Adventures in game development

 Good afternoon Internet!! I just wanted to share our third powerpoint presentation with you all. In this video I explain what we did wrong and what we still need to change. Enjoy!

Good evening Internet!!! I just wanted to share our second powerpoint presentation with you all. In this video I explain what we did wrong and what we still need to change. Enjoy!

Good afternoon Internet!!! So, I am going to share a video with you of a paper prototyping session we had for Feats of Enlightenment. Essentially, after we had done the Poker Planning, we needed to turn everything we had into a paper prototype so we could play test the game as early as possible. Myself and another individual took on the task of making a placeholder paper prototype of the game map. This video shows the process of us doing it and afterwards I will show what the final product looked like. And below is that the final prototype looked like. We did play test the prototype and it was actually quite fun, so I think we found a good sweet spot.

Good afternoon Internet!!! So, in the last entry you saw me failing horribly at being SCRUMM Master. Good times! This next sequence of videos was the second round of this session. I apologize ahead of time, but my camera died a portion of the way through recording this session, so you do not get to see it through to completion. Anyway, that was kind of the jist of what happened. I did learn a lot from this process however. Most importantly, I got a hands on, high stress, feel for how the whole process works... and how it falls apart and rapidly deteriorates if you do not have complete synergy. Another thing I learned was how the burn-up and burn-down charts work. I think I still have further to go with that, but I understood it much more after this session, then before, just reading and learning about it second hand. Anyway, Hope you guys are still enjoying and see you all next time.

Hello Internet!!! So, in the continuation of the last entry, we had to take the user stories from our poker planning session and make a paper prototype of our game. We had to take on roles for this task and I was given the role of SCRUMM Master. The following is the first session of me fulfilling this role. Enjoy.  As you can see, I make a lot of mistakes. I guess we will see if these get remedied in the second round.

Hello internet!!! So in class the two competing teams came together to learn about poker planning and we used my teams game to do so :) yay!!! We had created our user stories the week before (sorry, no video for this as it is proprietary information) but I did record a little bit of our poker planning. The following are parts 1 and 2 of our this session. The technology we are using to engage in this session is free and available for anyone to use Here

Good Afternoon internet! So, These two weeks we have a fun assignment. Our goal is to have a placeholder box for our game that we will use in any future presentations this semester. It must contain all the pertinent information (game description, images, partner info, title, etc...) and be professionally printed. Anyway, I have two main tasks I need to accomplish for this. The first being a elevator pitch, short game description overview and a catch phrase to sell the idea of the game. The other is I took it upon myself to create a partial placeholder level so we can put some screen caps up on the back side of the box. The following is a short video within the Unity 3D Editor to showcase what I have so far. Remember, this is ONLY a placeholder partial level for presentation purposes. I may end up making a second partial placeholder map with a completely different tile set/theme if I have time just to showcase some variety, but that will only happen if the time is available. ...

GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOD MORNING INTERNET!!!! Last night we had our 7th vidcon for Newbie Games.... and we actually had EVERYONE online.... but only for about 5 min or so (as always, I will post a link at the bottom to the vidcon AND as always, the vidcon is very much NSFW). Then we were back down to the core group. We also underwent some major changes within our team hierarchy. Most notably being, we dropped two more people from the group and I am no longer team leader. It was felt by the instructor that my team was becoming TOO  reliant on me as leader and that I was coddling them too much. Fair enough. There were certain people in the group that I repetitively gave the benefit of the doubt despite the facts presented to me. So, not my good friend Vett is the team lead. Also, my second in command stepped down due to failure to complete tasks in a timely manner. So, needless to say, everything is completely restructured. There is a detailed outline of the new team hierarchy on our f...

Good day internet!!! So I just wanted to share this with everyone. This GCD talk is, in my opinion, one of the most quintessential presentations ever given for the game development industry. I believe that everyone, both in the industry, but especially studying to be in the industry should watch it, take to heart AND put into practice the concepts discussed in this presentation. I personally make a point of watching it at least once (usually many more times) every month. I hope you enjoy.... Have a great day internet, Steve

I found this funny. Check it out.

This is just a supplimentry post to voice what I believe a developer should not do. A while ago I pre-ordered Titanfall on PC. Well, today EA and Respawn opened up pre-loading for the game when it releases on March 11th 2014. Well, much to my surprise, this is what came up when I attempted to install the pre-load.... 49.99 gigs for a preload! Really Respawn, REALLY?!? This is completely ridiculous! Now granted, my total HDD capacity on my machine is 1tb, but I do not have almost 50 gb to dedicate just to one game. I expect this out of a major MMO or something along that line, but for a simple competitive multiplayer game? Again, I ask, really Respawn? REALLY?!? This is just my opinion, but this is something that should not happen in the industry. At least not until the average HDD capacity is 2tb or more. From a production standpoint, this just seems like they did not even try to optimize the build for a more compressed size.  Now, it should be noted that I have not pla...

Good afternoon interwebs!!! So, today has been pretty much just Udacity training so far... and I'm killing it on the test sections. Following are some screen caps of my successful (and easy) quiz answers.... But first, the man, the myth, the legend.... Mr. Steve Blanks!!!! Here are just some of my answers (they are just so easy)...  Ok, so, the above photo is kind of a joke, but honestly, this is the easiest passing quiz I have ever taken! Finally, last post I talked about the 2nd survey my team and I sent out to target a specific demographic, and posted a screen cap of the survey and a link. So far we have about 18 responses and the data is yielding some interesting data. The following is screen cap of our initial metric data for it. Anyway, I will be posting again tonight after my teams weekly vidcon so until then, have a great day! Steve

Good evening interweb! Another warm and sunny day in Milwaukee, WI! …. Oh, wait.... I mean another cold and windy day..... Anyway, yesterday my team and I had our fourth vidcon and we really did not have that much serious to talk about honestly. As always, I will put a link to the vidcon in the bottom, and as always, it is NSFW. We made a couple of decisions, first and foremost being being we narrowed the two initial platform release options to PC and mobile. We also chose the targeted initial age group which will be 10-13. There were some other housekeeping things we took care of, but all and all it was a meeting.    I also got a few lesson plans into Udacity. Down below are some screen shots from that. It is pretty cool stuff, and I suggest it for anyone looking to get into the business.    Today, I also finished our final version of our second version of the target survey. Here is a screen shot of it, but I will also post a link at the botto...

Last night my team and I had our third video conference call, which was generally a success. We covered a lot of information and had some good laughs. I will attach a link with the conference call in mp3 format, however, be aware that it is NSFW due to profanity and suggestive conversational themes. The main topics of conversation were our teams facebook page and a survey to collect pertinent data to our business model canvas, created by myself and my COO, Chris Rich. We had some laughs, but also had to talk about some more serious items. One of our team members has accrued 2 reprimand accruals and if this trend continues, the need to cut him from the team may be present. All and all it was a productive team conference. Also, at the time of writing this, less than 24 hours since I finished creating the teams facebook page, we have 11 likes/followers and the survey has 16 responses since going live at approximately 1400 hours (2:00pm) today. Pretty good start. Link to the...

This post will recap my first few weeks of CSG intro 110. The first 10 minutes of the first day of class were amazing. The instructor was the kind of no bull shit instructor I have been wanting the whole time I have been enrolled at Milwaukee Area Technical College. Furthermore, he is also one of the most knowledgeable instructors in his field that I have seen to date. I am very much looking forward to this class. We were split up into two teams in this class. The goal of the teams is by the end of the semester we need to have created a game development company, create a new Intellectual Property and account for a year of development in both profits and losses. The winning team will be the team with the most profitable game. I was chosen as the team leader/CEO of the company. There are a few team members who have blown me away with their willingness to learn and contribute, but some that are not. Time will tell if this will lead to cutting people or not. Hopefully not. We voted...