Alternalien Planning Part 16: Final Touch Ups

This week is dedicated to all the things we have to do to polish up the game.  All the little touch ups and tweaks we have to put in to smooth out the little bumps.  This includes small bugs or other minor issues that keep the game from running as easy as possibly.  They're not game ending bugs, but are big enough for the player to notice.

Alternalien Planning Part 15: The Intro Sequence

The final week for getting things into the build has begun.  After adding a few last minute items to on deck and doing the planning power for them, I got started on an animated intro sequence.  The intro is set in the Nevada desert at night, and will eventually feature an alien ship whizzing by, revealing the title, then crash.  I only the background so far.

Alternalien Planning Part 14: The Animation Controller

While the sprint was being planned today, there was some confusion as to how Animator Controllers were set up, so the most major thing I did today was teach the other animators how to use it.  An Animator Controller is basically a state machine.  If a key is pressed like the move or jump key, then the Animator Controller would automatically enter into the key's corresponding animation.  These animations can be connected graphically like so:

When a character is facing right, they can choose to enter into their jump right, power right, or move right animations; and it's the same with the left.  We got all the animations for Lenny cut and into the animation controller.

Alternalien Planning Part 13: The Angry Sun

This week, I had the privilege of concepting and finishing an enemy called the Angry Sun.  The idea and most of the concept was from our stellar designer Garrett, while I did the animation for it.  Originally, it was only supposed to have 3-4 frames of animation, but I wanted to go above and beyond with the Angry Sun.  There ended up being around 50 frames, and when I realized how tedious and time consuming it would be to go through each frame, I ended up cutting in half to around 25 frames.  This is the finished product.

Alternalien Planning Part 12: Mood Board

After the refactoring, I decided to put more effort into the Art Bible, as many of the entries were rather vague.  One of the first steps in any Art Bible is to establish a Mood Board.  A Mood Board is a set of reference images that evokes the vision of the art, environmental paintings and photos to set the "mood" for a location.   The whole Alternalien Mood Board can be found here: http://www.gomoodboard.com/boards/rN2tycIi/share
Here are a few examples.

The base has very geometric shapes and bright, unnatural lighting.

The desert's rock formations have blueish-purple shadows.

Alternalien Planning Part 11: Developer Bios GUI

An extra thing that the Product Owner wanted was to put an option to look at who developed the game.  It was decided to make it an official menu, so I concepted two pieces

 Using team member Erin Fink, I pixelated a photo of her using a edit in Photoshop.  The idea of this piece was to impart the notion of secret files, like our team are secret operatives that have confidential files.

I edited Erin's picture to a more greenish hue, with the goal of this concept to fit in more with the computer look of the main menu GUI.

Alternalien Planning Part 10: The GUI

We've begun to plan for GUI used in the menus.  I picked up the task right away and got to work on the thumbnails.

My first concept is inspired by some of the earliest computers in the world.  It has the font and color of an old IBM and case of an Macintosh.  I wanted something to fit fit the 50s aesthetic.

For my second concept, I tried to do something more like what would be a military base.  It's set inside the desk with knobs to the side, which is more antiquated than the previous concept.

Alternalien Part 9: The Refactoring

After a disastrous first 8 weeks, we've refactored our whole system of doing things.  We've failed a lotthis semester, but we're learning from our mistakes.  We've adhering to Scrum ceremony, in that we've started having sprint review, sprint planning, and retrospective meetings.  Today, we cleaned up the backlog, with the PO adding new cards and cleaning up the acceptance criteria.  I hope that we won't fall into our old habits again.

Alternalien Planning Part 8: Midterms

Midterms have arrived once again, stressing everyone out.  I have been sick with a cough and congestion, and part of me thinks that it's aggravated by the stress of midterms.  We were told that if continue to get questions wrong with Agile, we would be re-rolled, which means that we'll have to retake the whole program, starting again with freshmen courses.  If I get these questions wrong, I'll probably get re-rolled, or worse, my whole team will get re-rolled.

Alternalien Planning Part 7: Sick Days

I was out sick today because of a really bad bug that's been going around the school.  There's not much else to report as I finished with the all the task assigned to me this week.  Here's some art for this game that I worked on.

Alternalien Planning Part 6: Frozen

After I finished with Temper's hot form, I was asked to finish the animations of his cold form as well.  The animations for the icy Temper are much easier because they don't have many moving parts.  I edited the original animations by recoloring them and adding ice spikes instead of flames.  The whole process took less than an hour, it's more efficient this way than creating a new sprite from scratch. Don't work hard, work smart.

Alternalien Planning Part 5: Extra Spicy

I've begun to work on the animations for the Temper alien.  Temper is an alien that can control the temperature of its body, either becoming a fiery ball of plasma, or a frozen popsicle.  It was originally concepted that all the aliens would be able to level up their abilities, the Temper could turn into ice, the Sumo could become weightless.  This idea, however, was scrapped early on for scope.  But the Temperature's ice form lives on as a relic from this early period of development.

The original character design and sprite were done by Jose Flores, I did the keyframes and tweens.

Alternalien Development Part 4: The Sundering

Today I was officially demoted by the rest of the team.  I was acting like a Product Owner when I wasn't one, so I officially stripped of my title as CEO of the company.
I don't necessarily agree with this decision, because while I do admit I was acting like the PO, I wasn't warned about this.  This was a sudden demotion that completely took me off guard.  Second, I me acting as a PO doesn't equate to being a terrible CEO, Chief Executive Officer and Product Owner are two different positions, one being a product development leader and the other being the head of a company.  Both are leadership positions, but have entirely different job duties.

Other than that I worked on a thumbnail for a what a jungle level might look like.

Alternalien Planning Part 3: Labor Day

Although we had the day off, I continued to work on the Art Bible that I was developing.  It mostly consists of various pixel art techniques.

I also have the whole art team studying Super Mario World sprites, and replicating them so that they can get a better understanding of pixel art.

Alternalien Planning Part 2: The Cave

I decided to paint a cave background for the arctic levels.  Its purpose was to hep me estimate how long and how much effort it would take me to create a background for the level of detail the PO asked for.

I determined that this style of background was impractical for many reasons.  First, it was way too big and too time consuming.  Doing a full-sized 1000px by 640px painting took around two hours of work.  Which was too long for the amount of matte backgrounds that was asked of me.  Second, it doesn't fit the game stylistically.  The art style is very minimalist and reminiscent of Super Mario World.  The background I painted would fit more in with a King's Quest game.

Continued

Alternalien Part 1: The Return

We've finally returned to class and begun planning our first sprint for Alternalien.  We learned about the Sprint 0 checklist, which is comprised of steps we have to take before starting Sprint 1. They were objectives like setting up pipelines in psyberfire, poker planning, and agreeing on work hours.

Over the summer, I painted concept art for Alternalien's four biomes to help the other developers get a feel for how these biomes were laid out.

Dope Background Music

CSG 110 Part 16: Final Retrospectives

Today is our final look back on this class and ourselves.  Overall, this has been one crazy ride.  I was voted as the new CEO after the previous one left.  We completed a demo for midterms, and were eventually chosen despite our terrible financials.

I've learned to be more confident in myself over the course of this semester.  Confident enough to step up to a leadership position.  With a great team assembled from the two groups combined, I have no doubt that we can achieve greater things.

CSG 110 Part 15: Pitch 2

We pitched Alternalien and surprisingly it got picked.  The audience called us on our bullshit numbers again, but, we did end up getting picked.  We were told that the other team didn't have a demo ready while we did.  Too bad the guy who had our new and improved demo never showed up despite our 20 attempts at calling him.  But, in the end, we had a product to show and they didn't.

We merged the teams and decided to set up tasks to work on over the summer.  What I want done better marketing research and a whole bunch of concept art.

CSG 110 Part 14: Preparation Part 2

Our instructor wasn't here again, so we just spent of the time getting our financials squared away.  Unfortunately our data is still terrible no matter how we try to rationalize it.  Pitches are next week and don't think we're going to get picked.

CSG 110 Part 13: Preparation

Our instructor wasn't here today, so we're on our own to re-edit our pitch presentation and out LTV.  In our first pitch, we made the mistake of putting our numbers before actually pitching the game.  We've decided to reverse it and hook the audience with the game first, then reel them in with our amazing numbers, which won't be shit this time.

CSG Part 12: The Cover

Our goal for this week was get finished box art for our game using psyberfire and SCRUM management.  It took us 3 threes to turn out a shitty cover.  The first try was a mess because we didn't communicate or use psyberfire.  The second try was a little bit better because communicated, but development still fell through because we still didn't have any tasks setup in psyberfire.  After we finally got tasks setup in psyberfire (after having to teach a few people, including myself, how to use psyberfire) we finally got a cover done.  It looks shit, but I blame that on our inability to get organized and setup tasks in the beginning.

I'm pretty sure we were setup to fail, which is okay.  You learn more when you fail, and this is probably one of those situations.

CSG 110 Part 11: The Beast with 3 Heads

We started out our practice development by playing a gameified version of Agile Development called Agile Heroes, developed by Emil.  We drew up a boss monster that represents bad qualities in leadership such as arrogance or laziness.  Our goal was to kill the monster by the end of the training.
There was also a guy there who would roll a die that would make development harder.  At points we could only communicate through singing, or only work every other minute.

It was absolute chaos.  No one knew what they were doing or how to get organized; communication broke down immediately; cats and dogs living together, mass hysteria.   I wasn't really being a leader, but after a break and some healthy criticism, we finally got organized.  We communicated much better and handled the chaos rolls better.  In the end, we only managed to hack off 200 health points of the boss, but we'll get him yet.

CSG 110 Part 10: Way of the Agile

We officially began learning Agile and SCRUM, which as it turns out, it a tool of Agile.  Does this mean that there are other forms of Agile development?  I learned about iterations and pivoting, and that Agile allows for fast development, openness, and fast reflexes.
We learned about the Lean Method and the Minimum Viable Product, how we strive for a vertical slice of our  game as a primary.

I was told that we were going to use a board game I designed last semester as practice for Agile Development.  I pitched my game at the end of class and we played a few a rounds.  We're aiming to make this into a full 3D digital game.

CSG 110 Part 9: History

We watched a documentary on the history of the video game industry narrated by Sean Astin.  It covers the first video game ever (Space War!), and the start of Atari with Nolan Bushnell and Al Alcorn.  Atari's poor business practices and the over saturation of shitty products that led to collapse of the market.  Nintendo and Sega rose out of the ashes and started the first console war, and then the coming of the modern Xbox and PlayStation.

We're going to start learning how to use Agile business management and SCRUM.  I know a little bit of SCRUM already from Intro to Game Design, but it's better to have an official education in SCRUM.

Midterms

We pitched our game to Emil and the previous team from last semester.  It went a lot better than expected.  The main concern was that our numbers were shit, so we plan to redo our numbers to make them more accurate.  We also have to rearrange our presentation to talk about the game more than what we did.  One of the audience pointed out that he didn't know that the game was a puzzle platformer.

Emil did say that we had beautiful art, so I'm going to show that off more.

CSG 110 Part 7: Countdown to Midterms

We're mostly in the finishing stages for midterms, working out the last kings in our pitch.  I worked with the product owner in our 11 page design after I had him look up the professional standard of design documents.  We got it done a lot faster then what I thought I we would.  It goes to show that the more minds you put on a topics the faster you get it done.  I also had our completed box concept printed and put into a disc box.

Now that midterms are coming up soon, I've never been more nervous.

CSG 110 Part 6: Building a Demo

We decided to try an get a single level demo done for midterms, so I split the team in two teams again.  One was assigned to actually design the demo, the other to finish our business model canvas and surprisingly we actually got a lot done.  The B-Team actually finished our business model canvas and the Design Team got most of the assets in for the demo.  I made a bunch of sprites that will be featured in our demo, so all that's left to do is actually program and build it.

CSG 110 Part 5: Developing the Demo

We decided to go with the alien escaping from Area 51 idea.  I had everyone split into two groups, one to brainstorm ideas for the actual games, whether they are alien types, level ideas, puzzle ideas; and one group to come up with a survey to ask various internet communities if they would buy our game.  For homework I had the team draw up concepts for characters or levels.  After our online meeting (to which only 3 people showed up including myself), I learned how to paint in photoshop and drafted up some preliminary concept art for our various alien types.

CSG 110 Part 4: The Fustercluck

That day was just a huge mess.  I missed the bus I was supposed to take, and then a later bus decided to appear 100 yards from where they usually stop, so I missed that to.  Luckily, thanks to some quick thinking and some expert level communication, I was able to stay in contact with my team and delegate leadership to the next person on the chain.  I did eventually get there about half-way through class, but we were still able to get a lot done, including a lot on our business canvas, and a concept of the game we want to make.

We decided to try and design a puzzle platformer set in Area 51.  An alien being held there uses his psychic power to take control of other aliens captured there, each with their own special abilities.  You use these aliens to solve puzzles and eventually escape Area 51.

Portrait of the Average Gamer

Our CEO didn't show up at all today, we couldn't even get a hold of him.  I was elected as backup CEO, so it was on me to get everyone on task for the day.  We finished up financial business from last week and started on researching economic game trends.  The results weren't that surprising, but it's still preferable to have evidence rather than assumptions.  Currently the Wii U is the highest earning console on the market because they make games for all ages.  Action, shooters, and sports games lead the AAA industry, while most top indie games don't seem to have a single most popular genre.  The most common genres they have in common are adventure and puzzle, but among the big names are titles like Goat Simulator and Five Night's at Freddy's, which are respectively physics-based humor and jump scare horror.  After researching the best selling games of 2014, we moved onto the customer.

We first general layouts of the gamer audience, then as homework I gave each member a specific demographic to research in depth.  It's based on a 3 layer matrix of age (13-17 0r 18+), gender, and core-range (hardcore, midcore, casual). 

Fistful of Dollars, CSG Day 2

Most of our team didn't show up for the first hour or two, which included most of our Chief Officers.  Luckily instead of panicking like a bunch of nerds, we managed to get organized really quickly and get most of our tasks done efficiently.  I personally set up a Trello board and made everyone sign on so that we could assign tasks and jobs to people.  We used it to finish most of our financial planning (office space, a lawyer, equiptment, software, even desks and tables).

Seriously, thank whatever god rules the universe for Trello.  I don't think we'd get even half as organized.  I learned that networking is a powerful tool, having friends in various field is a very good asset.  I communicated with a family friend about lawyer prices, to which I learned that his firm helps startup companies get set up for a flat rate.  As we finished up the day, I had some team members look up business loans and investments, because $10,000 won't cover the cost of starting this company.

Intro to CSG Intro

Last week I started Intro to Computer Gaming and Simulation.  I'm taking it this semester because I accidentally took the classes out of order.  This semester will be an trial, to see if I actually have what it takes to start my own company or join one.  I already learned last semester not to bullshit your way through any course, so this semester I'm ready to tackle new challenges and have what it takes to be in a marching band.  Two rules to follow this year: 1. Do my shit.  2. Do not bullshit.

Primarily what I learned were the different positions of a company.  I was named Assistant Operations, which means that I'm in charge of day to day operation.  Or at least  I'm the assistant to him.