CSG: 181 Capstone

Tomorrow is the day that most teams fear, especially beginners: Judgment Day, or how it's called normally, midterms. I'm slightly nervous, but then again, who isn't on midterms? It's a day where we evaluate how you have been up until that point. We set criteria for your teamwork, communication, leadership..etc and set a score for the total, from 5 to 1. No matter how many times we go through midterms, it always brings up some nervousness, especially since the entire team is giving you feedback on all of your work. We'll see how this day goes...hopefully well.

Well, I did say that there would always be problems in a company right? This week was no different. Even though we did resolve one problem, another one decided to pop up. This time, it was an argument to decide if we should go with feature teams or meta teams for our tasks. It was an argument that went for about half an hour to 40 min, and it went on 30 min longer than it needed to and it was getting on everyone's nerves. It was honestly ridiculous how we couldn't decide on how to work on tasks. In the end, Mike told Matt to choose one on the spot, and he picked feature teams. In my opinion, it was a better choice because it shapes each task and also promotes more communication through the different teams. Another factor to the fighting would also be that people are starting to get bored of the game and loosing morale. On the bright side, I was able to get some assets done for the game and I'm pretty happy with how they turned out and glad i was able to get some feedbac...

It wasn't an easy day for the team as there was an argument, which isn't uncommon for companies or groups. The argument was pretty much a time management issue of the art team since we had a different pipeline than the rest of the team. And we also had a three day buffer to fix anything that could have been wrong. There didn't seem to be anything wrong with it in my opinion, but there can't always be peace in the world, so there was argument. But that's just how it is in life, nothing in life is ever easy, there's always going to be arguments, there's always going to be some tension, but we just have to get through them and keep moving forward. On the bright side, I was able to finish a decent wood texture for the floorboard/deck and a water texture so that's nice . I'm actually pretty proud of my work, it wan't easy to learn Substance Designer, especially on such short notice, but I'm happy with my results.

Today was a normal work day, just like last week. We had made some great progress as team in general. The Design team was planning out the starting level for the game, and some of the menu screen layouts. Programmers were working on different mechanics, such as bullet penetration and different player movements. The art team was working on the two main classes that we are going to implement this semester, the gunner and the tank. The design team and the art team actually worked together to create the characters and backstories. I chose the task of creating a few of the textures that we would need for the environment, like wood textures, concrete etc.

Today was our first "official" dev day where we would work on assets for the game. I chose the task of creating different environmental assets with Andy. He and I created a list of all of the different props and environmental textures we would need for the level. The props list includes things like tables, chairs, beds etc...the environmental list include things like a concrete texture, wood planks, plaster etc...There are also different versions of the wood texture to accommodate different parts of the level. Not only that but there would also be plaster textures for the walls and concrete for the outside. I had already started watching a few tutorials to get myself familiar with the interface and tools of substance designer, and watching a few more on how to create a wood texture. There's a lot of work that goes into it but I know it can be done.