Week 16

Well, today's the day. The big final hoorah (until next semester). We will be giving our final presentation on our company and product. There may come a day where we will fail, and Emil will yell at us. But it is not this day! This day, we present!

We are cleaning up the presentation right now, and Cody and Wilhelm are doing a dry run of the presentation before 1pm rolls around.

Wish me luck, pseudo-Ryan-blog personality!

Week 15

We did our dry-run presentation today.

It went poorly to say the least. Our presentation got torn apart by Emil and friends. To be honest, they were all accurate judgements put forward. Our presentation was boring, had way too much text in it, and honestly I wouldn't even buy our own product based on our presentation.

We have the rest of the day today to work on our presentation, before the real deal next week. We are cutting out 95% of the text in the powerpoint, adding more humour, and making it more fun to watch.

We will be able to tell if our hard work has payed off next week, here's to hoping we do well!

Week 14

This week we finished talking about Scrum. Emil gave us the majority of the class time to work on whatever needed finishing up. We had thought that our presentation dry-run was this week so we had prepared for it to happen, but found out that it was next week. We spent the rest of the class doing more polishing on our presentation for next week.

In our presentation we will be talking a lot about the financial side of our game and the different work that went into coming up with the idea, and also talking about some of the features our game has to offer.

Week 13

This week we once again continued with learning about Scrum development, but I was not present due to being sick.

Week 12

This week we continued talking about SCRUM development. We talked about the framework of of SCRUM.

Framework

Roles:

- Product Owner

- Scrum Master

- Developer

Ceremonies:

- Sprint Planning

- Scrum Retrospective

- Daily Scrum

Artifacts:

- Product Backlog

- Sprint Backlog

- Burndown Cart

We worked on our sprint design/backlog today. I had the glorious achievement of having the first idea in the icebox. Frigid!

Week 11

This week we started learning about Agile and SCRUM now that Emil was back in action. It was really interesting learning about it. Here is a bit of a summary of what was learned:

Parts of SCRUM:
- The Team
- Scrum Master
- The Sprint
- Sprint Planning

Scrum is self organizing diverse teams consisting of 5-9 people that do iterative development in 2-4 week sprints.

A sprint is a period of time used to develop features of a product. The product is designed, coded, and tested during the sprint. No changes are to be made to the sprint plan while in a sprint, plan these changes into the next sprint.

This is what we worked on during class, producing a sprint backlog. This will enable us to decide what features need to be developed first or have the most time spent on them.

Week 10

This week, Emil was absent. Since we were going to start the Agile training, we watched a video of Emil doing a presentation on Agile and creating a start-up company. We learned about the do's and don'ts of starting a company, and how to maintain good work practices to make your company (at least somewhat) successful.

Week 8 (again)/Week 9

So during our meeting last week (Week 8) while we were waiting for our turn to present, I was promoted to Chief Information Officer (CIO) since apparently our team didn't have one. PROMOTED!!

So since then I've been working with the Finance group and the other Information group members to get our expenses/revenue spreadsheet worked out, research different user statistics (steam users, computer users, etc) since we didn't have much for that.

This upcoming week we will be doing peer reviews with Daryl, I'm going to go ahead and wish myself luck with that!

We've been going over our plan for this week, editing things appropriately according to what Emil told us last week.

Retrospective

Taking a look back at what you've done is definitely important. It allows you to learn from your mistakes, while using your successes to solve those problems you encountered.

This class has so far been very interesting. I would say the best part was definitely working in such a large team, something I have not done before in this context. While it does have the chance to have problems, it also allows for such a wider array of opinions and experience, that it is almost impossible to not come up with an idea to make a game upon, to resolve a problem, and to have fun doing it.

To be continued...

Week 8/Udacity

This week we are presenting our company so far, and turning in/presenting various things including our Udacity completion screenshots, surveys, and our blogs.

I had one problem with my Udacity completion. Despite completing Lesson 4 completely, it shows as incomplete (seen in the second picture), and in the Lesson 4 page, it shows it as everything being completed. I have provided a screenshot of the course completed popup, the lesson overview (with Lesson 4 showing as incomplete), and the Lesson 4 page showing itself as completed.

The image above shows Lesson 4 being completed.

The image above shows the lesson completed page.

The image above shows the course completed pop up that appears when you finish the last lesson.

Week 7

This week we fleshed out our plot more, and began on concept art for the box art. We talked about the different character classes we want to see in the game, and some of those ideas are posted on the G+. We started a game development document on a Google Doc, and also finished up our Business Model Canvas.

Doing the Udacity lessons, and will be turning that in Week 8 along with these blog posts, and the groups BMC, development document, and box art.

Week 6

This week we started fleshing out the plot of the game more, creating a Google Doc that everyone could edit and give feedback on. We worked on our Business Model Canvas for a large portion of the class as a group.

In the Technology group, I posted a couple options for computers for the programmers in the company. These computers would be fairly basic, as most of the "hard work" computers would be needed by the animators as their work is more gpu/cpu intensive than a programmers (and this is coming from a programmer).

Week 5

This week we started discussing ideas related to our game. We had no game name yet, no plot, and no ideas for game mechanics coming into this class.

When we came out of the class, we had a rough idea of what we wanted to do for the game. We had assigned certain things to do based on which department of the company each person had chosen and what was needed. I am in the Technology group, and we worked on determining which animation software we wanted to use and started outlining what we wanted to see with respect to computers needed for the company.

We chose Blender for our animation software as it was free. The computers were not entirely decided on yet, we never exited the discussion stage.

Week 4

This week, I was finally able to join the class after solving my registration issues. In this class I started catching up on what I had missed in the previous 3 weeks.

I joined the "Formation Gaming" team, and the first order of business was to sign a Non-Disclosure Agreement (NDA) for the business. This NDA basically just said I was not allowed to talk about the game(s) we would develop outside of the group of people who had also signed this NDA. I then got setup on the teams Google+, and the Trello.

I found out that the team had decided to emulate Valve, a former game developing company, and now a game publisher/distributor. Emil shot down our idea, on the fact that Valve doesn't do much game developing anymore, and asked us to think more outside of the box, leaning towards indie developers. We started brain storming companies to emulate, and put it up for a vote on Trello. The decision would be made next week on which company to emulate.

Week 3

I was just finishing working through my registration issues. The delay was due to transcript issues, money issues, and time issues.

Week 2

This week there was no class because of Labor Day, but I still had not worked through my registration issues at this point due to transcripts.

Week 1

I was not present for this week of class due to registering issues! I was working through these issues during this week.