End of Module Review

It's been a long time since the last entry and pretty much the entire module has finished and I failed to keep up a blog but I'm going to briefly go through whats happened in the last few months. The design document and tech document where both completed although numerous issues did arise with both of them.

Originally between the five of us the work would be split so that myself and Ian would do the tech document and the other three would do the design document but this quickly changed as the deadline for the design document came closer. I ended up working with the three doing the design document to get that in and even then I personally feel it wasn't a sufficient effort and preparation and communication was poor and this reflected in the design document.

In response to what had happened with the design document we decided as a group that we would all pitch in to the tech document. In the end the tech document was split up into numerous chunks and done by the different members of the team but not very evenly. One of my personal faults that I've been able to identify from this module is that when the group project deadlines come into sight I would rather do as much as possible myself rather than wait and see what anyone else would do. Something that was very apparent when putting together the summary of who did what in the tech document as I was the one that split it up and gave the different tasks out. "If you want something done right then you have to do it yourself" comes to mind just now and that tends to be my way going about group projects and its one I would like to change.

Reflecting back it has been quite disorganized and there's to many things to list that I would of done differently but I will end this by saying that I have definitely learned a lot from this experience that will be valuable for any future projects.

Week 6

In the last couple of weeks there has been quite a lot of changes in regards to the game design. We reviewed the game idea and decided we wanted to do something more interesting and fun in terms of storyline and game elements. It is going to keep an overhead perspective similar to games like 'The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past' and the first six Final Fantasy games. We had originally planned to go along with a fairly simplistic storyline but after rethinking it decided to fill it up to be more entertaining.

At this point in time a brief introduction to the game is this. The games protagonist, at this point named Simon, is a young and ordinary guy who is still living with his parents when one day he receives a strange letter through the post. The letter tells him that he has won a house in the town from which the letter was sent. He decides to take a chance and goes to the town where he has indeed won a house. He is welcomed warmly and he enjoys the town and its people. He makes the decision to stay for a while and that's when things begin to go strange. As the days go past more and more things start to happen. The townspeople say strange things, he is catching glimpses of figures in the mirrors, he hears footsteps outside his window at night. Before Simon knows it he is caught up in a bizarre and frantic adventure to discover what is happening in the town, but soon finds he is only scratching the surface of a history of violence and darkness within the town.

A few minor details are to be added to clear the story up but the idea has been solidified along with the game play elements. The group has split the work on the design document and the technical document and both of these are being worked on in different chunks for each member. We will then go over each others work and collaborate it all together and then revise it and tidy it to be ready.

The First Few Weeks.

It has been about three weeks into the module and various things have been happening in regards to our group (FADC ULTRA) on many different aspects. The game design started out with two or three ideas, one idea in particular went pretty far but within a week we came to the decision that it would be to ambitious for our abilities. We were looking into Unity at this point but after talking to Dr J, the better choice has been to move things to using C# and XNA. Everyone else in the group apart from myself has got experience using both of these in games creation so it was a logical choice to move away from Unity in favor of a more programming focus in C# since we are all in Computer Games Technology.

The game idea swung from RPG to Fighter and currently is leaning more towards an RPG game where we can mess about with different kinds of code. Currently we are all looking back to past projects that were made for the other guys College course in C# and XNA to get re-familiarized with C# and begin getting into proper coding and fleshing out a more solid game design.