Week 6

On Monday, we Anil, Ashley and Johnson visited University of Pittsburgh to meet with the Formula SAE adviser William. He was really helpful and provided us with the detailed description of how the competition works and also how the recruitment happens each year. He showed us the Formula SAE car that University of Pittsburgh built last year. He was gracious enough to answer all our questions and was of the opinion that teamwork and communication is of utmost importance because of the huge team size of thirty people and each sub-team controlling their own department. He was really helpful and offered to work with us if we needed more technical information.

Kanishk stayed back at the ETC to attend the client meeting because it was conflicting with the visit to University of Pittsburgh. The client meeting clarified some important questions that we had discussed as a team. Some of the key points that were discusses were that the client wants this as a proof of concept and wants to be able to demo it to various schools and companies. They don’t want a highly scalable version right now which will be launched to the masses. Also they liked the idea of extending game-play over a couple of days so that players have to log back in to finish their tasks. This means that they have to manage their time along with the other tasks they have in their daily life and due to dependencies they have to make sure they are not blocking other teammates from doing their work. We are also planning a visit to the client to show our prototype in November.

On Tuesday, the entire team visited the University of Pittsburgh Formula SAE team. We learnt a lot about their process and work and tasks are distributed in the team. They volunteered to help us out with the content of the game and also come play-test the game once we have our first digital prototype. They liked the initial paper prototype we came up with and said we were going in the right direction. We also worked on updating the website contents and adding all the development blogs on the website. The programmers also met to discuss the technical tasks among themselves.

On Wednesday, Kanishk worked on creating a document with our content that we can share with the University of Pittsburgh team and adviser so that they can edit to to be more technically accurate. The programmers looked more into the technical networking part and Ashley worked on researching on how the UI in the game should look.

On Thursday,  Ashley, Kanishk and Johnson visited Martha on main campus to discuss about how to incorporate teamwork and communication in our game. She gave us a lot of good ideas and also advised us to take her training which is on the CMU online learning initiative. It was really useful and we agreed on inviting her to play our prototype at a future date and provide  us with more feedback. We also had a meeting with Scott and Tom where we updated them with the quarters feedback and also what the goal was for the next sprint. The rest of the day was spent in head down work with Anil focusing on building the network architecture that would be the base for our game.

Friday started with a visit from EA to our project room. They said that we are in a challenging space to have an asynchronous game with multiple players involved. If we are successful in figuring it out we will be in great shape in terms of the project. We also had a quick catch up meeting with the team to discuss the next sprint. The rest of the was spent attending the weird reality conference and making sure that we focus on development during the next week.