We Made Alpha Now on to Beta

Well congratulations should be expressed to everyone involved in my Senior Team Project. We made our Alpha milestone and the game is a lot of fun. Now we need to buckle down and really see if we can tighten up the (graphics on level 3. Just kidding couldn't resist joking about that silly comercial) game. We still need to balance the game out a bit and make sure that we include the necessity for the player to strategize. But I have a good feeling about it, I definitely think it will all work out.

I offered my Lead Designer and Producer to get in touch with the Vice President of Steam and see if they would be interested in putting our game on their service and they said yes but they wanted to talk to the rest of the team/not in it's current state. So I'll let that sort itself out some more.

I'm still working on my portfolio site. Tomorrow I'm required to have my second piece included for my Portfolio class. I hired a Graphic Designer to help me and he made a wicked sweet logo. He also gave me a business card layout and a gave me a suggestion for what I should try to make my website look like. So right now I'm going to try and get all of my content up there that I want up there, finish my resumé because I need to have it all on one page but looking good, and make my business cards. Then I will try to make a version of my website that looks like what he suggested from scratch. Because I like his layout better I just don't have the time for it at the moment so I need to prioritize getting a website up that looks at least presentable before trying to get it all up perfectly.

As for my Advanced Seminar class. It's going. I'm definitely going to have something done by the end of the semester that I can put in my portfolio but right now Unreal is being a little sassy so I have to make a lamp post from scratch on my own and import it into Unreal. Then I need to make sure that the light mechanic of my level works perfectly with it and then it's just a matter of making it look pretty. So that shouldn't really be a problem.

My C++ class is moving along just fine too. We've started discussing and using classes and pointers. I think after I graduate I might take some online courses to keep learning C++. The reason I'm thinking about this is because I'm in the IGDA QA SIG mailing list, that's actually a bit of a mouth full, but a common thing said in the mailing list is that if you're in QA, or Design I'm inferring, you should know code. So that you can understand and talk to the programmers a bit better as well as point out problems because of how something was coded.

How Champlain College teaches us designers requires us to learn some 3D art skills as well as programming. But I'm startting to think of taking it to the next level. Who knows maybe I'll find myself not getting a job in the industry when I graduate and will have to do the part time job thing while I continue to learn programming and maybe even getting a certificate in it.

A New Year Begins

So a new year has begun and I am back into Senior Team Project.

Unfortunately my project got cut. But as a door closes another one opens... I just don't know which one that is just yet, as I haven't been assigned to another project. If I am assigned to another project I should know by this weekend. If I'm not than I'll be in the QA pool. Which won't be horrible but I'll feel a bit bad because I've spent three and a half years learning something only to not really use it for my senior year. That doesn't sound all that right does it? I'll just have to find a way to make do.

On another note, I'm in Senior Portfolio now and we're talking about what to put into our portfolio, how to host it, how to make the site itself, etc. And I learned that for what I'm doing with the site I've already acquired I could do for free with wordpress.com I would just need to pay like $5 to link it to my domain name. So when my contract with godaddy expires I think that's what I'm going to do.

So here's hoping that I get to work on design on a game this semester and that I can figure out a good hosting experience for after my contract expires.

New School Year

And thus it begins. A new school year has started... in fact this is my final school year. Which is a bit of a scary thought but at the same time I can't wait to get into the industry. Anyway, this year I have two projects that I'm working on.

The first one is for Senior Team Project. Which is kind of like our Senior Thesis Class. We spend the whole school year making a game. My team has decided that we want to take a simple game that already exists and then make it in Unreal Tournament 3 so that we can show case the artists' skills and my skill as a level designer. So what we're making is The Floor is Lava. Unfortunately, there's about four programmers in our entire major at the moment... they burn out easily. So I'm doing the programming as well as designing and level designing. Which isn't actually a big deal because designers should know scripting anyway and I've worked in UT3 before so it's not like I'm starting blind.

One of the things about Senior Team Project though, is that teams can be cut and the team members from that team diseminated to the other groups. So there's a chance this could happen to us. But I am confident that we can make a product that will showcase our abilities and be fun at the same time so I'm not too worried about it.

The other project I am currently working on is for my Advanced Seminar class. This is an optional class for designers and artists. They each have their own section so I'm obviously in the designer section. In this class everyone chooses a project and spends the semester making a project for that class. My project is currently being called Swords, Curses, and Smites. It's a working title as soon as I come up with a better game name I'll use it. But it's a card game based around the idea of one type of cards allows a person to tank, another kind allows a person to deal good amounts of damage, and the third allows them to heal. So it's a very simplified form of standard roleplaying roles. Once I have the rules more solidly explainable and such I'll perhaps post a link on here. Right now we're in the middle of playtesting so it's still quite finiky and one of the decks is horribly overpowered compared to the others. But again that's why I'm playtesting.

That pretty much covers it for this update. I hope you all enjoyed my review of Madworld and found it informative. I should have another review posted up in a couple of weeks and hopefully you will find that one helpful and informative as well.