OVER 1000!

Our game has been on the market for a little over a week and we have almost 7500 trial downloads and  just over 1200 purchases!
We're excited at the success we have had! \(^_^)/
Now I'm just getting ready for the Graduate program in the Fall! Let's do this!

Passed in REVIEW! RELEASE FRIDAY APRIL 24

It's happened! Our game passed review! There were no bugs. Everything worked! We put tons of hours into making the project bug free and it's all paid off. We passed review in only a days time! We're are hopeful that the indie community will have the same response when it is put on the market. Only Friday will tell how we are going to do.

Game Breaking Bug

So we have to wait a week because our game broke when a Guest Account was logged in and then tried to buy the game we got a code 4. It was a big hit to our team because we thought we covered all of our bases. Now this last week we had to fix our small bugs and now we play the waiting game. We have been talking up our game to different press areas and trying to keep moral high. It's been quite a week because the amount of work has gone down, but things to do has remained the same. So this coming Tuesday we will push our game again and we are hope it will finally get accepted for publish.

IN REVIEW!!!

Our team gathered Thursday afternoon to start our final push towards finishing the project. I was placed in charge of getting the last pieces of the UI working and polished.We finally got the credits screen to work. We placed each of our avatars on the credits screen next to our names. It looks pretty sweet. I added the ablility to Trial and Purchase our game. We even added a feature that if you select a level that is locked in trial mode then it will send you to the market place.  With a lot of work and a late night we finally got everything  working and without bugs. Now with our game up for review we need 12 people to pass our game. We are now reviewing other people's games in the hopes that they will reciprocate the review and help us get our game onto XBLIG Arcade. Now we play the waiting game and reviewing games.  I'll update later when we have results.

Ready for Review?

The Last week has been crazy busy. We've been getting the game ready for it's second review.

 Blake and I fixed a bunch of multiple controller bugs to start off.

I've been getting the new UI working. I had to get a different better font formatted and textured to be able to get it in the game.

After that Max sent me some screenshots that we are now using for background art for the menu system. I got those working then set moving on getting the option screen to have a controller displaying what the player currently has as a layout. In the end I ended up blowing the dust off my photoshop and getting some art whipped up for that.

 I had to then get Layouts to work. I implemented the ability to use a controller layout, but it appeared that it was easier for my team to hard code the buttons into the game. I worked my way through the code and implemented the ability to change the controller layout along with the changing pictures on the option screen.

After implementing this, I quickly learned that my code did not have the ability to change controller layouts mid game. With the lack of time to the push time, I quickly put together an  in game option screen that didn't give the ability to change the controller layout.

A few more tweeks later and being 1 or 2 am (I can't remember >_<   )  we ended for the night still wondering if we should push the game for review.

In the morning I loaded the game up and deployed it on the Xbox only to find that some of the scaling was off when the television was widescreen. I jumped on it and started coding again. I could only get some of it done because of my lack of knowledge of certain areas of the code. That is where we were as of this morning. More end of game craziness to come.

GDC!

So with GDC come and gone, I learned some great lessons that I'm hoping to be able to apply next year.

-Make a game plan of where you want to be when. There are tons of speakers and discussion sessions plus things happening on the expo floor. Laying out a plan of where you want to be when will help it go smoother and you won't feel lost.
- Be prepared to feel frustrated with HR reps. I was told this by a professor but I didn't understand the extent of frustration.
-Go knowing what your strengths are and sell them. Too many times I told people I was a programmer and their response was "send in an application" The real conversations about jobs that I heard started when someone said "I excel in Tool making" or "I'm excellent with Game Engines" If you can narrow down your interests then they can further investigate if you are right for their company.
- Roger told us this but it was true. Swag run first to get your stuff, then go and wait in lines to talk to people.
- Don't be satisfied with a one time visit. There are many different people at the booths all day. Take time to go back and see if you can talk to someone else that you might click better with. This is one of my fatal flaws of this last trip. I was satisfied with everyone telling me to just go online and apply. I didn't try going back to talk to others.
-Plan to go to after parties. some of the best networking experiences can happen at an afterparty. Even if you are tired after the convention closes. GO TALK TO PEOPLE! In this program everyone has a game they can promote or show off. Talk to everyone about it!

GDC was a great experience and I would like to go to more conventions in the future.

Getting ready for GDC

We have some new screen shots up for the game. It's looking super nice! 

We've been working towards getting a couple of trail levels for GDC. 

  My Start menu in Action. hopefully the next thing is to put the logo in the background once we get a logo.

Some gameplay examples. The Trail following the character is a ribbon like particle effect that is going to follow the character.

So recently I've been on the fine tuning of the start menu. My recent adding have been a level select menu. Now I need to add a unlocked locked visual feature on it.

Moving forward, I have a lot to work on with it to make it a smooth navigation process.

More Main Menu Work

With a couple weeks worth of playtesting, our team is hard at work putting into place a lot of things we learned. We've focused a lot on controls, camera, and animations. Also our level design is in need of some attention, but overall I think we have got a handle on designing and I'm excited to see what our designers come up with.  This semester has been really really busy with other classes and lots of testing our game getting it ready for the review and submitting process.

I'm still working on the Main menus and trying to make it interactive. I've overcome a lot of hurdles (including now getting my own xbox to run it on). And now I'm just iterating on different layouts and cameras and control schemes for the avatars making them look right and placing them in the right spots. I wish I had a way to get screen shots from my TV, I'll look into it and post pictures if I can. I don't want to take pictures with my phone and have bad res. shots. I'm finally feeling comfortable with my programming skills and with some guidance from some of my team I'm more confident that I can do the tasks assigned to me. My goal is to have the Main menu stuff done by the end of this week and get another project that I can work on :)

Overall this semester has been crazy, but I'm excited to see our game go through the submitting process. \(^_^)/ Hopefully I'll be able to get some gameplay and screen shots up soon.

Playtest in Two days

Our team has our first playtest coming up this week. We are all really nervous and have tons to do. We had a meeting last night to discuss a couple of big key areas that we need to cover. That being having an level loading and playable. We have a starting level created but the process of getting it all loaded into XNA without lagging the game has proven a challenge. Also with one of our artist leaving last week, stress has been high. Time has been an impeding factor for almost the whole group. Between this project and all of our other senior classes added on to most of us working so we can stay in school, time has been short. Nevertheless the team is working hard despite the stress. I am still working on the UI and getting the starting screens to be a sort of introduction to the game. You will be able to see your xbox avatar and play around with some animations. It will default to a  couple animation loops if the controller is left alone. Also another block has been passed, I finally got a harddrive for my xbox so I don't have to travel the hour or so to the school to work on the project.

This week is going to be difficult but our team is amazing. I know we're going to pull through.

Sprint the 1st of this semester

I have been put on getting some of the Main menu stuff working. What I have accomplished this sprint is getting my Layout scheme, that I worked on at the beginning of the project, to work with a place in our Options menu. I have created multiple Layouts that get cycled through.The coding is in place, I just need a graphical representation of what layouts are being cycled through.  I was also assigned to get all the avatars of signed in players onto the start screen. I have code in place to test this and I will be testing it in the near future.
So far this sprint we are working quickly to have a game we can submit for approval and start the testing sequence of the xblig dev process.
Also on the plate to do is to test games with our business license. We are approaching deadlines and things are getting tight. Today we are hopefully going to have a level and more in the game.

Second Semester

The semester has started and out team has hit the ground running. We had a good sit down meeting to really flesh out out game and the direction we are going.
We really nailed down what the UI system is going to be. and some of the GUI elements. My job right now is to make the menu system look and reacted nice to the player input. First we are going to add the players avatar onto the start menu screen. This start menu screen will give the player the feel of there avatar is what they are playing with. We are adding the ability to press buttons besides start and see different ninja moves that your character will have in the game. Though there will be a scripted sequence that you can watch if you don't want to press buttons. My next task is to take the ability to have multiple layouts that I created last semester and add it to the Options screen.

So some of the cool things we have decided was the starting tutorial like area of your avatar breaking out of a prison cell. This will give you small challenges to learn how to move throughout the game. When you finish getting out of the prison cell. When you get out your character set out to complete trials/quests/objectives.
I will post pictures ect once things change and get working.