to the group that we shouldn’t be focused on adding additional rooms to the game world but instead adding to the great hall and foyer already in place.

After this playtest I’ll admit I grew a sense of frustration with the production state. During the first month or so I would have said we were a group that was somewhat ahead of the rest of the groups in terms of development. However, some time over Easter I think we fell way behind with our coding. I did try reaching out to our coder through the groups communication channels however didn’t receive a response.