CSG: 181 Capstone

Today is the day that we have all been waiting for to be over before it began, portfolio day! We were scrambling to get the build set up as nicely as possible for all of the executives. So we decided to get to school early and get to work. We also had to set up the screens and hook everything up so it worked correctly. It was also a day that I decided to dress nicely, which I almost never do. After the very stressful day that we had..a few of us went out to the bar and relaxed for a bit. as you can see... *facepalm*

Today was the day!...to playtest our game for any bugs that we came across. The main people that were doing this, were Andy and myself. It was pretty relaxing in a way, yet, mentally exhausting playing the same thing over and over again for a few hours finding bugs to fix. We actually were able to make a huge list of stuff to fix, mostly colliders, but nonetheless, we found some bugs. Even though we were just looking for bugs and playtesting, I'd say it was a pretty productive day.

There's nothing like adding a bit more pressure to our already stressful lives right? We had even less time to get everything finished because Portfolio Night was coming up fast and we were going to show off our product to business executives. If we wanted to get anything into the build, we had to get it done now or else we weren't going to have anything. Our anxiety was through the roof at this point, but we couldn't let that stop us from getting this project done.

Today....was a bit of a mentally exhausting day as we kept running into more problems. The build that Jade had built was too big to be able to send into github, and we weren't able to figure it out until later in the class, since it was taking so long to try and push. During the meeting that happened on Saturday, Jade came up with the idea to split the entire scene into smaller chunks so it would be easier for us to push into github. So we all took a chunk and pushed it into origin. It worked for a few of us, but for others, it still wasn't working. So those chunks were broken down further to see if that would help the situation.

Today was an interesting day, but in a good way.  The designers and Jade decided that We needed a build...and fast. The first part of class was them presenting us their own special builds, which I was surprised about.  They had talked about desperately wanting to get a build that looked semi-done and workable, which I understood, we didn't want the same thing to happen again from last semester. We took a vote and decided that the build that Jade had created since it was the most complete looking of the two. Plus it was the one that fit the aesthetic that we were going for.

I am pretty excited this week! I get to work on one of my favorite things in the world: TEXTURES!! I don't know why, but I like looking online and seeing what kind of textures there are and seeing if I can recreate them. It's fun to play around with the nodes in substance designer and experimenting to create different textures. But you also have to take into consideration that it should be realistic to the real world.

Today was a pretty normal day, it was the week after retrospectives and I was thinking back towards it. It did make me a bit depressed to keep thinking about what they said but it was kinda true, I didn't really feel like I was pulling my own weight, but I still have time to really improve and show the team that I am not worthless(well at least in my eyes). I always feel like I'm not worth anything to the team and everything I do will never be good enough. But I'm going to change that! I had finished texturing the props and I say they came out alright.

I started working on a few of the props from our prop list as well as adding a few more just in case we didn't have them already on the list. It was kinda challenging trying to find references for our props because there's not that many to look at. Cyberpunk isn't really a popular search when you're trying to find references for individual props, but great if you want to look at cities. I was able to make a few props, even after I accidentally forgot to save my work once or twice. I'm still not used to prop modeling, but I'm always learning to get better. 

There was a recommendation to watch a tutorial on modular building(since I'm not the best, and still learning) and follow it. I got to the first part and decided that it was a bit boring. So what I did, was stop watching the tutorial, and just went with what worked in my mind. I actually think I came up with some decent parts for the building. It did take me a bit since I'm not used to modular building, but I think it turned out ok.

Today is the beginning of our second sprint and it went pretty well. We planned out everything that we needed to get done, you know, the usual stuff. I put myself on a card with Nick to make some modular pieces for a building. Modular building is basically taking a structure that has similar faces and cutting those pieces so they are able to be stacked over and over again to create a variety of buildings from a few pieces. So in theory, we can create 10+ variety of buildings with the modular pieces of one structure. I also had created a list, along with the rest of the artists, to about what we would need for props and stuff. I also decided to try and figure out how to get my substance textures into unity. And I did.

Today was the end of our first sprint, and I'd say things went pretty smoothly. We went over what went good, what went bad and what we could improve on. One of the main issues that we needed to work on is communication. A lot of the people on our team didn't know what the others were working on, including myself and that we needed to be more transparent with each other. And I agree, especially since we have such a small team, it's important for us to know what each other is doing at all times.

Today is the start of the first sprint! Woo! We split up into different feature teams based on the features of this sprint and split up the different sub-tasks for said teams with each of the members. I was put into a team with Nick and Matt to talk about and design the city block layout. I actually came up with  few ideas that we might be able to base the lower class on and created a small slideshow.  https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1Hg-85U_KnmtWABcfkpEgh1PVO0EISnHQDTxkc99-X58/edit#slide=id.p

Today was a sad day, I missed class for the first time in a long time... I had gotten a letter saying that I had been summoned for jury duty. The sad part was that I was sadly going to miss two days of school and miss out on doing work for those respected classes. On the bright side, I got to see the inside of the courthouse.  We were also having some issues with a few of our team members, but from what they told me, that was resolved. Our Lead Art is now Max and Nick is back to being a normal team member. 

Sprint Zero has started and we are going all out this semester. We are going big with a lot of planning and actually, a lot of implementation. Jade went all in with the planning and the vision because she doesn't want what happened last semester to happen this semester. So we are changing how we do things, even changing a few of the programs that we use. Instead of using trello to track tasks, we now use Hack n plan, which in my opinion is much better.

Today is the first day of the new semester and I couldn't be more excited. It's a new semester and a new opportunity to do better than we did last time. We decided before the semester started that we would start a new product that would better suit the time that we have. We are going with a cyberpunk sandbox narrative. The story is still in development, but our PO has most of the story nailed down. We also decided on roles for this semester. Jade is our PO, Matt is Lead designer, Andy is buildmaster, Nick is our lead artist, and I am the assistant PO.