Pre-Tradeshow Meeting

The last week has been quite busy, we proofread the entire technical documentation in an afternoon and completed a large number of things we had left to do over the past week. We are still making changes even after submitting the "final" version so that the tradeshow version performs optimally.

Today we had our last real meeting since the tradeshow is on Thursday. We went through the technical doc to make sure we understood things and we're going to do the final work required tomorrow.

It seems like everything has wrapped up nicely, which is great!

Tonight's Skype Meeting

With less than a week until the tradeshow, we have started to really buckle down with our work. Tonight, we all attended a meeting over Skype which was very productive. I nearly completely revamped the Options screen and it looks pretty awesome now, and I also fixed the ingame Pause menu and the Postmatch Statistics screen up and they are functioning and looking a bit better now. Jordan is making a lot of progress on the AI and Ryan and Vince are working on the fighting engine.

We have created a to-do list and are actively ticking things off and adding things when we find them. I am fairly confident that we will finish on time provided we keep up this level of work from here on in. Looking forward to the final product and the tradeshow!

Skype Meeting

This week we had yet another meeting over Skype where we made some progress. I have had some issues with setting up Visual Studio and XNA on my new computer but I did some work on the story mode dialogue during the meeting.

Things will be drawing to a close relatively soon, and hopefully everything will be wrapped up nicely by then!

Update

I recently got a new computer, so I have been spending quite a lot of time building it, setting it up, and installing things on it. My upcoming Sensei work will include updating the User Manual to reflect what has changed, and fixing bugs here and there. Progress seems to be solid, with lots of great new art being added lately. Everything is looking a lot better going into the final weeks.

Hopefully we won't be too rushed in the last few weeks and everything will be done in time!

Somewhat Close to Completion

Things seem to be progressing nicely going into the last few weeks, and we now have the game done to a reasonably complete standard. It is playable, but still missing a fair portion of the modes and stuff. The majority of the functionality of the UI is now completed, but there is still quite a bit to do in order to make it more flashy, and I think most of the current screens will change the way they look considerably by the time we reach the final product. Hopefully we'll have enough time to finish all of that, though I think a lot of that will be Jordan's work since he is the one with by far the most art experience from what I can tell.

The Options menu is basically complete, just requiring an upgrade in the textures and how it looks. I think Jordan will do the providing of the art and stuff, I might be responsible for some minor adjustments like maybe a border or something. I'm hoping I can contribute to story mode somehow since that is one semi-major thing we need to do. I can hopefully also give ideas about balancing the game, though I am sure we will all have input on that.

Our demonstration with Luke went as planned which was good, hopefully our external testing next week will go just as well.

New Documentation and Options Screen stuff

This week our group is presenting what we've accomplished to our supervisor (Luke), although he basically already knows since he has been paying attention to what we've been doing both on our blogs and in our weekly meetings with him. Nevertheless, we hope to have some new stuff to show off to him on Thursday.


I myself have been doing some work on updating the UI section of the technical documentation and am working on implementing the interface and functionality of the options screen. I also plan to make some modifications to some various screens based on the updates to the technical documentation and get a few screens up to date with our goals. There had been some various changes in the functionality of certain screens, so I was able to correct that in the documentation.

We seem to be making solid progress going into the last six weeks, so hopefully we will have a polished game by the end of session!

New Main Menu Screen and upcoming stuff

Today I did a redesign of the Main Menu screen to make it look quite similar to how it will look when the final game is done, minus art. Descriptive text for the currently selected button is displayed at the bottom of the screen, and the buttons were repositioned to where they will be located in the final version of our game.

Tomorrow I am planning to make the Character Selection screen work for Story Mode and get the File Select Screen "working" for the AI training mode. Additionally there will be a group meeting tomorrow since we didn't get around to our meeting agenda during the work meeting today.

New Screens Updates

I have begun to work on the UI a bit more during the past few days, and the work amount is only expected to increase once I get assignments from other subjects out of the way. The progress I have made is that I have started to tune up the Character Select Screen and the Title Screen. Soon the Character Select Screen will be very close to its final design, lacking only the final art and containing all necessary functionality.

The main functionality that needs adding to the Character Select Screen is the ability to load an AI to face, and I will need to think carefully about whether having a single class or multiple classes is the best option for the character select screens of different modes, considering that the screens for other modes will have different options to the Quick Fight mode.

The game is progressing along nicely, with Ryan and Vince making a lot of headway on the fighting engine, and Jordan working a lot on the modeler and making sure we are on track. Things are shaping up quite well, though we are a little behind at the moment.

Tuesday W4 Work Meeting

Today, I worked on new screens (the title screen and post match screen), as well as the credits screen. The screens are fully navigable but are not complete yet since they are still pretty plain. Hopefully in the next week or so the screens will go through dramatic aesthetic improvements.


We also had our weekly work meeting where we checked out all of the work that each of us has done during the past week, and reviewed the project plan and our blogs. Some of the major improvements are that the quick fight battles can now be controlled separately, and Jordan's modeller is coming along very nicely.

More work to come soon!

Update

It has been a while since I have posted, but meetings have continued and progress is being made on the fighting engine and Jordan's modeller. I have been tasked with the job of fixing up and implementing the menu interfaces of the game, and I am also paying attention to the way the fighting engine works and how it is being implemented.

Now that I am taking CSCI356, I will be gaining valuable experience in XNA that I previously didn't have, which should enable me to become a much stronger asset on our team. This is great, since I have felt as though I haven't been able to contribute as much as I would have liked.

In the coming weeks, I plan to make significant improvements to the currently lackluster menus, to make them as close as possible to what we have planned for them to look like when the project is complete.

Post-Exam Meeting

We held our first meeting in several weeks a few days ago. We talked about our availability for the rest of the holidays and what we should be doing during them. I chose to continue working on the menus and interfaces to make sure they look as close to what they are supposed to look like as possible. We are going to keep in touch via email and IMs. I have had a semi-busy couple of days but should be able to get my assigned work done sometime soon.

If everything goes to plan, we should be on track according to our schedule.

End of Session Update

Since the work from other subjects is beginning to pile up and exams are just around the corner, there hasn't been much time to work on Sensei stuff. However, our meetings have continued and we are still close to being on schedule with our plans.

Shortly, I should be doing some more documentation, this time to do with screen connectivity. That will probably wait until I make some significant progress towards completing other subjects' assignments, though.

Stub Screen Implementation and Connectivity

I have been having health problems lately so I haven't been able to get as much work done as I would have liked, but I am starting to catch up on it now. I spent an hour or so fixing up the screens in the project so that they can be navigated somewhat well. It isn't really fully connected yet and only shows some text and a coloured background for each screen, but it is better than nothing.

I plan to do some more technical documentation work on the screen connectivity sometime soon, hopefully in time for the preliminary technical documentation submission on Friday. Meetings have continued on schedule and regular meetings with Luke have been happening as well. Increased workloads due to it being the end of session has made it a bit more difficult to get project work done for all of us though.

Screen Tech Doc Done

I forgot to blog about it when I finished, but I did some technical documentation work on the User Interface section, specifically about two pages on five different screens. It has now been added to the main Tech Doc file (thanks Jordan) and it looks good there. What I wrote may need  to be revised later on depending on whether or not some of the ideas behind it change, but I think the general structure will remain as I wrote it.


Hoping to get some more work done in the group meeting tomorrow at 3pm, and I will probably write a blog post about that on Wednesday. If all goes well then I will get some work done on the user interface stub classes.

Technical Manual Progress

Today, I completed several sections of the technical manual that I was assigned to by Jordan. These included a section on the Project Members, a section on the Core Technologies and Operating Environment, and a section on Quality Assurance Procedures. These are preliminary sections and are likely to undergo further revisions in the future, but they do a good job of representing what we have currently achieved.

There will be a group meeting today where we will organise the next week's work which will probably include more technical manual information and user interfaces. Later today I will also be completing a tutorial Jordan prepared on using an engine he wrote for MS Visual Studio 2010 / XNA that we will be using to develop the project.

Things seem to be running smoothly as usual. Hopefully when we start coding things will continue to run smoothly.

Update

The mid session recess is now over, and the project continues to be on track. Unfortunately, I was unable to make the meeting we had scheduled today because I was too sick to attend. However, I did attend yesterday's meeting where we looked over how our project is structured and the modules of the project we were all going to be involved with. Ryan and I will be focusing on the fighting engine and doing much of the programming for that section using XNA. We also did a bit of discussion on the documentation side of things, and worked out what kinds of documentation and diagrams we might need for which section of the technical documentation.

User Manual Sections Done

Just finished writing my allocated sections of the User Manual. Hopefully the rest of the group likes what I have written! I was responsible for the content in the Main Menu and Game Modes sections of the manual. I kept the Main Menu parts short and to the point, and I expanded and gave more thorough descriptions in the Game Modes section. Ryan will be putting my stuff together with the rest of the group's, since he is the main person in charge of the User Manual.

In other news, there was no meeting this week due to the mid-session recess. Next week we will be back in action and I'll be sure to post another update after that meeting, and possibly before it too.

Progress

Yesterday we had an extra meeting in order to attempt to finalise the functional requirements of our project. As usual, we all attended and gave our input on various aspects. We made progress on the functional and non functional requirements, started to choose design aspects of the characters that will be present in our game, and went over our project timeline together to work out whether what Jordan has come up with will work or not. We all seemed happy with what he has laid out for us. I don't have a problem with doing extra work during the mid year break if it means our workload is lessened during session, especially since I will be taking a full 4 subjects next session as opposed to the 3 I am taking this session.

Today we are going to have another meeting where we will go over some website stuff, further screen design aspects, and split up documentation work that needs to be done. We are definitely well on our way to producing a successful project, as far as I can tell!

Week 3/4 Semester 1 Update

In the week 3 meeting we started getting into a little more detail with the design of our game. We have determined quite a lot about what we want our final product to include and we have even started to design the screens. Vince has made a nice battle screen and Ryan has gotten our documentation format done. I am in the process of designing the rest of the game's screens and menus, and hopefully I will do a good job of that. Right now I have gotten what I think would be a good idea based on my experience with games down in text form. Jordan has updated the website even more with brief information about how we all plan to contribute to the project and has even put caricatures up which are pretty great. He has also made sure we keep up our working by continuing the task sheet trend which has been quite successful so far.

The meeting I talked about in the previous post on this blog was rescheduled and completed thanks to Jordan, and we now have TortoiseSVN set up and ready to use from our home computers, which should be yet another huge boost for our organisation purposes.

Everything seems to be going very well so far and I am completely satisfied with our progress.

Update

So far, pretty much everything is progressing smoothly and according to plan. I guess an exception to this is the planned meeting yesterday that didn't go ahead because of the flooding near Albion Park, but obviously that is none of our faults. Jordan managed to get a website up and running very quickly, and has planned out the entirety of this semester by having goals for the group to meet for each week. He has been doing a good job of keeping us organised, and has made sure we are all on the same page and aware of what we need to be doing. I am sure the meeting we missed will be rescheduled to a time pretty soon, so that won't be a problem. I wasn't around for most of our first meeting with Luke, but I heard about the outcomes and I intend to be there for today's meeting.

As for keeping in contact with one another, we have set up a Google Wave which all of us seem to be able to check regularly without any issues. And of course, there is also the email system which, to my knowledge, we have all got forwarding to an easy-to-check and regularly used address. I doubt there will be any communication problems whatsoever during the course of the year, which is definitely a huge plus for us.


Overall, things are looking good so far, and we haven't run into any real problems. Hopefully it stays that way!

I now have a blog!

I haven't really used a blog before, but it seems pretty easy. So far we have had one meeting but we have already started sorting out the roles for our project.