THANH TRUONG

Week 12 Journal

This week, I was recovering from a medical procedure and did not contribute to my team, however prior to my procedure the team was informed and a schedule was still in place.

Week 11 Journal

During this week for my weekly contributions, I had to organize and find more playtesters for the Beta playtesting session in order to record their feedback for the Beta build of our game. The finding of these playtesters was much easier than the previous weeks as I got into contact with my previous playtesters and were eager to assist my group for this build of the game or willing to help me find other playtesters if they were unavailable. From these playtesting sessions, the general consensus of the game was it looked very beautiful yet the biggest issue would be the overall performance of the game. The framerate on lower-end machines would oftentimes drop below 10 frames per second in the more dense areas of the map. After relaying this information back to the group, I helped find a solution for this and assisted the programer in finding out what the issue was. The main issue for the low frame rate was that Unity by default sets their objects to dynamic along with the lighting, and even though the environmental pieces of the map were low poly, the constant re-rendering of the lighting effects takes a heavy toll on some machines. To fix this I explained to the programmer that setting the objects to static and re-baking the lighting should dramatically increase the framerate of the game. After this, I contacted back my playtesters and asked if they wished to play a more optimized version and if they had further feedback, which I have gathered and relayed back to the rest of my team.

Week 10 Journal

As the project manager, my goal was to ensure everyone maintained on task and kept up with their schedule. For the most part, tasks were maintained however some members of the team fell behind. However, to compensate for that issue; I further limited the expectations given to them and ensured that the core elements that were needed were prioritized to ensure the game and the project were mostly on track. Afterwards, I gave the team another timeline for this week to keep them on track for the beta release of our game. Since the visual aspects of our game such as the 3D models and the rigging are essentially complete, I assigned our visual artist to discuss with the lead narrative writer in order to set up an opening vignette segment of our game to introduce the player to our game. The idea of this was implemented as we wanted to expand on the story of the game, but due to timing constraints, the opening level needed to be further cut down, however, this way the player still gets the full story of the game and the level designers and the programmer have less work to do. Additionally, I let the programmer know about this segment so they understood when to insert it into the story of our game. Furthermore, a member of our group felt under the weather so they could not participate in the in-person group meetings, and it was my responsibility to ensure they were filled in and still knew what they needed to do. They were still present at the group meeting as I set up a video call with them to allow them to communicate with us however, further explanations were made afterwards.

Week 9 Journal

For my progress this week, most of what has been done was setting up meetings with the other members of my team so I could receive feedback based on the presentation I was unavailable to attend. From what I have gathered we still need to reduce the scope of our game, and I have since met up with each member of our group to see where these areas can be narrowed down. I have also set in place a more realistic timeframe of when each task for each member should be done with some flexibility placed in. For example, I gave some deadlines for each member to try to finish an allocated goal with some flexibility to allow us to have time to relax in-between to keep our mental health in check. Additional features and ideas were also thrown in to help compensate for the cut features and act as a replacement that is more manageable for our given timeline. Furthermore, I have a second, more intensive surgery scheduled later on in the month and I have informed my team in order to let them know what days I would be out of commission and asked them to let me know if there are any other areas where they would need my assistance. Furthermore, I have gathered the contact information of my previous playtesters to allow my team to contact them directly while I am unable to do so. I have also made contact with the teaching team to ensure they are kept up to date with my procedures in case any other issues or changes happen, and let my team know that the teaching team is aware of my situation.

Week 8 Journal

This week was extremely rushed as much of our work needed to push a day ahead due to my medical procedure. Although this put much stress on the rest of my team, I felt like this was necessary in order to further improve on our game and it will create a better game in the long term. Based on the previous proto-type I felt we needed more feedback than what we got previously. This is why I decided to gather 14 participants in order to playtest our game, 11 were done in person and 3 online. The 3 online were initially only scheduled as an emergency in case I could not get all 5 however that did not seem to be an issue as I gather more than double what was needed, yet any additional playtesters could only help us positively. The playtest was set up in a room with multiple machines, one to run the game and one to record the results. During each playtest, I tried to gather what they were thinking by asking questions and recording their answer. Afterwards, I asked them to fill out a servery that automatically imputed the data into a spreadsheet I created to document all the feedback given and to automate some of the feedback processes. After all of these playtests, I scheduled a mandatory meeting with the rest of the team so I could relay the feedback that was given. Some of which included holes in the animation, problems with the map and other unintended glitches or problems that we faced. After telling the teams this, I made suggestions and helped them prioritize what areas needed the most work and where our timeline as a group stands. After this, I helped come up with other methods of working on fixing areas that needed to be worked on that may be easier to fix.

Week 7 Journal

My objective for this week was to ensure that the team is well coordinated and to ensure the correct people in our group remain in contact to ensure all our elements in the game are integrated with each other. Several meetings were scheduled by me to ensure that the entire team understood what was expected and knew where our current progress stands. Furthermore, I approached each member of the group individually with the intention of viewing their progress either in person or through screen recordings and to see if they understood what needed to be done with respect to our current schedule. This individual check-up was partially due to wanting to ensure that each member of the group did not feel pressured by the rest of the group in case anyone was falling behind. I instructed members of our team to meet with each other such as our main story director and programmer/level designer to ensure that the intro level included everything it needed to include. Additionally, the programmer was instructed to meet with the animator, as upon further inspection of the current game’s status, certain animations were missing. I also needed to come up with design questions in order to ensure that we built our game with the features we wished to have answered, as in the previous prototype stage, we lost some marks due to not having a good set of questions prepared. More importantly, we also lost potential information from our playtesters as they were not asked or were presented with questions that we needed answers to. Lastly, my last major contribution for this week was to secure and schedule a number of playtesters for our alpha code, which would need to be pushed a day forward because of a medical procedure.

Week 6 Journal

My contribution as well as the rest of the team has been fairly light for this week, as many of us are recovering from the heavy workload of the last week with the addition of other courses taking a temporary slight priority. However, as the project manager, it is good to allow some breathing room between milestones to prevent any team member from feeling overworked. For this week, my main objective was to remind the other group members of what should be accomplished for the next milestone. This was done by setting a bunch of soft milestones, such as reviewing what needs to be included in the UI and communicating that with the main programmer. Furthermore, suggestions were made about what animations should be included however with a set priority to ensure the core animations are ready first. Additionally, a search for more participants for the next alpha playtesting session has begun and is starting to be scheduled. However, this scheduling is somewhat restrained on the team at the moment, so a tighter timeline still needs to be created before any true scheduling takes place. To extend off of that, the team was made aware of an upcoming eye surgery that I would be having, which limits my availability for one day, which was originally going to be the day that we were having our playtest sessions which meant that the timeline for the team had to be shifted forward by one day if I was going to be the main person looking for playtesters. Furthermore, it was suggested that other members in the group find other playtesters just in case if I cannot find the full 5 and the extra day is needed. Finally, a plan was suggested for a possible discord call to be made during the presentation day for alpha code.

Week 5 Journal

For this week, my contributions for this week are significantly more important and larger than the contributions of past weeks. The usual checkups and overhead work of a project manager ensuring all the tasks were done such as working with the lead writer to ensure that the scope of the project is still within our capabilities. This also includes the delegation and organization of each of the modelling steps and programming steps, while assisting or giving feedback to their work. Furthermore, an additional member was assigned to the group and as the project manager, it was my job to catch that person up to speed and to find them a task to accomplish while the other members were working on their current task. After the programmer finished their current task to build a working prototype and implementing the models, they sent the file to me in order to get the project playtested. In order to do that, I needed to find multiple participants willing to playtest the game while being from a broad enough demographic in order to get a larger sample of feedback. Originally, all three playtesters were going to be done in person, however, due to some conflicts out of my control, one of the playtest sessions had to be done online. This online feedback did not yield as much information as we would have liked yet it was still useful. Lastly, due to technical difficulties and a wifi outage, the in-person playtests were delayed slightly and some emergency hotfixing of the code had to be done in order to get the game playable for the playtesters. After the playtest sessions, the feedback needed to be relayed back to the rest of the group and suggestions were made based on the feedback given.

Week 4 Journal

This week’s project contribution for myself is on the lower side as there was not a lot of work to do as a project manager this week relative to the amount of work needed by the others in the group. To compensate for this, I designated tasks to each individual member of the group to ensure we remain on schedule for the project and to narrow the scope of the project. After a long discussion with the narrative director of the team, the scope has been narrowed down enough that the project’s scope is more within our realms of completion. Additionally, decisions have been made on what features to cut in order to save time. For example, an entire sub-species of our planned project has been cut which should effectively remove about a third of the models needed for our game. Furthermore, to assist in the streamlined nature of the planning, I created a spreadsheet or checklist given to both the programmer and visual artist on the team to designate which tasks still need to be done and their level of priority, and colour coated things so it is easier for the person at hand to find which task needed faster. Additionally, research has been done in order for me to be prepared to take over or offload some of the modelling or programming in order to remain productive within the team and assists in the creation of some features. Additionally, as discussed during a meeting, it has been settled to be my job in order to find and set up playtesting candidates in the following week of different skill levels to ensure the game is playable and certain functions are engaging to the player and what features need to be worked on further.

Week 3 Journal

For this week, my primary contribution was working on writing the more technical aspects throughout the game design document such as what are the primary and secondary gameplay modes, the winning play and as well as creating some of the mock-ups for potential user interfaces for our game. When designing the mock-ups for the user interfaces, many inspirations were taken from other games of the same genre, such as the minimap location, health bar, weapon information and on-screen dialogue. We were unsure on whether our UI should more closely represent the UI of a 1st/3rd person shooter or one of that of a fully open-world game. As a group, we felt it was best to narrow the scope of our project and therefore design the user interface accordingly. Besides designing parts of the UI, the majority of the time I spent was leading the discussion for parts of the core gameplay loop, such as how the player goes from exploring the map then branching into battling or interacting and so on. The core loop was designed by myself in terms of the direction of where the core elements lied however the actual illustration for our loop was designed by another member of the team. From there, the idea of how our player would interact with the NPC’s in our world was mentioned, as prior our team did not really think about how we wished to tackle it. With the idea of having multiple gameplay modes, the secondary gameplay mode of dialogue mode was pitched, and although my initial idea of having some type of visual indicator that indicates the current karma state the player was in, may have been too far out of the scope of this project, it helped us define what was the core features that we needed in order to make a functioning game.

Week 2 Journal

Throughout the week, most of my time for this project was dedicated to coming up with gameplay features for our game such as weapons, equipment and power-ups, with the goal of making use of the damage types in a somewhat thematic way while keeping the balance of the game relatively in check. Although much of the numbers are theoretical and much of the numbers would need to be adjusted after testing, the core idea of what weapons to have and a rough sense of the general balancing of the weapons. Of course, these numbers are subjected to change, yet while the ideas’ were present, I felt like it was good to display the information in a table-like format so a quick comparison can be made to get a rough idea of the power progression of the player. The decision to include the raw numbers of the weapons and power-ups was implemented in a way that in the future while programing the items, the core functionality of each category would stay primarily the same with some adjustments to the numerical values to speed up future coding.

To further add, the idea to have the weapons “upgrade” in a non-linear fashion but in a way where the weapons deal the same damage on paper, with the damage types being different it gives the player the option to specialize their gear towards the enemies they think they will be facing rather than having a strictly superior option. This would likely need to be further worked on in the future as if the difference between similar weapons are too small, then the player may not feel the point in upgrading, while the reverse is also true as we do not wish to pigeonhole the player into objectively optimized gameplay. We believe that it could be too tedious to the player if they were to spend more time constantly swapping what they are using rather than actually using them.

Week 1 Journal

While forming the group we all shared where our strengths would lie in our original group of 3, where I would’ve been the main programmer, I found my programming skills may not be as strong as we needed to take on the brunt of the coding alone, luckily a fourth member joined our team who had experience working with the game engine Unity and I was given the new role as the project manager and assigned the other members of the group to the main role based off their strengths as well as secondary roles in case someone fell behind or needed assistance.

While brainstorming I suggested how we wanted to approach the concept of our game as going into the group, none of us had a game in mind on the scale of this project. I suggested starting by telling each other what games they have recently played so we can get a feel on what types of games we were all interested in and potentially what we could create. During that discussion, I proposed our current, yet ambitious main gameplay loop of having a large open world with subworlds associated, in addition to having multiple potential ways to complete the core objective of finding pieces of the player’s ship.

As ideas were pitched, I proposed the concept of more specific mechanics were thrown such as having a damage system that allowed weapons to deal multiple types of damage against different enemies which in theory made decision making more of a bigger deal. The basic conception of that formula I came up with can be seen below.

Our team was rather ambitious with what we could accomplish in a somewhat short period, as we were using our past work as a frame of reference. However, as the project manager, things felt more doable at the moment while planning and it would be more advisable to better determine what is manageable and make sure the team stays on schedule.