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.

Mid-Pre-Beta 1--Mid-Pre-Beta 2 (March 22nd, 2021 - April 4th, 2021)

Week 1: 6 Total Work Hours

*Mar. 22nd - Monday: 1.25 Hours total, For 30 minutes I researched about gameplay loops and quickly read over the New Design Cheat Sheet document. For 45 minutes I had a meeting with Producer Amber Renton, Game Design Director Brandon Schulz, and fellow Level-Design Game Designer Manuel Guzman. We talked about how the recent scope reductions would impact Dungeon Objectives and overall the studio's gameplan.

*Mar. 23rd - Tuesday: N/A

*Mar. 24th - Wednesday: N/A

*Mar. 25th - Thursday: N/A

*Mar. 26th - Friday: N/A

*Mar. 27th - Saturday: 1.75 Hours total, For 1 hour I reviewed my week's goals, began work on the Ultimate Dungeon Objective Design document, caught up with others' work, and once again organized the Dungeon Objective Documents. For another 0.75 hours I worked on the Ultimate Dungeon Objective Design document and reviewed the article I had previously read about Gameplay Loops.

*Mar. 28th - Sunday: 3 Hours total, For 1.5 hours I attended the WolverineSoft Studio weekly meeting, the level-design pod meeting, met with fellow Level-Design Game Designer Manuel Guzman to talk about Level Design, and in one more short meeting/work session pitched my Ultimate Dungeon Objective ideas to Programming Director Nigel Charleston and Audio Director Logan Hughes for feedback. For 1.5 hours I brainstormed further on the Ultimate Dungeon Objective ideas, put the ideas down briefly in the level-design pod for feedback, and crafted the Ideas document to rough draft completion.

Week 2: 17 Total Work Hours

*Mar. 29th - Monday: N/A

*Mar. 30th - Tuesday: 1.75 Hours total, For 1.75 hours I worked on updating this website, fixed the social media links (except Twitter, I don't have a Twitter yet), organized Blog Post Webpages in HTML with correct text and organization of pages.

*Mar. 31st - Wednesday: 4.5 Hours total, For 0.25 hours I worked on the Ultimate Dungeon Objective Design document. For another 2 hour session I worked on the Ultimate Dungeon Objective Design document. For 1 hour I attended the Video Game Music Club weekly meeting to listen and attempt to make some game music (had problems with my DAW unfortunately, so didn't contribute much in that session). For 1.25 hours I worked even further on the Ultimate Dungeon Objective Design document.

*Apr. 1st - Thursday: 1.25 Hours total, For 1.25 hours I updated my website slightly and organized some of my screenshots I've taken for this project up to this point (1,500+ screenshots, wow!)

*Apr. 2nd - Friday: 0.75 Hours total, For 0.75 hours I met with Game Design Director Brandon Schulz and Programmer Nikhil Ghosh about Dungeon Objective Brainstorming as well as learning about UI updates.

*Apr. 3rd - Saturday: 4.25 Hours total, For 1.25 hours in the early morning I worked on my website. For 1.25 hours I continued organizing my 1,500+ screenshots in folders that while don't visually show on the website are part of the Visual Studio Code files that makes up this website. For 1.75 hours I worked on the Ultimate Dungeon Objective Design document and for a short chunk of the time in seeing previews in Discord of others' studio work.

*Apr. 4th - Sunday: 4.5 Hours total, For 0.5 hours I attended the weekly WolverineSoft Studio meeting. I let the studio know in advance I would be 30 minutes late, and I made it on time for an important Game Design meeting. For 1.0 hour I met with Game Design Director Brandon Schulz and Artist Grace Ma afterwards to discuss more about the Dungeon Objective, get help for re-downloading CloudInterior so I could access the updated version, checked out Grace's Enemy Disintegration VFX, and a tiny bit on working on updating this website. For 3.0 hours I recorded blog entries for the 3rd Sprint (still hadn't done that, had notes on a Word document that I add to whenever I do something for this project showing what I did when), recorded blog entries for the 4th Sprint (this one), and overall worked on fixing the website (while making progress still need to work on this, especially with the pictures problem).

*

MID-PRE-BETA 1--MID-PRE-BETA 2 RECAP:

TOTAL NUMBER OF HOURS FOR THE PAST 2 WEEKS:

*Target Number of Hours: 18 Hours (for 3 Academic Credits 9 Hours Per Week, 9 Hours * 2 Weeks = 18 Hours)

*Hours Achieved During this Sprint: 21 Hours (6 from Week 1 + 17 from Week 2 = 23 Hours)

*By doing these extra 3 hours, I have successfully made up for the lost time from the prior Sprint (I was short 2.5 hours in the last sprint)

IMAGE AND VIDEO EVIDENCE

Again I do not have much video evidence, yet I have a plethora of image evidence in a pool of 1,500+ screenshots to draw upon to show my work. Next sprint I absolutely plan to use video evidence.

BUGS AND PROBLEMS ENCOUNTERED:

*Problem: Due to Scope Limitations, Had to re-work the Ultimate Dungeon Objective Design multiple times.

*Problem: Recovering from the last Sprint's lack of time as well as having a very tough first week (I clutched U of M's first-ever Michigan Entrepreneurship Conference held by MPowered Entrepreneurship--UMich's Flagship Entrepreneurship Student Organization--by being brought on to help market product, help setup event logistics, lock down two of our speakers both on the days of the event, and moderate one of the speakers

*Bug: I couldn't access the game with its latest changes. Fortunately got help from Game Director Brandon Schulz on 04/04/2021, and can playtest again.

*Bug: After organizing my screenshot files for this website blog, some of my images disappeared from prior posts due to failing to update the code to pull them from their new locations (so currently the code has inaccurate information to draw the pictures from, and thus fails to display the images). I'll update the code for these changes soon so those images pop up again.

TIME MANAGEMENT STRATEGIES USED:

*Planning ahead of time (I knew I'd be super busy the first week this week and that I needed extra hours because I was behind from last sprint and since my dungeon objective design is imperative for the studio by the end of this sprint)

*Communicating when I needed help and not over-committing to more than I could do.

*Having a strategy for how to create the Ultimate Dungeon Objective Design (first focusing on ideas, obtaining feedback from members, completing a draft version, communicating to figure out scope obstacles, rinse and repeat until had product at end of sprint)

SUCCESSFUL TASKS:

*Ultimate Dungeon Objective Design (Super Success in my Mind, Very Complete and Feel Good About It)

*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

UNSUCCESSFUL TIME INVESTMENTS:

*Purusing a legendary Ultimate Dungeon Objective Design idea (would maximize the game's level-generator; nonetheless, despite its simple implementation, we decided against it since we felt that due to the short time left it would not have its due justice; to see what idea I'm talking about, look at idea #3 in the "(Ideas) Ultimate Dungeon Objective" document in Confluence).

*Organizing screenshot image files for my website (this caused an inadvertant bug where many of my images disappeared, and I'll have to update the code; however, this time investment was still necessary for my website and organization of screenshots of work efforts in this project).

*This week I strongly felt that my time was used wisely. That Ultimate Dungeon Objective Design is as good as it can get for this game in my opinion, barring minor changes to it in the upcoming sprint.

STRATEGIES FOR IMPROVING IN FUTURE SPRINTS:

*Distributing time more evenly throughout the week (Failed this for the first week, nailed it for the second week of this sprint, confident I can continue this trend)

*Using more time going over tutorials (specifically for HTML, still haven't gotten around to this much)

*Using more time to research ideas (Succeeded in this sprint at this objective for Gameplay loops)

*Continuing to format this website, continuously updating Blog Post formats, this is still an urgent goal of mine

*Still on learning more about Documentation styles, glad to see my work get featured again in this Sprint, definitely a confidence booster

*Spend some of my Sprint time on specifically organizing past website progress (this is mega urgent now that I need to fix code to get prior post pictures back up again)