Games Project Journal

Scrum

After planning this sprint so rigidly, keeping on target and to the burndown has been fairly simple. However the spanner I mentioned last week has grown into a very large wrench and is causing some fairly bad delays.

So basically Jason went looking into how to implement Unity Analytics and very quickly found that all the cool shiny features were locked firmly to Unity Pro, which is about €150 a month. I don't mind spending a little on the project here and there but that's bit much for two weeks of data. I asked Jason to email Niall and get his input, seeing as he was the one most interested in Analytics. Good news is he said he would email Unity himself and see could he wrangle a trial license for us. Bad news is it's been over at week at the time of writing this and we still have no news. The data we'd gather with pro would be incredibly useful, but it's not worth a whole lot to us if we get access to it too late to implement any of it.

Level Design

So I'm done. I finished up rebuilding the gravity room today, based on some wind tunnels and nasa images I found, and that's all of my modelling, unwrapping and texturing for the project at a close, minus any issues that might pop up between now and the expo. I enjoyed most of the work, but I'd be lying if I said I wasn't going to take a nice long break away from any UV maps for awhile...

To finish....

I'm pretty sure this is my last journal entry, don't much see the point in doing any more if the final I-CA is due Monday. It's definitely been a stressful year (whatever I mentioned about taking a break from UV maps is 10 fold as far as Scrumwise goes) but for all the late nights, hours spent in front of PC wondering why my normal maps break or politely telling people to get the lead out and catch up on scrum, I'm content in that when I look at the final product it was all worth it. Well, nearly all worth it. Team is just shy of 1000 hours of logged work on scrum and that's a whole lot of time I'm never getting back. I just want to sit and home and play with my Lego...

Scrum

The team worked well this week, keeping ahead of the burndown almost all week.

We planned out the next sprint more rigidly than usual, setting strict deadlines for when certain tasks needed to be finished so others could start. The goal here was to get the game built and deployed as early as possible so we could get as much feedback as possible. In regards to this we've had both a spanner thrown in the works and some big bonuses.

For the spanner, our plans for deployment were delayed as the panel strongly suggested we implement Unity Analytics rather than getting user feedback through a survey. While I don't like the extra work they're probably right.

For the bonus, we've been given an extra sprint to work with which negates the pressure implementing Unity Analytics put us under.

Level Design

Not much to report here. Like I mentioned in my previous journal I worked ahead on my tasks so by this week I really only had one task left, which was re-texturing the broken wall sections. This was fairly simple once I stuck to the same process I laid out in my previous journal for texturing the walls.

By the end of this sprint we'll be on the homestretch to completing the project, just a few tweaks here and there and as much user testing as we can cram in. To be honest I'm not sure what to even do with myself after this, I think I'll go mad with all the free time.

Scrum

We've moved into the final release and I think overall the team is in a really good place. We don't have too many outstanding issues to be fixed in the game and the panel thinks we're doing really well. Enda's comment on our presentation being "close to perfection" has been a massive boost to the teams moral.

As a result of our progress I've made the decision to reduce the workload for the final release, giving my team time to work on their own personal assignments. At this I think it would be better for all of us to focus on our own personal work to raise our respective GPA's. Pumping all our time into the project that we're already getting firsts in won't be that useful to us in the long run.

While I have mentioned in the past that we've seen an improvement in our velocity with the quarantine I would rather stick with our usual 10 hours each a week. The tasks we're currently working on are important and I'd rather be sure we do a smaller amount of work well than a larger amount of work poorly to hit a deadline. This can be seen in our burndown during sprint 13. We've been on target or ahead of schedule all week.

To sum up, we're ahead, we're doing well and I wanted to take some pressure off the team this release. They've earned the break.

Level Design

I've had a burst of motivation this week, getting almost my full sprints worth of work done in the first week. I finally got to tidy up some issues that have been bothering me for awhile, including:

1. Fixing the tiling on the interior wall textures so that the now line up correctly and have the same colour.
2. Extending the interior walls to get rid of the extension pieces I had to tack on to raise the ceiling height from 3-4 meters.
3. Rebuilt to creature lab entirely.

To fix the wall texturing I gave the part of the wall with the tiling it's own UV map, which meant i could get them to the same scale and position every time (because they're all the same width, ie: 2m). This meant that when I brought it into substance I could just drag and drop the tiled material and didn't have to do any playing about with the scaling.

The wall extensions were a problem early on. Originally I planned to have the ceiling 3 meters high but once I started adding the ceiling pipes this became too low. The original solution was to create panels what we 1 meter tall by 2 meters wide that could be attached to the top of the walls to increase their height. This worked but it left an obvious seem and it was extra work to try and align the tiled texture. What I did to fix this was simply extend the height of the wall in max when I was creating new UV maps for them for the new tiling texture. This meant that there was no seam and less models to have to work through. Less models is less work and thats always a good thing.

For the creature lab I completely redesigned it, taking inspiration from "Doom" (2016). I modeled some large containment vats I could put creatures in, then creature some broken vats to make it look like the creatures had escaped, hinting at what caused the downfall of the Thinking City. With more of a focus on the story instead of just getting it done i think the room looks far better now than it did before.

I still have to rebuild the gravity room and right now I'm completely stumped for ideas, but that's a problem for another day.

Scrum

While we veered off a bit near the end of the week, the burn-down hasn't been too bad. It looks like increasing the workload was the right call but we'll see how that plays out over next week. Despite being ahead on work already I did allocate some extra work to myself and Jason. Initially I had assume that each team member should have the same amount of work done during the release however, after talking with John, I was told that there's no reason to waste time just to keep everyone equal. If I have more time available to work it stands to reason that I should do more work. Make the game as good as it can be for the release.

We've also started some presentation practice. I opted not to schedule this in the sprint just because I have no clue how much practice we'll do. Similar to the last release we're just practicing whenever we get time so estimating how long it'll take is impossible.

Level Design

With the extra time available to me I have been touching up parts of the level and tying up loose ends where they appear. I've finally replaced and textured the broken wall sections, which haven't been touched since before we moved to VR. I've also replaced the interior wall textures with a tiled normal map to give the appearance of more detail after some long standing criticism that the interior walls were too plain.

This has caused me some frustration as lining up the tiling on the walls in a nightmare. I have to make a change to it's position in substance, export then import into Unity, check to see if it lines up and rinse and repeat until the textures are aligned. At this staged I've kinda settled that I just can't get it perfect without pouring too much time into it.

There's also a frustrating visual issue where some of these interior walls appear darker than others, despite using the same material setup in substance. Ill have to just log this as an issue on git and leave it till post production to fix. I've too much other work at the moment to spend hours retexturing all these walls from scratch.

Scrum

After veering off last week we never really managed to get the scrum back on track this week, chasing our tails till it ended. I did end up having to pull some work from this sprint to be completed next sprint. I'm not happy about that but there isn't much I can do about that. We did get some solace in a hefty extension of our entrepreneurship assignment deadline, pushing it out past the next team project deadline. God bless Kilian Logan for that one.

Scrum - Covid 19

So we final got the word the college is shutting down as we go into quarantine. Probably for the best I say. At first I was worried it was going to slow us down but to be honest this will probably give us much more time to get more work done, Cutting out class and commute time will be a big bonus to our productivity. We re-planned the last sprint of the release, significantly increasing the workload by around 25%.

Overall the whole quarantine shouldn't have too much of an effect on our work, we do very little in person anyway. Only downside is that without a VR headset i can actually play the level properly for myself.

Level Design

I built the creature and gravity labs this week. Both were fairly straight forward. I grabbed a 3rd party asset fro the center if the creature lab that Jason had in an asset pack from months ago and retextured it to make it look more organic and graphic. I also build some test tube samples with organic growth inside them. I was initially worried about how these would turn out as Most of the work I've done in MAX has been mechanical objects but it turns out there's basically a button to fix my problem. Open subdivision (or Turbosmooth in MAX terms) significantly increases the smoothness and poly count of an object, creating the natural look I wanted. You learn something new every day.