Life is a roller coaster...

A few weeks ago the "Serious Gordon" Project (I don't think it ever got a proper replacement name) finished up, now with some time to reflect on the project, I'm ready to share my opinions on it.

11 weeks on, after a slow start and a few changes of direction the final game was compiled (in glorious High Definition) and the source files and a video, showing the game running, was archived and saved.

Looking back on it there are probably things that could have been differently, to yield an even better final product.

Things like having an artist inboard from day one, using a CVS from the beginning, have a better idea of what the project deliverable would be from the beginning and of course having PCs which don't crash every 15 minutes.

However I think that you can only make a decision based on the information you have at the time, and it is pointless looking back on it and thinking "what if". However I do feel that it is vital to note what could have improved the project, and lessons learnt, so it something similar is attempted the lessons don't have to be re-learnt.

I take on board Andrews point regarding people being at the same level when starting a project as it is very hard to learn in a few weeks what someone else has spent 4-5 years learning. However I do think that realistically very few teams contain people of the same level, instead they try to work on the the strengths, different experiences and diversity of the team, which I feel we did well.

I think overall the project was a success, as I said earlier things could have been different, but there is no point in kicking ourselves too much, as the project was among other things, a proof of concept that a project like this can be successful within the DIT enviroment.

Finally I'd like to take this opportunity to thank everyone involved in the project, its been a real experiance, with ups and downs, I'm glad this was one with significantly more ups than downs.

Reflecting

So here we are, over half way through the last week of the 10 week project. It's changed a lot since we started, in terms of what to focus on, how the game was being designed and the tasks we were faced with. This led me to thinking about what exactly we had accomplished based on the original email that we received with info about the project, which was just looking for programmers.

In this project Paddy has done Sounds and scripting, working in Audacity, Face Poser and Hammer. He did some Java at the beginning but that was scraped after the changes to the game design. He is a programmer by trade and yet for the current encarnation of the game has not touched a line of real code. It's as though he was hired to sell cars but ended up painting ships.

I however have been in the code, but that's not to say all my time was in there, or even most of it. Once the core functionality was done, I was moved into Hammer, while Paddy learned how to script the levels, to create the acctuall levels, some test maps and an good portion of a map that was later junked. With the help of Brian using TortoiseCVS and his machine the CVS was setup. From there it was into Photoshop to attempt to alter skins to fit our needs. That then evolved into Milkshape3d which was used to model new props and then unwrap that and make the new skin in Photoshop again. With there was also the requirements for compiling them and making them usable game assets. All of this happening with MASSIVE computer issues, sometimes going a week at a time with only 1 workable PC between us, and still attempting to get progress made.

For me atleast, it's been quite a trial, being asked to do all these things that I just am no good at, even with a fundamental knowledge, is tough. That's something I would do differently if offered to do similar project, knowing exactly what was going to be required, though I wouldn't go back and change it for this project since there are advantages to better understanding such things. I just think it's very difficult to have 4 or 5 things that need done but each one is such a radically different element to the game that you have to almost learn an entire new tool set to do it properly, without my previous knowledge I doubt I'd have accomplished half of my tasks.

I think I'd also go back and give Paddy 4 weeks or so to learn the tools before starting the project, because I was able to start as soon as we finialised our design when unfortunatly he still had some more to learn and that leaves us in the situation now where we have all the core elements but it all needs to be tied together before the game takes its real form. If we'd been able to distribute the work load more I think we'd have a lot more done by now, but that's no one's fault other than mine I suppose, I got a lot done quickly on the coding and mapping which left paddy with a lot of ground to catch up on in an entirely unfamiliar editor, even now there's a lot of content left for him to tie together before we can get a full release together but with a bit of luck that'll all come together now with his knowledge of the Hammer editor.

Not including the hours of ranting that could be produced on the topic of PCs and their reliabilty, I think those are the only real issues that appeared in the project. Everything else was quite good, there were some aspects that I thought were really great. The storyboarding was brilliant, it gave real direction and a great feel to the game, a linear story rather than a bunch of lessons linked together by nothing more than a short walk from one place to another. The sheer number of people involved at the begininng caused some issues, but as we progressed it was nice to have so much input and such interest in the project.

That's my personal reflection of the previous 9+ weeks, I in no means speak for Paddy, nor would I expect him to have the same opinions, because then only one of us would really needed to have been part of the project, and other could have just read the blog. I have the extended time to work on this so I'm hoping the keep the pace that we have set here at the end of the project, with the aid of hindsight and perhaps a spine I'd probably have asked for some kind of pay rise for the remaining time, but my biggest flaw is that I enjoy games and making them, and just the thought of continuing to make a game being my job was enough to get me to sign any contract handed to me. :D

Working 9 to 5...

Today was probably the day during which we felt the game programmers arch nemesis, know simply as "crunch time". The final part of the game was to be implemented, the moving boxes into rooms part. As it turned out it was much harder to implement that first envisioned. It seams like an easy problem both on paper and pro grammatically, however when it comes to implementing using the objects provided by the Hammer editor it was a very complicated process.

While Andrew worked on adding some nice touches to the game I spent most of the day working on it, towards the end of the day Andrew got involved and we used out combined brains to work on the problem. At 7:30 a test level of the functionality seams to have worked, the solution was very complicated, a series of what seamed like steam powered (no pun intended) set of levers and pulleys, feeding into each other and triggering different events. Time to go home, sadly I don't think the game will be ready for testing tomorrow.

Start spreading the word...

Today was another eventful day in the DMC. Andrew and I both did some further work on the game in the morning, after which we made sure that all the recording equipment worked, didn't want to look stupid when everyone arrived if the hardware didn't work.

Just after 11 the actor arrived, we went through the script and recorded all the dialog. We also recorded some additional speech, which may or may not be in the final game.

In the afternoon Andrew and I continued our work on the game, trying to get it top a testable state by next Tuesday.

Bridge over troubled waters

The last few days have been a test of patients, with both Hardware and Software. Which of course has delayed us further.

On the bright side though the artist which will do the voices for our game is confirmed for tomorrow (Friday) and we were lucky enough to be allowed to borrow software and hardware to allow us to record very high quality sound. The equipment is now setup and ready to go.

Double Posting

well I've discovered the perils of working from home, and the biggest has to be that you take your work home with you. When the normal break time rolls around you have very little reason to stop what your doing, so here's what's happened to me because of it. I started working on the Chef's clothes and think I've reached a decent enough point that it's no longer unbearably inapporpriate.

This is news enough to get its' own post and if i didn't I'd probably forget about it tomorrow anyway, so here you go in it's horrendous glory, my attempt at reskinning the chef. (my methodology acheiving for this would probably make any Photoshop using professional weap like a baby)

Note: I don't have the mod installed on my PC at home so I'm using the default Half Life 2 character, the visuals will be the same, but our game will have a slightly less agressive chef, ie he'll use forcefull words rather than high calibur munitions to get you to do your tasks.

Telecommuting

Instead of heading in and siting around waiting for the techs to come and help me setup yet another PC or try and use my laptop without Steam to do anything I stayed home and worked from here.

Most of the morning was spent attempting to create a connection with the CVS server to see if I could gain access, which wasn't expected but would have been nice. Once I'd estabilshed that it was definatly not going to happen I set to work on attempting to help Paddy with the voice syncing issues in face poser, again no joy.

However I did have a reason for making use of my PC, I was able to compile a couple of models that I'd created and skinned, and also to alter the skins for the sink and toilet. They are far from perfect but there's not much that can be done about that, any decent modeller could do better, but then they'd probably have to be hired on aswell. Anyway here's a pic.

No New Work and Lots of Issues

Well apparently the DIT computers have no reliability what so ever, and that has limited us to one PC between the two of us. I'm using my laptop to do some modeling, but I have been locked out of all the latest Source Code and can not go through and make changes that are needed. So, officially the feature side to, well the entire code section is frozen as is, and there is very little I can do to get access to it. Our repository has an old version, but the PC went down before I was able to upload my changes which included many fixes and overhauls, the PC decided to crash and never start up properly again.

More importantly paddy is unable to get face poser to sync the records to the player mouths, as the program crashes every time the recordings are imported and sync'd with words, which is a massive set back for the game.

But all is not lost... Paddy is single handedly pulling the game through from concept to product, with his mapping, scripting and scene creation, all due credit to him for making this game work so well and to be able to bring atleast something to testing, unlike myself unfortunatly I will have little to nothing to show for these coming tests.