Blog Hours

This page contains my dev-blog information, where I break down my weekly hours, overall highlighting what I accomplished each week.

Continue reading to see how my hours are broken down for the Pre-Alpha I Sprint.

Pre-Alpha 1 Sprint (Oct. 4th, 2021 - Oct. 17th, 2021)

Week 1: ? Total Work Hours

*Oct. 4th - Monday: N/A

*Oct. 5th - Tuesday: N/A

*Oct. 6th - Wednesday: 1 Hour total, From 8:30pm - 9:30pm ET I attended a WolverineSoft Studio Playtesting session, where both Project Tower and Project Bloom were reviewed for feedback.

*Oct. 7th - Thursday: 2 Hours total, I attended the WolverineSoft Mass Meeting from 7pm - 9pm ET.

*Oct. 8th - Friday: 30 Minutes total, From 7:30pm - 8pm ET I made some comments about Narrative Design with the team and looked over the Studio slides.

*Oct. 9th - Saturday: 3 Hours total, for 45 minutes I had a meeting with Design Director Brandon Schulz and Game Designer Matthias Claassen about: Dungeon Objective and Game Design Documentation Strategies for 45 minutes I worked on my Devblog website and did the following: Experimented with Programming More in Visual Studio Studied a bit of HTML terminology and updated my not working "Generic" webpage, getting it to work again by tweaking the code for 1.5 hours I updated and organized the Dungeon Objectives Game Design document where I did the following: Color-coded certain categories Organized bullet points into sections based on Department category Standardized the font stylings to match other Game Design documents Created 1st Dungeon Objective Blueprint (so people from other departments reading the extensive document could have a short and quick summary of the 1st Dungeon Objective) Brainstormed and Combined Dungeon Objective suggestions from everyone I had talked to, retaining what I thought were good ideas

*Oct. 10th - Sunday: ? Hours total, I attended the weekly WolverineSoft Studio 11am - 1pm ET meeting on Sundays for 2 hours.

Week 2:

*Oct. 11th - Monday: N/A

*Oct. 12th - Tuesday: 0.5 Hour total, I had a 30 minute conversation with our Narrative Lead from 6:20pm - 6:50pm ET. N/A

*Oct. 13th - Wednesday: N/A

*Oct. 14th - Thursday: N/A

*Oct. 15th - Friday: 4 Hours total, From 6pm - 10pm ET I participated in the WolverineSoft 2021 Pumpkin Game Jam! In this I formed a team with Nikhil Ghosh, began work on the core design of the game, re-installed Unreal Engine 4.26, and made rapid BFXR sound effects.

*Oct. 16th - Saturday: 8 Hours total, From 10am - 6pm ET I enlisted the help of my brother, gave him tasks to do for level design and audio design (concerning SFX), finished up some of my design concepts, created the labyrinthine level, coordinated with Nikhil for programming constraints for our time limit. If I did any further work after this I have no photo evidence or memory recollection of it. --

*Oct. 17th - Sunday: 11 Hours total, On Sunday from 9am - 6pm ET I created the main song, attended the shortened 1 hour WolverineSoft Studio meeting, tweaked the level like crazy, playtested a bit so the game was playable, wrote up the narrative, received and mixed the sound effects my brother sent over, and created the art cover for the project (in like 20 minutes from a screenshot). After 6pm I playtested several game jam games made by other teams from 7pm - 9pm. --

*

PRE-ALPHA SPRINT 1 RECAP:

TOTAL NUMBER OF HOURS FOR THE PAST 2 WEEKS:

*Target Number of Hours: 30 Hours (for 5 Academic Credits 15 Hours Per Week, 9 Hours * 2 Weeks = 30 Hours)

*Hours Achieved During this Sprint: ? Hours (? from Week 1 + 23 from Week 2 = ? Hours)

IMAGE AND VIDEO EVIDENCE (in the Form of Links Because I'm Still Learning how to program in HTML, plan to update this soon):

*Dungeon Objectives Documentation: https://studio.eecs.umich.edu/confluence/display/PWW2/Dungeon+Objectives

*Enemy Design Philosophy Documentation: https://studio.eecs.umich.edu/confluence/display/PWW2/Enemy+Design+Philosophy

*Enemy Design Reference Documentation: https://studio.eecs.umich.edu/confluence/display/PWW2/Enemy+Design+Reference

*Google Document with Image and Video Evidence: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1H8zUXh4uXvzT9pefMQkfMqmVCCzorngUQfJ99CwOtNE/edit?usp=sharing

BUGS AND PROBLEMS ENCOUNTERED:

*Slow movement in Unity (due to lack of having a Mouse, laptop Mousepad is not ideal)

*Speed of 1st Dungeon Objective Greyboxxing (again due to lacking a Computer Mouse for my laptop)

*Balancing project hours in Week 2 (I completed all of them in the final 2 days)

TIME MANAGEMENT STRATEGIES USED:

*Organized-time strategy of even distribution throughout the week (Week 1)

*Combining brainstorming sessions with documentation in real time

*Incubator-time strategy of doing most/all of week's work in 1-2 days (Week 2)

SUCCESSFUL TASKS:

*Dungeon Objective Documentation (Artist Natalie Neumann almost perfectly drew what I envisioned in my head, seeing those drawings were amazing)

*Communication between multiple departments (got feedback, listened to, and incorporated ideas from each of the 4 departments)

*Keeping up with WolverineSoft Studio hours and maintaining overall grades in heavy University of Michigan class courseload (total is 18 credits this semester)

UNSUCCESSFUL TIME INVESTMENTS:

*Using some of my greyboxxing time trying to get a working player in it (we already had player drafts in the main "cloudinterior" project files)

*Lack of tutorial organization (should be watching these in order, this didn't hurt in the short-term but probably will in the long-term if I continue watching tutorials without viewing them in a planned order)

*I overall don't feel like too much of my time was wasted.

STRATEGIES FOR IMPROVING IN FUTURE SPRINTS:

*Distributing time more evenly throughout the week

*Using more time going over tutorials

*Using more time to research ideas

*Continuing to format this website, continuously updating Blog Post formats, immediate focus on learning how to add/embed images

*Learning more about Documentation styles, incorporate more images and take out rough draft notes eventually