Week Five: Weighing In

Summary

This was a big week for our project because week five at the ETC is Quarter Presentations. This is one of three main presentations given by project teams throughout the semester. During quarters, faculty spread throughout the building in pairs visiting project rooms. Each team stands up and gives an overview of their project; some of their goals, needs, and obstacles. The faculty then ask a few questions and give some feedback for the teams, then move on to another project’s room.

Most of the beginning of the week was preparation for quarters. Art helped pull together some concept pieces, and helped organize and format the slide presentation. Design/Production worked on putting together presentation content, some of the design ideas, and organized rehearsals for the team on Monday and Tuesday. Programming didn’t have as much to do with getting ready for the presentation, so their focus was more on Twitch integration and working on connecting HTML to Twitch and sending and receiving messages through Lumberyard.

The setting time aside for quarters is also putting a bit more pressure on the team since next week we have a milestone of a operating tech demo, as well as some art assets, to take to GDC. Our goal of having them done by next week gives us a day or two to be able to check and do some testing before we leave. The artists were pushed back a bit this week leaving a smaller window to get their goals done, so it will be important for them to be able to focus in and have everything ready to show off to our client (and other professionals) at the conference. Programming has their own set of challenges as their milestone is to have a “playable” tech demo that shows off the fact that they have a connection from the HTML5 interface to Lumberyard and established a full pipeline architecture moving forward.

While it’s been a long week, we’ve still had quite a few things moving along our scrum board. Here are some of the tasks moving this week:

Design/Production
– Quarter Presentation Content (completed)
– Quarter Presentation Practice (completed)
– Quarters! (completed)
– Design Doc [verbs] (completed)
– Animation list [main character] (completed)
– Environment References (completed)
– Contact HCI Researcher (completed)
– Notes Log (completed)
– Design Doc for Deity 1 (in progress)
– Website Content (in progress)
– Concept Art References (in progress)
– Quarters Sitdowns (in progress)
– Milestone Stickies (in progress)

Art
– Concept Art: Character Coloring (completed)
– Environment Concept re-Worked (in progress)
– Environment Concept finished (in progress)
– Quarter’s Presentation Art (completed)
– Quarter’s Presentation Slides (completed)
– Character Unwrap (completed)
– Character Model (completed)
– Character Texture (in progress)
– High-Poly Sculpt (in progress)

Programmers
– Research Twitch HTML5 (completed)
– Environment Planning, Interaction Maps (completed)
– Twitch Begin Layout (completed)
– Learn JQuery/PhP (completed)
– Get PhaseJS and Play Around with it for Input (completed)
– Design of Viewer Minigame (completed)
– Set Up Team Project (in progress)
– API Fixing Bugs (in progress)
– Finish Mini Game Back End without Art (in progress)
Some questions that have been raised are:
– Why Install the whole Lumberyard Engine in Perforce instead of just the project?
– Other ways to make Twitch talk to Lumberyard apart from chat
– Get viewer info and check whose message it is seems unclear in the API
– Control the water in game engine that spawns on loading the engine

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