A New Age

Last Tuesday (5.5.2015) marked Day 1 in my new job as an Associate Digital Producer at Mullen.

This week has been full of training, listening, learning, and being introduced to more people than I can keep track of. I’m very excited to start this new position, and I think the number one thing I’m still consistently surprised about is just how friendly everyone is, the people here are always super willing to help out with any random questions or talk to you about the teams etc, it’s pretty fantastic.

Mullen uses the Atlassian Toolset so that makes for an easy transition seeing as I used those tools at Turbine, but Mullen also uses a number of other programs that I’m definitely going to need to get used to.

For now I’m off to The Cape to help get the family landscaping/boats in order for the Summer.

It’s Been a While

Haven’t posted since July of last year, but I’m still kicking (sometimes also screaming, but mostly just kicking). So what’s happened since then?

Between July and mid-September, I’d been working on Cape Cod indoors and outdoors doing construction, deconstruction, painting, sanding, staining, powerwashing, and my personal favorite, wielding the mighty air-compressing collated nail gun, which I nicknamed the Plasma Cannon.

In August, a Champlain classmate of mine who works as a Graphics Programmer at Turbine Inc. in Needham, Massachusetts forwarded me a job description for a Production Intern Position. For the first time since looking at seemingly hundreds of job descriptions, I actually had all of these covered, and felt confident about it. I applied immediately, and went through a few phone interviews and then was called in for a face to face interview. I was interviewed by 5 team members, one at a time, and they spanned about 4hours when it was all said and done. A fairly trying process but one I gained a lot of experience from nonetheless. Weeks later I got a phone call with an offer, talked about pay and paperwork and things of that nature. Then the real struggle started, signing up with Randstad, a temp agency. WOW there was more paperwork than should ever be allowed under any circumstances. Once that was completed, I got an apartment in Belmont, and have been working there ever since.

Turbine has been an incredible learning experience for me in the short 7 months that it’s been so far. I’ve learned so much about Scrum, Kanban, and working with the Atlassian Toolset – JIRA and Confluence. I’ve made some fantastic connections, friends, and colleagues. However, because this is a temporary position, I need to think of the future, and putting my name on a lease for a place to live in the Fall is high on that priority list, especially because apartments are already being shown and rented many months out. Unfortunately, there are no associate producer positions on game teams in the building, so I’ve been presented with a few other options. The Cloud Solutions and Integrations (CSI) team needs a Producer, and the Mobile Game Platform (MGP) team also needs a Producer once their current producer heads to another position within the company. I’ve interviewed with both teams and I believe the MGP team would be a better personal fit for me, and I have informed the appropriate parties, so we’ll see where that goes in the coming days/weeks. I’ve also interviewed outside of the building to a company in Boston to put a few proverbial eggs in a few different proverbial baskets.

And now we play the waiting game. Kinda like the Hunger Games, but with less Hunger and more waiting.

Light Speed

Wow, it’s been a while since I’ve posted anything on here, and that’s probably because at the end of the storm everything is happening so quickly, sometimes you forget to keep up with smaller side habits like blogging.

So VacuuLab was finished, with only a few small bugs left, none of which that are game-breaking per say, and the team was all quite happy about how things ended up. After we baked all of the lighting and played with some additional moving textures, the levels really popped visually. Chris O’Connor, our Lead Artist, really put in some serious work and long hours with his team and it absolutely paid off.

At the expo of all of our Senior Games at Arts Riot, our game was one of the most popular ones and our station of eight computers was almost always full throughout the time that it was there. The players who were testing it were laughing, yelling, talking smack to each other even if they didn’t know each other, and having a great time. The Team’s most favorite metric of success was the number of young kids who were continuously playing the game round after round because after all, it was their age group we had designed the game for. Consider our Target Market reached.

We had a team meeting during which we talked about what would happen to the game moving forward. Even though we’re happy about how the game turned out, we have a bit of an issue with the playability outside of a controlled environment. What I mean by that is since we have no AI, the only way someone can play our multiplayer game is if enough other people are online and playing simultaneously. We also never implemented the ability to join a game that’s already in progress, so if one of the team members leaves, that team is immediately at a disadvantage, and if the host quits, the game immediately ends anyway. In order to successfully be able to release the game and have people play it, we’d need to build up enough hype in the Vacuulab Community to have a lot of people playing it all at once, and the team decided it wouldn’t be worth our time since most of us have since been employed and are now busy with full time jobs.

So at the end of the day, VacuuLab was an amazing learning experience for everyone, and I can’t imagine a better environment to hone my Producer Skills than being the Lead Producer on a team of 8 for several months. All of the team members are still in touch and are still friends, something that cannot be said for all teams coming out of serious game projects.

I loved being the Producer of Team Heartthrob, and VacuuLab will always hold a special ridiculous goofy gooey mayhem place in my heart. Now onto bigger and better games.

Chugga Chugga

Cho0-Choo. The production train keeps rolling and the HUD and almost all of the menu is in. The new level has also received a lot of art into it plus new music and other exciting features.

The new animations that Chris has been trying to put in are almost all complete but some were a bit derpy so he’s been tweaking those.

We’re having a meeting tomorrow to hopefully shoot some finalized gameplay footage in order to put it into the team demo reel in preparation for the Senior Show on the 17th.

Release Client I is due Wednesday the 9th so we’re going to be looking at those details as well.

On a more personal note, I’ve been working on the script for my own individual reel that I’m going to be learning kinetic type for, I’m both excited and concerned about how much time it’s going to drag away from other school-related necessities. Only time will tell.

There are only a few weeks left and with these new features into the game came a bunch of new bugs as well which was expected but is still unpleasant, kinda like when an individual who is lactose-intolerant drinks milk, the result is expected but still unpleasant.

Leaps and Bounds

“Leaps and bounds” might be a bit of a understatement. Since returning from GDC the team has been absolutely killing it in terms of progress on the game. The new HUD is in and functioning including 2D icons for powerups, the second level has bunsen burners and great art. The first level has been also art-reworked and Dan, one of the programmers, has been working with Chris the Lead Artist, to help surmount a hurdle that occurred with the new character animations a number of weeks ago. Now Chris can break down the animations into separate shots and put them in for hopefully this Wednesday’s QA. Everyone is incredibly excited for all of this.

Looking ahead, Ross [Lead Designer] and I looked at the requirements for the Beta Milestone this Wednesday and figured out what there is left/what we need to do. I also coordinated the recording of the interviews for the team demo reel with a DFM friend of mine, Curran. I talked to the team about who wanted to be in the video and it ended up being the 4 Leads: Ross, Tom, Chris and I. We set up everything in the library and I had the scripts on my laptop for reference. Everyone dressed up the same way we did for the end of the first semester presentation so everyone was uniform and looked professional. Everyone recorded multiple and we had a good time shooting everything, I think it was a good bonding experience for the four of us. I’m going to meet with Curran this upcoming Tuesday to go through the footage and do a preliminary cut to see where we are with timing etc.

Everyone is incredibly stoked about the games massive visual updates, and I have the most optimistic thoughts moving ahead.

GDC Setback

Half of the team went to Game Developer’s Conference in San Francisco for the past week or so, and two leads were part of that group.  Because everyone was worried about their websites and portfolios and introductions for the people they were going to meet in the industry, Senior Team took a bit of a backseat unfortunately and there wasn’t a whole lot of work on the game completed. Once everyone returned, I setup a semi-emergency “readjust” meeting on Tuesday in which we talked about the things we need to get back into. We had started to drift away from some good habits like logging time, using the backlogs efficiently, and showing up to meetings on time. Several team members expressed that they would prefer the meetings on Sunday be at 3 instead of 2 so we changed that time effective immediately. Everyone took the meeting seriously and as a team we worked together to compile a new master list of priorities for the end of the semester. With every team member present we were able to discuss ideas and concerns efficiently and at the end I think everyone was quite pleased with the results, myself included.

The following week will determine if everyone will come through with their estimations on what they can get finished and I will be monitoring everyone’s progress closely to see if we need to make any other cuts in the pipeline in order to continue making milestone deadlines.

 

Back Into It

Now that everyone is back from Spring Break, it’s time to get our noses back down onto the grindstone. Tom and Chris [lead programmer and artists respectively] put together a build for Wednesday night’s QA but since Vermont was hit with quite the snowstorm Wednesday into Thursday, QA was canceled. I opened the build anyway to take a look at what we were gonna test and noticed a miscommunication between the team members, notably the art department and myself. When the artists said they’re “done” with assets, they meant just modeling high poly. The whole level was coated in Unity Gray, nothing had been textured. I talked to Chris about what this means for the pipeline and that we unfortunately may need to cut a level because of the extra time it’s going to take to actually finish up these assets.

Aside from this alteration in the production, I’m going to be taking a look at what our next milestone requirements, and most of the team (4/8) are headed to GDC this upcoming week, so it’s going to be a mostly designer + producer party these next upcoming days, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing because it will give us a good opportunity to refine the master asset list and see what exactly we need.

Spring Break

Champlain has their Spring Break a bit earlier than most schools and this year it was March 3rd-7th. Many members of the team (including myself) went various places around the country and because of that, the communication and cohesion has been pretty fragmented. Once everyone is back on Sunday we’re going to reconvene and talk about what people have done over break, share experiences, and discuss what needs to be completed for the next milestone. I for one went to Colorado and skied Breckenridge for the week. Unfortunately, the beginning of that trip was tainted with a fever of over 100 that had started at the beginning of midterm week and seriously inhibited my ability to sleep soundly or enjoy life in general without the aid of medication. But once my body finally won the battle, the skiing was fantastic.

Now I’m looking forward to getting back into the swing of things and starting to finish up and polish our game and prepare for the final semester presentation.

~6 weeks remaining.

Midterm Madness

At the Green Mountain Games Festival, men, women, and children of all ages played VacuuLab and we were super excited about the results. Our target market (Parent and kid gamers playing together) were absolutely loving the game. It wasn’t too technical or complicated for either group and the feedback we received was all positive and any suggestions we already have 90% of it in the works of our backlogs to add into the game anyway. We also discovered a bug that we turned into a feature that we’re very excited about: Jetpacking. If the player aims directly below them and shoots while walking, they can effectively walk on the bullets and propel themselves into the air and across space. We originally thought this would prove to complicate things and would be difficult to convey to players but an 11-yr old was watching the game being played for a few minutes and as soon as he sat down he started using it as a way to move around the map. The whole team is super excited about it, especially Bryan because the level he’s been whiteboxing has a large emphasis on thin cat walks around the map.

So for the week of Feb 23rd, Champlain College holds their midterms. I had 3 written tests and most of them counted for a gross percentage of the final grade in the class. Much of the team had work involving portfolio classes or other high-priority classes in their individual departments. Thankfully, since I knew everyone was going to be quite busy this week, I had ironed out the requirements for Senior Production’s midterm the week before and we had everything completed well within time.

The Lead Artists ran into some issues with implementing the animations so he will be conquering that before moving onto anything else and the other artists are continuing chugging on environment assets.

Programming team has been refining the projected textures and still working on implementing the end screen which has been more complicated than expected but they’re working at it and think it should be nailed down quite soon.

Green Mountain Games Festival

The following week had a pretty clear goal in mind: Prepare for the Green Mountain Games Festival ( https://www.facebook.com/greenmountaingamesfestival )

With this in mind, the team prioritized the things we absolutely wanted in the game and what needed to be done to accomplish these goals in time. The following week was also midterm week, so I listed out the midterm requirements for the team and worked closely with the leads to compile a master asset list as a part of one of the requirements. Moving forward, the team will refer back to this list that was both color-coordinated and listed in priority order for all departments. I also coordinated a team dinner at a local favorite burger pub that everyone was able to make minus one team member because of illness.

Bryan has been balancing the damage of each bullet when shooting and has been playing with how strong the vacuuming is. Bryan has also been updating his whiteboxed level by adding more details and figuring out where he’s going to be placing what once the art is delivered.
Ross has been doing mostly sound design and has been compiling the asset lists with Bryan and I. Ross is working with Bryan tweaking the balancing of shooting and vacuuming. Another one of the midterm requirements is to have a storyboard for the senior demo reel. I talked to our professor about what he thinks we should loosely do with it or points we should cover and then Ross, Bryan and I all sat down and wrote it out.

Our Lead Artist has completed character animations and is now working on implementing them into the game. The other artists on the team have been cranking through environment assets that we should be able to put into the game ASAP.

Programming has been working on projected textures so it looks like there are splat marks when the bullets collide with walls etc and also implementing an end screen once only one team remains.