Semester 2: Post 13

Semester 2: Post 13

I wonder who the viewers of this blog are? Well they won't be reading it for much longer. I wonder if I wrote anything I'll regret. Regardless, this is the final blog post.

I was afraid there would be a lot of uncertainty the moment I graduated And there will be. But I know what I'll be doing in the first few weeks at least. Heck I actually will get a lot of that stuff done during senior's week. Although I don't think any of the labs will be open during senior's week. A week without a computer will be a sad, sad week. If I can get access to a computer I can: Update my resume, apply for jobs, get in contact with publishers and controller manufacturers, not be super bored, and many more excellent activities. 

But this blog is for Dan Shredder, not for my boring life...

That game sure is done for now. 

Actually, I wonder how the post-mortem will go tomorrow. I hope no one reveals they were a lizardman the whole time. That'd be a bummer.

Semester 2: Post 12

Semester 2: Post 12

It looks like we're going to make serious attempts at finishing and publishing Dan Shredder. I'll start trying to find funding as soon as finals week is over. Although I'll have to do it from lab computers or my phone. That'll be annoying. It's going to take a lot of money to pay for ten-ish people.  Here are some of the ideas we have to eat while we work on Dan Shredder.

• Kickstarter
• Easy
• Good publicity
• Maintaining kickstarters takes a lot of time. 
• Publisher
• Devolver might be into it
• Maybe an arcade company?
• Maybe a controller company
• Maybe we could get some help from Harmonix
• Get other jobs and work on it in our free time
• The game will never get done
• We'll have to move away from each other
• Unreal dev grant
• We could probably get one

I guess that's all the ideas we have. I thought that would be longer but whatever. We'll see.

Semester 2: Post 11

Semester 2: Post 11

It's the day after the senior show and man, I don't want to do any more work.At the show we went after Arco and Shannon went and described how great each member of her team was. I didn't plan to do that but I figured everyone else was going to do that so I decided to improvise something to say about each member of the team. It went well mostly.

After the show it seemed like most of the recruiters were avoiding me. They'd see me arrive to a circle they'd briefly make eye contact and I could see the fear in their eyes. I wasn't able to speak with any of the recruiters except for one guy who really liked me. Overall the night went pretty well.

Today I didn't get called to any interviews and then I laid in bed feeling sorry for myself most of the day. The team members that went to Gamefest have reported that we won "excellence in peripherals." I know I should be happy that we won anything but I think that's the worst Champlain has done at Gamefest for several years. I should feel positive but the lack of interviews has put me in a bad mood. I wanted at least one so that I could have more practice. It's going to take me months to get an interview once I graduate. I don't think anyone will ever actually hire me... I was going to specify in my field but in hindsight I haven't ever been able to get a job so yeah: I don't think anyone will ever actually hire me.

Semester 2: Post 10

Semester 2: Post 10

The game is done. It's great. People are loving the trailer even though the second half of it had to be cobbled together. That was the part I edited. It's nice to finally have some real free time again but it's not over yet. I have to prepare for the presentation, I need to log my time, and I need to write 2 more blog posts.

I still have my doubts about whether or not I contributed enough to the project. I came up with the initial idea for the game, I made a fantastic presentation for midyear show, I am the face of Dan Shredder in the trailer and yet... I feel like a mascot more than a producer. Sure I've done alright on the big moves but the day to day I made a lot of mismanagement, people had to crunch a lot both semesters. I'm not sure I'm cut out for this. Then again: the better you get the worse you think you are. At least I know what a producer does now. 

Semester 2: Post 9

Semester 2: Post 9

Hot damn. PAX was great this year. However the day after we left (friday) a professor came into our class and announced that the trailer was due Monday. All of a sudden Slack is blowing up with vague panic and dread. I didn't have access to a computer during the trip because my Laptop died. It was stress city and I bet it was even worse for those that weren't at PAX.

I returned to Burlington a day early. I expected to return to a fiery ruin but I returned to a much better game. Those that stayed behind did a great job. I finished the trailer and the game is good to go. I feel a bit guilty about going to PAX during a crunch but we didn't know it was going to be a super crunch until we were already gone. It was handled and I hope my team doesn't think worse of me. I asked if there was a lot of work left before I departed and the answer was a clear no. I guess I should've known better.

Semester 2: Post 8

Semester 2: Post 8

Wow, I fallen behind on my blog posts quite a bit. I can't believe I haven't done one of these since break. I'm just going to write multiple posts a week now to meet the requirements and hope that no one reads these or doesn't care. It's been pretty nose to the grindstone.

During the break I worked on the Plan Shredder spreadsheet tool that was like a light weight way of tracking what everyone was doing. Some people like it. The programmers do not. It saddens me but they're still using Pineapple and that's fine. Speaking of programmers one of them really wants structure. Like a ton of structure. He likes all of agile and that's great. It's just it seems like other people don't like agile and everyone needs to be 100% on board with agile for it to work. A weekly sprint planning meeting wasn't really feasible with our schedules but now I'm realizing... What if we had the weekly work meeting be the sprint planning meeting. No one can work on these lab computers anyways. Ah well it's too late now but lesson learned. I know I won't go directly to a producer role once I leave school but I wouldn't want to anyways. I'd need to really understand the culture of the company and people before I start producing.

Also, my computer broke so that's annoying.

Semester 2: Post 7

Semester 2: Post 7

We made it to the break but there will be no rest for me. I know no matter what the team grade is at the midterm I'll blame myself for it not being higher. I've failed my team in so many ways thus far in this semester.. It hasn't been all bad but with a bigger team there were so many new mistakes to make and I made them all. I'm going to probably work on some stuff over the break that'll help the team out when we return. 

I've already scripted one new feature into the google sheet planner I just need to do that for anything I could possibly want in that. More importantly I need to make the video very soon, as in today. I'm going to possibly just ask for the bad footage if I need to. We need new footage for the video for the folks going to GDC. Even the bad footage is better than the really old footage.

I'm going to try to get some rest but I think It'd be easier to rest if I just do enough work to satisfy my self imposed debt to the team.

Semester 2: Post 6

Semester 2: Post 6

I spent last week with my nose down focusing on making the better presentation. I hit what was written on the check list of things that needed to be addressed in the presentation but I didn't sell that we had a plan moving forward. It seems that we really didn't. We were working on something better but I'd been too hands off leaving everything to the leads. People were working in isolation and I didn't want to disturb them in their hole. People have emerged from their holes now though.

We have a plan now. I was afraid to plan. I selected the members of this team because I respect them a lot and I didn't want to shackle them with my incompetent producering. In doing that I was incompetent. I wasn't ready to plan because I was waiting for the designers to produce good, solid documentation and in not making it clear that I wanted that I failed them again. It's not too late to be great but I'd say we've lost at least a week of good work in these weeks of playing it loose.

Semester 2: Post 5

It's been a while since I felt so much like shit. First the Greg LoPiccolo disaster, now the Greenlight debacle it's been a bad couple of weeks. I made a poor presentation for the greenlight, it didn't hit all the points and what's worse I spent a really long time on it. What kind of precedent am I setting for the team if I keep on failing to do my job well. I remember during the presentation seeing the other producer rub his face like my father did whenever I'd bring a report card home. I cannot let the team go on spring break with morale being this low.
There are a few things that could raise morale: The next presentation could be amazing, the playable boss fight could be very fun in the first iteration, I could talk to each individual team member to discover their concerns. I know one member is concerned about the writing and I hadn't heard about that until recently even though the concern has lingered. How can I overhaul the plot without hurting feelings? I need to take a more active role. I've left most of the departments to their own devices but I need to just be over 2 times the producer I was last semester.

Minor concern: bad things started happening after I shaved. Is my team going to associate bare faced Jacob with failure Jacob?

Semester 2: Post 4

Semester 2: Post 4

The meeting with the Harmonix guy went badly. I don't want to talk about it. I learned to overprepare for something that vital.

The time has come to abandon the idea of having all the backend stuff done first. It was a wonderful dream but it's been too long and the blueprints aren't all C++ yet. One of the programmer has moved on to gameplay programming and we'll just fix everything that breaks as we go along.
2 weeks from now we are going to have the boss playable, he might not be great but he'll be playable. 1 week from now we are challenging greenlight. It's been a while since I had to do a powerpoint presentation. I hope Edmar doesn't dislike my presentation style. I know I don't like my presentations but everyone else does. I've been in theater though during this semester so I probably won't choke during the presentation. 

Semester 2: Post 3

Semester 2: Post 3

Finally! Visible progress! New UI! New Lighting! 

I'm always thinking about Dan Shredder,Dan Shredder is my life. My life is finally picking up and becoming exciting again. However, we need to get those greenlight deliverables done soon. Greenlight is ambiguously on the horizon. We need to get that done soon but we also have a meeting with a creative director from Harmonix on Monday so we want to slam as much polish in as quickly as possible.

Semester 2: Post 2

Semester 2: Post 2

I know what we're doing next now. we're making the boss fight before we make level 2. It makes sense since the boss will 100% introduce new mechanics and the pacing of the music will be better planned out. I'm happy about knowing that much since we were rather unfocused until recently.

We will be seeing a lot of new stuff added to the build by post 3 and if not that is cause for alarm. We will hopefully have a new fret board in tomorrow. The assets are done they just need to be implemented.

Semester 2: Post 1

Semester 2: Post 1

Development has finally resumed and it's uncomfortably sluggish. A bigger team has more inertia, it takes longer to get the ball rolling, etc. I'm still feel a twinge in my stomach when I go to bed at night and know that we haven't made any visible changes to the build yet. Programmer have been working on cleaning things up and tools so that when pre-production on level two and new mechanics is done work will happen quickly. I might need to set a milestone limit on the pre-production though because while progress is being made it is slow. Any idea being locked down so that we can add it ti the game would be nice and would be good to keep morale up as well. I'm not super concerned yet but stress is mounting within me. I won't know if I'm mismanaging until later down the line but I definitely know that I'm taking a risk by allowing this much time in pre-production.