Game Project Design Journal

[teresaohanlon]

Week 14 the dreaded pitch week

"Everything that can go wrong, will go wrong in the worst possible way and at the worst possible time" (Murphy's Law)

This has been a nightmare week after Friday's disastrous moot pitch. I wanted to sink into the floor when it was being presented. But I digress, during this final week we had a few people who were a complete no show and no communication. We also had found out that people who were assigned to do specific tasks hadn't completed them this effectively caused a huge issue with our work load as we now had to complete our own work and then I also had to redistribute the work load around all the other member's who were there and about to do it. 

Pulling extraordinarily long hours on the Wednesday, Thursday and Friday right up until presentation time we managed to get it together. 

The design document, the project plan and all the deliverables. 

After everything that has happened or hasn't happened this week I swear has aged me another 5 years. (I will not hit 40 yet. silly group work)

Well it's finally pitched and we have taken the criticism on the chin and hopefully we come up with a better game experience for it. 

After the massive amount of work that we  have completed I'm actually looking forward to a week's break before hitting the exam cram. 

[teresaohanlon]

Week 13

Working through moot pitch's and how we want things laid out and worked out to present having issues with getting people to agree on what is wanted to be presented and how they want it displayed within power point.

Some members are wanting to have a complete working prototype within unity on the tablets while others want it done via a power point so that our idea's are accurately projected  

The article that Will sent out this week is good old common sense with a refreshing touch. One of the main few points I see here are the be selective about who you work with. While at university I have yet to have the "perfect"  group experience. While I have come close on this project there have been some people who simply shouldn't be doing a project on this scale. 

There have also been plenty of time over recent weeks were it is clear that people have to separate themselves from their "ideas" 

[teresaohanlon]

Week 12

During this week we decided to take a complete redesign to the RTS  game. We weren't happy as to how it was going so we pulled it back to the drawing board. We are pretty sure we have it where we want it now but that has taken up quite a lot of time as we are now in the final parts of the sprint.

One of the main frustrations within the group at the moment is the lack of communication from a couple of members and the lack of any type of action from Jamie is causing major problems within the group dynamics.

Some of the team members are now being openly aggressive towards Jamie given his complete lack of interest. At least once this week team members needed to walk out of the lab before tempers got the better of them.  

[teresaohanlon]

Week 11

Start to rapidly increase our unity skills sets. 

Work on the Game design document and Game project plan and the design iteration is being revised again. We this week have gone to great lengths to get Jamie to do something, anything at all and it hasn't happened. The group is over it and they are sick and tired of him not pulling his weight. 

Also fallen on my face with a nasty head cold thanks to my kids for sharing. 

Was working from home on Wednesday.

Back in the lab on Friday. 

 The adding juice to your presentation. The old saying first impressions count.  We need to really seriously look at feedback and how to make this game a more immersive experience for the player. 

Adding in the elephant is a good way of creating the emotional connection but we need to find a good balance with the sound design. 

[teresaohanlon]

Week 10

We met with Thai national to help answer some of our burning demographic questions. She was enormously helpful and we have since done another complete design iteration bye bye baby elephant. Hello Mr Water Buffalo or Beefalo as we are affectionately calling him at the moment.  

We also had the presentation with Marcus Watson on using simulations and games for real world training. That was very interesting and I think greatly helpful to looking at where we want to position this CABI game. 

With out presentation this week we showcased one of our unity builds. 

[teresaohanlon]

Week 9

Panic mode ensured this week until we were advised that we can push our viability presentation back to week 11.  Main focus this week was getting CSI to a viable state without the alchemy addition. 

Paul Hyland popped in to pay a visit due to some "management' issues with Jamie and Takumi. 

Desk Crit this week was Ross's 1st look at the game and from the general tone of the feedback he was somewhat surprised by what we had come up with. 

Still no show from Takumi and no communication. Jamie was asked several times to complete very simple tasks finding a few farm sound bytes and he refused to work instead choosing to play his phone while everyone else worked. 

Takumi finally advised he was unavailable due to his father's boating accident. 3 May.

Looking to narrow the demographic market to a more defined area than SE Asian market. We feel its still too broad so we approached CABI to narrow this down we are hoping for either Thailand (our current 1st choice) or Malaysia. (We found that Malaysia could be difficult due to its high Muslim population)

Started our sprint 3 weekly stand ups and a fortnightly sprint cycle. Stand ups are going to be held on Monday, Wednesday and Friday's. Mondays are via Skype and those that cant get onto Skype will post on either Facebook or assembla. 

Also commenced further paper prototyping. 

We were also asked to review the farm defenders game and how it links to any of the learning objectives. (of which it didn't)

[teresaohanlon]

Week 8

Confirmed that we will be using Unity as the game engine due to the ability to easily scale GUI type games. 

This was also the week were we started to have team problems with Takumi. 

Further design iterations and working through paper prototyping - Personally I disagreed with one of the designs as I firmly believed it was too complicated. Working through rough outlines for all 4 games but 2 are looking very solid and are starting to met our learning objectives. 

- Tim's initial idea with the mini games (think wariowares type)

- Val's CSI game with the alchemy twist.

- Ngui was choosen to the all the gui work in as its has nice and clean tools for creating complex gui's

Desk crit Finally coming up with the elevator pitch for those 2 game and taking on board some quite constructive feedback.

We also went through a couple of hours about NGUI with Josh for those that have never touched the engine before it was exceedingly valuable  

[teresaohanlon]

Week 7

Looking over the google playstore and checking the API and what the upload/specification are for any app to be considered for inclusion. 

Agreed to work full days on Wednesdays and Fridays in our P Block lab. 

Started tossing around game ideas and fleshing out iterations that are taking some of the learning objectives into account.  The group is currently working on 4 different games and looking at where we can improve on them .

Meeting today with Brian - Professor of entomology (insect guy) from Kansas State University. Looking deeply into the diagnostic process, also looking into how plant doctors focus on achieving their outcomes. 

Full day in the lab prior to desk crit. After our meeting with Brian we are back to the drawing board to re- iterate through our designs prior to our desk crit. 

[teresaohanlon]

Mid Semester week and Week 6

Mid semester week and Week 6 (2 weeks for this one).

Mid Semester Break

Meeting on the 3rd of April with Peta, Josh and Jonathan. 

One of the tasks to be completed is to list everything we know about both fiscal the ferret and everything we know about plant bio security. 

We also had a chat with Josh about looking at finding a framework for pedagogical outcomes and how and where to work out the learning objectives we want to put into the game. 

Group skype setup

Google drive setup

Start to compile a list of demographic questions that we think are relevant for Mike Thompson. 

Week 6 

Meeting with Mike Thompson - Plant Bio security expert and stakeholder with CABI.

Working through Project plan part A. Starting to upload meeting notes in google drive. 

First Friday Desk crit for our group. 

Will and Michael. 

Important items to note for next time.  

- We must start making decisions as we are weeks behind and need to make choices. We can no longer afford to wait for CABI to respond with what they want. 

Decisions made. 

- Fiscal the Ferret is dead

- We will be using a Agile Scrum Methodology

- we will be using the assembla tool set 

- 3 person management team  - Tim, Teresa and Daniel 

- Look at scrum and research roles

create Assembla account for all team members to complete. 

Project Plan review. 

2 days of watching videos and playing around in assembla and I still find that damn think annoying to use (I'd almost be happy to go back to the days of Queztal Help desk software. )

[teresaohanlon]

Week 5

After having meet with Peta, Josh and the rest of the group, Most of us have decided that we want to work on the Fiscal project given that it seams more game orientated than the CABI Project. While the CABI project does have some fantastic merits I think ultimately it will be harder to get a true game feeling out of it than fiscal. 

That being said we have agreed to meet with Johnathon (The guy from Bondi Labs) with regard to the CABI project. Peta said he's very engaging and makes it sound like a really good option.  I'll definitely be keeping an open mind about it but we'll see. 

We are also looking for more information in regards to the fiscal the ferret projects for QPS.

I have also taken a look through the CABI websites and done a little background research as to who they are. In all honesty I think I like the idea of helping 3rd world countries to overcome crop issues and help reduce world poverty. To me that seems like a very worthwhile cause and one that i would be happy to leave the world knowing that I had contributed just a tiny little bit to that cause. 

Work completed

- multiple meetings with various stakeholders. 

- trying to figure out how to split the groups up

-huge amount of background reading

[teresaohanlon]

Week 4

This week just after the game idea's being presented in the first hour. Peta Wyeth popped in to talk to the group about a serious game project. 

After hearing what she had to say about these projects she had me hooked and I fired off a quick email to her in regard to getting into the "serious games group" 

a meeting was also arranged so that all parties could get together and have a look at each project to figure out which one we wanted to do.

Tasks completed. 

- Fired off several emails to other groups with regard to joining their teams. (only ever got one response back).

- Joined the serious game group.

- Started a series of meetings with regard to the projects. 

[teresaohanlon]

Week 3

After sitting through about 4 hours of presentations from groups on Friday I have approached a couple of teams.1 team wasn't interested and I'm still waiting to hear back from the 2nd group. 

Still working on a few other game ideas.

[teresaohanlon]

Week 2

Working on my skill set presentation and feeling very overwhelmed with the presentation and the abilities of some of the other students. 

Having done up my skills presentation I figure my best bet is in the realm of project management given my background. 

I was about to actually pull the plug on this unit as I felt completely and utterly under prepared to face it but Michael managed to talk me into giving it a go. 

[teresaohanlon]

Week 1 Lecture 1

Journal created and powerpoint started.

I have to admit the size of this unit scares the s**t out of me.