Quandary 23/10/2013

After discussion with the team, it became apparent that I needed to cut up the in game music into three 30 second songs. This would insure that the music didn’t become repetitive in a 10-30 second level. I created the assets according and showed Will, which he was pleased with. This week has been okay, or I should say up until last night. We thought we were ahead of the curve, but when it came to presentations last night nothing really built properly. It turned out a lot of the groups are behind as well, which Justin wasn’t happy about. Really, it was all about our code. All the assets are there, they just need to be put together properly. I told Will that I legitimately felt bad for Josh, who’s pressured into figuring it all out by Thursday/Friday. It made me really think about my role in this team. I know that, for some reason, I’m put in a position where I can’t help when it comes to implementation of the actual game. Will has been good at just doing what he needs to do for the game, and Josh has been great in coding. So they’re a good duo together. I feel like during crunch time, I need to be around with the team all the time even if I’m not doing much work. Once they’ve finished debugging and making sure the game runs, they’ll input my sounds. Almost all sounds are 100% but I’m just worried some sound effects won’t fit. It shouldn’t take long to fix those up if that does happen. Until then, I’ve just been fixing up my documentation and thinking of new posters.

Quandary 18/10/2013

This week, I began making some new sounds. The music I had produced earlier wouldn’t work with the new grid movement system so I created two new songs for menu and in-game and also finalised the sound effects so that Josh can put them in the game, which he hasn’t done yet but I’m waiting for him to do it so that if any of them don’t fit, I can edit them according. The game overall is on the right track, we should be ready to build next week, unfortunately we didn’t this week.

Quandary 10/10/2013

It’s been a full week since my last update, which I think is a solid way to update this journal so I can just summarize the week. Everything is going quite well. Will has just finished the grid code so we actually have movement, although I’m unsure on iOS. Josh is making excellent progress on the new menu. And I’ve been working on some levels. The level design process has been really challenging, I read an article about a guy creating a portal level with the level builder Valve created. He had a general idea of what he wanted to do but when he got to making the idea he found it to be too easy. So he kept adding on elements so it became more difficult, the more he added, the more he made his friend test to see if it was challenging, and the result was brilliant. I didn’t expect to learn anything from the article, but the more I read the more it easier to make challenging puzzle levels. Not to say that it’s now easy to make my levels challenging, but it helped with the process. The thing with Quandary is, we don’t have portals to play with, infact we don’t really have anything to make puzzles with. So I took the liberty of making pressure plates after thinking about it for a while. I was thinking of adding more but I feel like just the one mechanic can make the game fun. These pressure plates activate a variety of things in Quandary, for example one can activate a door and another can add time to your progress. This has made it much more fun to design levels, I can be a bit more creative. However I haven’t shown the team yet, so tonight I’ll be showing my progress to them. The game overall is going well. We’re on track. Next week we’re expecting to have a non bugged build running fully on the app store, so hopefully all goes well. I’m actually quite excited.

Quandary 03/10/2013

So after the holidays, the began our preparation for the alpha. I reported in with Will and Josh and they didn’t seem to have as much done as I would have thought. It turns out after the presentations that most teams were a bit behind. I feel that the holidays distracted us, we had too much “free” time and we took it for granted. However after the presentations I feel that we were a bit more motivated for the next 5 weeks that we have left. The most fleshed out thing we have right now is the main menu which is fantastic. Will’s progress with the grid movement system has been awesome, which is basically moving via a square grid on screen. I’ve been working on levels inside Unity, I got the assets from Josh. I’ve made about 3 or 4 prototype levels just to get the idea, so I’ll probably show everyone tonight. These next weeks are going to be full on.

Quandary 25/09/2013

I haven’t updated in 11 days, I’ve been quite lazy with this thing. Really I’ve been enjoying my holidays, but that hasn’t stopped me completely from doing work. It’s really more about the fact that I’m not really involved in the technical aspect of the game. Josh and Will are putting it all together and I’ve been trying to keep myself busy.

Quandary 14/09/2013

For the rest of the week, we began just applying some polish on the game. All the assets were in unity now and it’s time to prepare for the Alpha. Will and Josh handle most of the actual implementation but I’m usually there as kind of a brainstormer for how certain things should be layed out (like the menu). It’s great that we’ve prepared so early with all the assets, I feel confident that the alpha in 2 weeks time will be something that people really enjoy playing.

Quandary 11/09/2013

Earlier this week I was told to gather up as many decent songs as I could and sound effects to put in the game to test. I gave my team a usb with all said files on it and had to run out due to personal family issues. They enjoyed most of them but thought they were a bit too sharp and loud. So I’ll have to fix that up next. I feel like I haven’t talked enough about the overall progress of the game, so better late then never. The game I feel is going well as a game. The touch input is something we’re stressing about so much, not just to get it working, but for it to be fun as well. A while back I threw an idea to Will about having a pad with arrows in 8 directions. The player would tap whichever they wanted and would move one block (jumping included). Yesterday, Will said he was having problems with the joystick and Justin basically pitched the same thing. So we’re going for that now. I felt like I should’ve been insulted in some way but honestly I didn’t care, Justin was a more reliable source of idea giving. Will asked if everyone was okay with the idea, which I said yes to obviously. The joystick would make the player feel like it was the games fault that he/she was failing. Which it would’ve been.