Final project

Ok, I'll keep the long story short. My project course... I still haven't get a grade on it, the teacher seems to have gone for a vacation and still haven't returned yet :(
But after a huge hassle with the hassle we managed to get an almost-a-game done in Unity3D. The last month of the course, half the group were inactive and we must have looked like Crusoe after all those years on an island, but what's important is that the teacher bought it. We could have done it more smoothly though. Here are three of, what I think, were our biggest problems:

Communication: We weren't synched with each other, there was always someone missing, people were too busy/lazy/sad to come to the meetings so half the group was always behind in the updates. We had MSN-meeting to enhance the whole thing, but some of us simply didn't take it seriously.

Effort: The more time passed, the less motivated everyone became. This was partially due to the lack of good communication, but also the lack of remarkable progress. We weren't experienced enough to do things right from the start, so there were a lot of "walking in cirkles" scripting until we, 3 months later, finally got a hang of Unity3D, C# and scripting in general. I think that's normal but back then we were allready tired of not having a constant, fine work flow. Most of our group simply gave up after that third month.

Production overview: Firstly I have to say that we had an extreme luck to have someone in our group who really knew the whole process of making a game. The rest of us were kind of aping around and guessing what's next to do. But because of the minority of experienced people - and NO tutoring at all - we often made wrong decisions and focused on the wrong things. Of course, I am really happy about learning everything and have gotten a great experience from it, but the learning curve never seemed to become to our advantage. We seriously needed to step back and look at where we really are heading, but I guess "young and naïve" works in this context as well.


But what's done is done. I'm still waiting for those last five points to appear in my uni account, so that I can officially graduate and have my bachelor's degree. I really need to get them soon, because of things happening at home right now. But more on that in a later blog!

Until then - take care!

Discipline ftw!

Mom's back! Finally! She's been through so many troubles, that she's weaker now than when she left, but I'm so happy she's back - the housewifey version of me has been put on the shelf [NOT] once and for all.

As for the final project, the major changes has been on the level design, we've now got two tutorial levels with colliders, textures and lighting and the first real level is designed and being implemented right now. There are traps (spears traps and steam traps) set and ready to be used. I've become the one handling all interactions with the props and items in the world, and it's very fun, except that there are not a few naughty bugs in the physics implementations.
We now have a somewhat playable tutorial level, but now the real battle begins with the fun factor - we need better guidance for the player. For the real level we also need to make the pace faster by putting in more challenges, and I have to implement the scoreboard! The portals that is supposed to teleport you between rooms is working, but we need to place them in the game. Although it's very simple, it needs to be done. The GUI system is nothing near done, but much of it depends on whether we'll use achievements/collectibles/timers and stuff, and in which level we'll use them, but much of the implementation is done allready.
Our biggest problem right now is to point all undone tasks - which is my duty - and make people work - which should be their own duty! Two students in the team, who tragically are the two of three programmers in the team, seem to have taken vacation or something, they don't answer on email, or when I call or send them an sms. One of them has been like that since the beginning, the second has been like that for a couple of weeks, which really was bad timing since we had a presentation last Wednesday.

But we're still up and running! And I won't quit until I get my PASS on this course (and of course, as good a demo as possible), or die trying. Discipline ftw!

Are you Chilling?

There's that extremely helpful guy who overheard someone talking in his phone: "Where are you chilling? You don't know the place? Ok, I'll try to find you!", and so he felt the urge to help and started to ask people around "Are you Chilling? No? Excuse me, are you Chilling? Hello, are you Chilling?"
A couple of hours later he found himself being on the beach. "Hi, are you Chilling?" he asked somebody sunbathing, who grinned back and answered "yepp!!". The exhausted man gave him a slap and yelled "Then what are you doing here?! People are looking for you!"


The first (and only) time I heard this joke was in high school, but somehow I remembered it while thinking about myself right now. I'm the producer of our team and have to plan a lot of things, I have important stuff to program, I have the GUI design and implementation to do, the dissertation to work on and the individual projekt to atleast START with. And what am I doing? Chilling!

Things are looking better, I have to admit that. Our level designer seems to be hyped by the fact that he gets to do the tutorial levels too and plan everything - good for him, really. But not all the team members are as optimistic as him and I really can feel the team power meter getting lower and lower. Have to do something!! My fellow programmer have worked her hands off and the designer seems to have given up on this project being fun to play. Our artist feels like hell's upon him and the third programmer in the team... well he disappeared again! He's been doing that all the time, but I thought I had him this time. Even the hands off-programmer tends to hide nowadays. Things that were supposed to be designed this week seems to be unfinished, but according to our plans, this sprint (which lasts until Sunday) is the last production-sprint and there will be no more drastic changes and new inputs. Next Monday it's feature stop!

Yet I'm still chilling. Is that ok? Am I still sane? I hope my optimism is not due to me loosing all my adrenaline. Maybe, my brain is being I Don't Care-ish, but my conscious doesn't get it.
Either way I think our game will be fun to play. I've seen the level design, it's not finished yet but our level designer seems to have some talent hidden under the hoods. At least enough for this project. I like the way he thinks and solve stuff, so I'm leaving that up to him. I myself am trying to get the GUI system up and running, but GUI design is harder than I thought. I'm not aiming at a complex system with lots of stuff to see and chose, but the look and feel of everything is so hard to determine! Why is it so hard to determine where to put a simple little button? Or how it should look. Does it even matter that much? I'll only push it to play the actual game for God's sake!! Am I missing something here? I definitely do, with my over-optimistic attitude and everything...


Let's take a look at another side of my life: my post apocalyptus, aka. after graduation. I have no clue what will happen, and since I'm such a planning freak, it freaks me out even more!!
Thing is, mom can't stand it anymore, she wants to live in our home country, so everyone is working to fulfill that wish. My poor parents have gotten through and sacrificed a lot of things for the sake of protecting us - now is our turn to return the favor! What that has to do with my post apocalyptus? Well, the initial idea was to study here in Sweden, but then mom persuaded me to rest for one year before continuing with the Master's degree. Then my brother persuaded me to go to London and do my Master there (he's living there now). But then mom got very ill and she went to Kuwait and now she refuses to continue living in Sweden. Understandible, I must say. But, now my brother is doing his best to get into business in Kuwait so that he gets a residence permit and buy an appartment or house where he and my parents can live. Eventually they will get an rp too. And now they try to persuade me to study in Kuwait. I can't find any Masters on computer games programming in Kuwait!! What I think that I've decided is to take distance classes while tagging along the family to Kuwait. But now I have to check for which requirements there are on courses to be counted as advanced enough for the Master's degree. With that approach I can manage to put up my own Master! Handy eh? And exhausting... But honestly, regaining harmony into the family spirit is priority #1 right now, so I can end up being anywhere on this lovely planet with neither a school nor a job to go to.

Jee, I'm really talented at WHINING! Gosh, I'll stop. You know what? let's turn this plate over to a better side:
I want to go indie! I think that suits me very well. Flexible, minding my own business, working at my own pace... I can have another job on the side, as long as I get to make my own games. I think it goes great with the post apocalyptus planless days - if there is no work to do, I'll make up work to do!

There are a few persons I already know I'd like to work with. Maybe I'm being naïve now, but I really look forward to work with people overseas, people from other countries, to get a mix of ways of thinking and percepting things. Also, there is atleast one competition I plan to participate in and I hope to find out more. I also plan to do some experiments in my games, I want to compare different styles of programming, different styles of games and even different graphics to see what it provides for the gameplay. I'm sure the answers are obvious but in this way I feel like making the game developing process only more interesting. Come summer and sweep me away!

I'm le tired

[Note: This was originally written on March 29th but I just realized that I never published it lol]

Two months left and I drag my feet along the time, trying to do my best in everything I'm asked to do. It's been really hectic, these days. Only things we (the programmers) have heard from the other team members are negative things and sarcastic looks and stuff like that, it's so sickening! Yesterday, the other programmer, my best friend, couldn't take it anymore, she was so furious and mad and I could only agree with her. Not only were we beginners in this bransch, in Unity3D and in programming, we don't even have a tutor, someone physically present to show the code to and ask for help from. And all we get is crap. I don't think the others understand how much effort we put into this, how hard we try to make things work. If there's no desirable result, then they consider it as if there wasn't effort enough. I've started to wonder if this is some kind of an intro to my life as a programmer, if I'll be treated like this until I become senior or something.
Today we had a meeting and I could barely hold back my anger. I don't know if I made it clear that I can't take their attitude anymore, but after a while of my bitterness, they seemed to rethink a bit and talk to me with more respect.
I made them show more examples on what they want and told them over and over that they should take into account the team's competence, and that this and that will be hard for us to figure out because we've been trying to solve it for some time.

I really hope things will get better soon. They chose me to be the producer for the rest of the course and even though it made me happy that they believed in me, I knew it only meant more work. What's worse is that I didn't even get as little as a comment from previews producers about how things are going, how they were planning things, and stuff. Our backlogs were so dated and everything was so falling apart in disorder, that I think they chose me as the last producer just to blame everything on me later on.
Oh Jee, I feel the emoness embrace me. No, actually, what they said was that I'm the most administrative one and the group need that right now. I hope I'll be able to fix that part atleast. I'll do my best in everything I'm asked to do.

How did we end up with C#?

Hell with it all! Right now I'm so frustrated! But not extremely frustrated, so it's aaall cool.
We've began the new course, working in project and making a game. Our idea is awesome, but that doesn't matter right now. I want to talk about Unity! I feel disabled :'O
I know nothing about Unity, except that it's alot of drag and drop and stuff, and it's a graphical editor, where you use scripting, not classes like decent people taught us to do. Oh, it's asset-centered, meaning that it's the object that is focused on, and then you make scripts and attach them to it. Instead of code-centered were you connect all the code together, independently from the assets.
And somehow along the way we chose to use C# - you may either script in C# or JavaScript - but it appeared, no, we allready knew, that all the tutorials and stuff were written in JavaScript. Oh did I mention that none of us have worked in C# before? Well, none of us have worked with C# before. Sure, we understand it because it's very close to C++ and Java (not that we know those languages well enough...), but that doesn't mean we can use it! So stupid! We should have gone with JS. How did we chose C#? Oh yeah we had a fight about the decision to use Unity, and not try XNA out a bit more, and then there was a moment like:
- Fine!!
- Fine!!
- What will we use?? C#??
- Yes!!
- Fine!!

Or something like that...

And now I need to make a damned state machine for the monsters, in Unity, using C#, and I have to be done by the end of the week. Damn it, damn it, damn it!


A couple of weeks ago mom went to Q8, to recover and stuff, her doctor was like "She have to leave this place! NOW!"Obviously she's suffering from depression and stress and is totally worn out. Poor mom. Both she and my older sister are in Q8 now, leaving me, my little sisters and my dad "alone" here buhu T_T
Well, accepting it all I soon enough turned into some kind of housewifey student to cover up for them. Now, my doggy little sister is 18 yrs, one would think that she'd help out but I expect more help from the devil! She comes home by 6.30 pm, excusing herself with her most frequently used phrase "I don't feel like doing that right now."
God in Heaven just let me slap her once. But she's too scary, if you say something she'll let loose hell on you. Not even my mom or dad can handle her anymore, she's like a freak gone mad! My parents should send her to the army!

My other sis, the youngest one of us, is 9 yrs old and well-mannered. But her voice tends to cut through my eardrums, leaving me with tinnitus and headache all day long. Sometimes I don't even notice her speaking (e.g. when I'm concentrating on my work) but I suddenly feel nautious and hear some strong *peeeeeep* inside my ear. "What is that? You? What do you want?" and when I ask her that, that's when she begins talking for real, you know with tea and cake and the whole "let's play Barbie" kind of atmosphere. It knocks me down. Everytime.
I try to be nice to her, really, since she seems to be very attached to me, drawing manga and stuff. Especially now when mom and big sis aren't around, I have to take care of her. So I try to do my best, but it's exhausting, I've even thought of dropping out of school for a while and take care of the home. I've discovered that it's not that bad. I can still do my programming, watch anime, draw manga and play the piano even more. I can actually play video games - I haven't played for a while, except for those 10 mins freaky spells of play I forced myself to have a week ago (I bought Splinter Cell and Wild Arms 3).

Where were we? Right: damn it, damn it, damn it. I spent three hours on goofing aroung, reading a bit here and a bit there about things I don't even remember... and writing this blog. Mom says I have to stop being a retard. I must be more efficient. I can't say she's wrong but waaaah what am I to do? xO (oh gosh this font sucks!) Allright, I start with efficiently watching a pair of anime episodes and taking an efficient nap. Then we'll talk!