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.