Alternalien Development Part 3: Market Value

We did an exercise today where we came up with all the possible features that would go into this game.  It was everything from the high concept of platforming to a single floor tile.  We were then given Monopoly money to assign what each of us thought the value of that feature was.  The highest was the concept of movement as a basic need with a score of 3161.

After we returned from that, we immediately got into planning for the first sprint with three teams.  Two were designing two arctic levels, while my team was completely animating the Crusher.  Our first sprint begins next week.

Alternalien Development Part 2: The Cave continued

After sleeping on the problem of huge, detailed matte backgrounds.  I came up with a solution that I brought to the PO.  Instead of using painting for the backgrounds, I suggested we use tiled backgrounds.  This is one I made for the Base levels.

This is much better for a few reasons.  It allows for a lot more variety, instead of relying of the artists to take hours to make three or four backgrounds, the designers can make their own custom backgrounds.  Plus, it stylistically fits in with the art style; simple and minimilistic.  The PO liked this idea and has now tasked the art team with making tilesets for all four biomes.

Alternalien Development Part 1: Jump Free

We continued to plan for Sprint 1 by doing planning poker.  Planning poker is an agile technique that uses numbers in the Fibonacci sequence to give effort scores to various features.  Being the Art Lead, I put all the various sprite an backgrounds and we voted on their values.  Usually, floor tiles take the least amount of effort, while characters and backgrounds take significantly more.

These are some example character sprites that took around 30 min - 1 hour work.  They may not look like much, but most of the work went into tweaking them just right.

CSG 115 Final

Another semester ends with a peer review.  While I think most of my team did relatively well for their skill set, I don't think I was a very good product owner.  If I hadn't taken so long to complete the donut game, I could have allocated my time to the other games.  I was too nervous during the pitch and stayed quiet when questioned about the why we used the donuts.

Cops 4 Kidz Part 12: The Pitch

We pitched Cops 4 Kidz today to an audience to an audience made up of the capstone class.  We had barely anything to show off, but we did have one mini-game, the Tower of Hanoi Donut Rescue game.  One of the animation ranted about why we chose donuts in order to rescue the cat, there was a story behind the donuts, in that we thought it was a safer alternative to stacking different sized police officers.

At any rate, we did do more than the other team in terms of content, but neither did accomplished much.  I think our team suffered a lot from the fact that much of our team left throughout the semester.  And of those who stayed, weren't skilled enough to add all the things I wanted to add.

Cops 4 Kidz Part 11: Clever Title 2: The Sequel

We've implemented the Cat Rescue game as best we could, working with the previous team's scripts.  We don't actually have a win screen that gives the player a card, but we do have a back button if they want to exit the game.
The programmer of the team working on the First Aid kit game hasn't showed up for the past few weeks, so I've started to work towards getting a semblance of that mini-game done for next week.  I did manage to get a scene together to drag and drop, but none of the models I was using had any textures or materials, so we'll have to wait a little while before I can get the new models into the scene.

Cops 4 Kidz Part 10: Clever Title

We've begun to implement the cat rescue game into the main build.  I put a tree with the cat sprite on the main street.  Luckily, it wasn't difficult to to implement the code to start the game from the main title screen.  However, it is difficult getting the win screen to pop up once you actually win the game.  The other team didn't really comment on any of their codes, so it's difficult to figure out their thought process.  Putting yourself in the mind of the previous team is not an easy task.