Thursday, February 28, 2008

Tree-based far-field interactions

I added tree-based far-field interactions.



I provided two movies: pretty and nifty.



This diagram tries to explain how the influence algorithm works. Obviously I need to throw more words at that, which of course I will do in the near future. Stay tuned!

Thursday, February 21, 2008

A Difference a Day of Production Can Make

Team Awesome is almost halfway through the Pre-Production phase of our final game project. I am going to share some insider knowledge on our progress for the Cardinal of Zephyr , an airship battle game. Every Thursday, Team Awesome presents a status report to Executive Producer. The EP is the gatekeeper for keeping a project online. The moment he or she feels like your project is a waste of time or money, then the house of cards built by your development team will come crumbling down to fall into the fiery pits of hell.

Rule 1: Keep your Executive Producer confident in your ability to complete your game project. It may sound rudimentary, but you will be surprised how many games crash and burn because the EP has no confidence in the project.

Thus far, we have been able to successfully relay our vision of the game to the EP. Without fail, week after week, Team Awesome moves forward on Cardinal of Zephyr. Here are few more rules that I've learned by working on the best game development team this side and the other side of the Mississippi River.

Rule 2: Construct a rigid flexible schedule. Yeah, I know that sounds like an oxymoron. But, you want to make sure that your team can adhere to realistic deadlines, but flexible enough to shift dates around if necessary.

Rule 3: Trust your teammates to do what they are good at and encourage them to perfect their passions. This is quite tricky because some of your teammates may not know what they perform well. They may also assume they're distinguished at doing a task, but they are not that proficient at it. Even worse, their assumption may be their passion. This can be detrimental to the team's overall performance if this person's ability to complete the task is the weakest link. In order to avoid such misjudged mishaps, the leaders need to do a skill assessment and skill utilization management. While assigning tasks, the leaders need to zealously encourage their teammates to be passionate about what they are good at and build new passions around their strong skills. Sure, feelings may get hurt and egos may get bruised, so reiterate how important they are to the team and their skills are detrimental to the teams overall performance.

Those are enough rules for today. I'll give you some new ones in later posts.

Monday, February 4, 2008

We're back and "trying" to make a game...

Semester two at FIEA has begun and it is hard to believe it is already almost four weeks in. I’ve been meaning to get to the blog since the first week, but somehow it kept getting pushed back “until I have more time”. Unfortunately as things usually work out I’m writing this blog now not because I have “more time” but because I’m just trying to get things off my plate, and this is a good place to start.

Since returning to FIEA we have been inundated with meeting requests from across the board; meetings for paper prototypes, board games, tone words, razor statements, tech challenges, feature lists, and meeting requests for presentations from industry leaders. It seems like every time I turn around a new meeting request is sitting in my inbox, and my TODO list is growing not shrinking. It wouldn’t take much for a panic attack right now, but somehow we trudge along.

Last I checked the programmers have their lives on life support and several are seriously considering pulling the plug. From what I’ve heard nobody wants to live the rest of their lives hooked up to machines like a vegetable. The latest diagnosis reads “no improvement expected over the next 9 months”. Bleak news indeed.

Somewhere in the next month or so I’ll try to keep you dedicated readers posted… All those non-dedicated readers will have to wait. Until next time!