Impending Awesome!

So today was a pretty relaxing day in terms of work. A bit of my work that was planned for this milestone got changed around. Yesterday was interesting as our team had some issues with re-structuring our game but we had our EP come in and sort things out for us.

Feature Frag 1 is now about polishing and completing our CORE gameplay mechanics. As the rendering guy on the team I'm more tasked with fixing the art pipe line and helping out with feedback withing our game. All in all a short and sweet day!

Also the Halo: Reach Beta starts early tomorrow for special people! I hope I get in early! I really can't wait to play the game, it looks like they've improved so much on their last game! A ton of the new gameplay mechanics have me excited! Anyways, thats all for tonight!

Cathedral.Built("Yeah, we did");

So the proof of concept milestone presentations went extremely well! Dark Matter is looking quite nice if I do say so myself. After long team-wide 19 hour crunch days for the last 5 days we all took the night off to relax and rest up for whats to come. I DID say that we at Avant-Garde were going to be SPRINTING towards our goal of finishing Dark Matter and blowing people away.

While we have hit our fare share of blockers it seems that we have been able to overcome them time after time. We no longer have team issues for now, we recovered our build from an alienbrain crash mid submission, AND our artists were able to re-rig and edit the assets just in time for a late sunday submission.

Unfortunately we had to push past code freeze because of our set backs but they extra time really allowed us to push our idea on to the players and show them what exactly we're about doing. The next two days will be filled with modifying the technical documentation and fixing bugs/hacks in our code base.

It's been a tough week. Good night.

"Assembling a cathedral out of a hurricane"

Yesterday I ran what we call in the video game industry a "crunch". Well whats a crunch? Why is it useful? Why is it bad? Is it a bad sign? Fear not readers. I'm going to answer all of these questions.

What is a crunch?
Essentially a crunch is when a person works and pours hours and hours past the scheduled and mandated work to get their work done/make their work better.
Why is it useful?
Crunch, for the most part, makes you get your shit together. Crunch happens usually around a milestone turn in. Be it an internal milestone or an external one crunch is when you devote every second of those days before the turn-in to working. I LOVE crunch because I work amazing under pressure. Crunch, however, takes a toll on your quality of life. Make sure you plan a crunch before a free day. Coma days are amazing.
What is a coma day?
A day you devote to sleeping past 12 hours.
Why is a crunch bad?
During crunch it's possible to completely break your game. Crunch is spawned by a multitude of reasons: Your behind on your work, you want to cram as much as you can into your game, or you need to do other peoples work to do yours.
Is it a bad sign?
Usually crunch is a bad sign. Unless it's voluntary. 

So why am I talking about crunch?
Yesterday I worked a 19 hour work day. With only 3 hours of sleep before then and when I woke up for today's 8 hour work session. I got my work done a day ahead of schedule AND I was able to get it into our build.

So our game has rendering now which is amazing but we're behind. VERY, VERY BEHIND. I've been stressed but now I am trying VERY, VERY hard to keep cool. Today I'm going to rest for a long time before tomorrows work session. I'm crunching again, I WANT a good game.

Hurricane warning:
So today myself, Brian my teammate, and David another teammate had an incident. This revolved around some personal attacks from David to myself and Brian and we weren't going to put up with this. The way we were attacked today is completely un-professional and un-acceptable. I'm dissapointed with not only what happened today but also how it affected our work cycle today. Constant setbacks aren't a good thing and we need to get ready for POC or FF1 is going to end up just as poorly.

I'm just going to use tonight to relax, calm down, and relieve stress. I'm enjoying today as much as I can because I know for the next 3 months I'm going to be SPRINTING to this gold turn in. I want this project to shine like nothing else before it and to pull this off we need to remove blockers like incidents like these and potentially, if it comes down to it, the people behind it.

I've spent two years of my life training to be able to do this. This project is my statement of what I learned and what I can do and I am not going to let ANYONE get in the way of that. If I have to crunch everyday I WILL. I am dedicated to this industry and I want my feelings and goals to be reflected in this game. I hate to sound so cut throat but that's how I need to be.

These two years of my life are GOING to be sent out with a bang. Of this I promise myself and my family who have supported me.

I apologize for this turning into a rant but I've got very, very mixed feelings right now.

Said a wise man: Life is a chessboard of nights and days...

"Said a wise man: life is a chessboard of nights and days. Where God, using men as his pawns, plays. Hither and thither moves, and checkmate, and slays, and one by one he places them back in the box. For each pawn has its fate, as does each player, as does God. Fate will be met."

Before I get into the video above I'll talk about production at Team Avant-Garde. We're finally back on track for the production cycle which is nice.

Sadly, however just as soon as we get back on track our deadline is effectively pushed up. On Wednesday we need to have a playable demo of our game which effectively means my time to work was cut down a day.
I ran into minor annoyances with the team today. One person kept bugging me every five seconds only to argue about meaningless things. He said some things I didn't agree on but I let him be. If it causes issues later on then the proof will be self evident.

It's going to be a very VERY hellish week until code freeze on Saturday morning.

As for the video and quote, I cannot tell you how much this has caused me to be creatively motivated the last couple of days! I've got a burst of creativity that cannot be contained! I've started up viral marketing for my game.

Our Main character Mark is on a search and rescue mission and his ship gets attacked by aliens. Our viral marketing takes place after this, where Mark's brother Dimitri who is a news anchor starts exposing the truth about what happened. The UEC is dismissing all of Dimitri's comments but Dimitri will soon get some help. :D

As you can see I'm in full creative mode! I just need to finish my renderer before wed...this'll be fun.

Sometimes, things go wrong.

Today the team I am a part of, Team Avant-Garde, had our Technical Design Document reviewed.

To say the least I am saddened, in disbelief, and slightly angry. Instead of production we have to go back to fixing the Tec Design Doc and STILL do the proof of concept(POC) coding. I already feel pressured for time and this doesn't quite help at all.

I've been boxed in as of late. I feel slightly pressured to get my work done ahead of time because people NEED it to do their work. Problem is, it hasn't been assigned to me yet.

So on top of being ushered along to finish our work early I've got people depending on me finishing my code fast so they can get back to work. Top this off with fixing all of our issues with the TDD and I'm very, VERY stressed.

But it's not all bad. I'm looking forward to BLOWING MINDS with our POC. If we meet the milestone we'll have a very nice game by the end of Feature Frag 1(Milestone acceptance for 100% of our core gameplay).

I guess I gotta keep trucking.


Oh and side note: I got mentioned at a networking seminar the other day by Darius Kazemi. Thought that was pretty cool :D

Halo 2 signs off tonight. Oh an production stuff

Today was quite an interesting work day. Official first day of production started today and it went amazingly well. I was assigned to the Texture Manager which is a two day task. I ended up nearly finishing it even though I was taken off times to work on some touch up technical documentation.

Our External Producer and Art Director were pleased that we planned out more than half of our core for POC. Our EP and AD said the fact that we are naturally challenging ourselves and that we have consistently good things is a very good sign.

All in all a great work day.

Side note:

Halo 2 signs off tonight with a HUGE bang. Bungie has promised Halo: Reach goodies to everyone who plays. I used to be a competitive gamer in the past and Halo 2 was a HUGE chunk of my life back then so re-playing it tonight is going to bring back great memories.

Thats all for tonight!

Murphy's Law and My SGP Experience

"Anything that can go wrong will go wrong".
- Murphy's law

How odd that this saying becomes a law when you start working in a creative industry like Video Games. For the last month, I've been plagues with certain establishments over charging my credit card, bills not getting paid because my money had up and left my account, and just today my electric was cut off temporarily because of certain personal issues back home. How does this relate to video games and the development cycle? Easy, prior to heading into my five month final game project I had little to no issues in this area. This "law" plays an intensified effect on the programmers in this industry especially. ANYTHING, could go wrong when programming for a game and if the proper steps aren't taken to avoid these issues ahead of time then ANYTHING and EVERYTHING WILL go wrong.

I speak from experience in this area, during a three day crunch before "gold" turn in for my two month Structure of Game Production (SGP) class EVERYTHING went wrong. Entire features got cut, downsized, or down right re-written. It's like a train loosing control and shooting towards the end destination. We didn't crash horribly but we crashed. We burned our gold disc on the ride to our expo and finished burning the disc as we pulled up to the entrance. I slapped the disc in it's case and SPRINTED towards the door. As I got to the door and opened it Keyvan our instructor grabbed the disc from my hand and escorted me in. Talk about cutting it close, we were technically late but we were hoping our sacrifices in sleep and time would make up with our finished product.

Remember Murphy's law? Well when you cut, reconstruct, and re-integrate full features into a game with no time to test them it comes back to bite you. Our game had crashes in certain section due to some hacking and assets being re-written during our final integration. When the bat enemies attacked and hit you it would sometimes cause the game to crash due to a subscript out of range error. It was slightly embarressing to have our game collapse on some people due to this. Also, our menu system was re-designed the night before and because of this certain features weren't implemented and sometimes it would lock up on the player.

Luckily our game had a very good amount of content and polished aspects to it that we were able to stay afloat from the wreckage and come out with knowledge if nothing else. I think myself, Kai Ting, Ercan, and David all came out of that experience a little wiser and sadly slightly bitter. We now know, fear, and treat the development cycle with respect. This may cause us to come off as strict or picky within certain aspects but it's because we've been bitten by the development cycle and are trying to prevent those events from unfolding again.

NOTE: One thing I am really proud of is how close our game is to our concept art.

Here's some photos from our game Tainted Ink:
CONCEPT IMAGES:

GAMEPLAY SCREENS:


Tainted Ink is an Tattoo influence action/adventure platforming game for Windows XP and higher.

New York Tomorrow, Tech Docing

So I just found out this week that I am heading back to New York. Amazing-ish! I LOVE the fact that I am going home but I won't be able to enjoy it as much as I have to do Tech Doc assignments over the break. Once I finish those I have to research some new tech for our game.

I'm doing the Rendering, Menu, and Scene Managment module breakdowns as well as memory maps for each module. This should be fun! Anyways, this post was short and sweet!

Really this isn't a break but class work without the class. At least I get to see some friends and my dog right?????



[EDIT] HEY CARLOS, I DIDN'T HIT PUBLISH LAST NIGHT AND JUST REALIZED THIS. I'M REALLY SORRY - Kevin 4/3/10 3:20pm