Advanced Games Dev (AGD) Week # 4

A lot of progress has been made in terms of production for our group for AGD within the last week. After the initial presentations for other AGD groups, we got a look at our progression compared to theirs.

To start the week of, as a producer I've been micro managing the team as a whole and providing any information needed of me, first off was a break down of what we will need for our presentation (December 2nd) and our first demo hand in (November 21st). Initially I began with the animation pipeline, this will be my main concern throughout the AGD module due to the amount of animations we require but only having one animator within our group. To help our animator I have created a breakdown of the animations we need for our first hand in, and what we should be able to achieve by our presentation:

I have put a small amount of animations on the list, due to the short time frame we have and the time it takes for the meshes to be rigged, skinned and hand animated, though I feel these are achievable for our gameplay demo.

Secondly, I have created a project plan to aid our group, although we are mainly using a website called Trello  to track tasks, progression and who is working on certain aspects, we also needed an overall project plan. Here's some samples of our Trello page for the AGD group:

Part of my responsibility as a producer/team lead are to maintain, update and add new tasks and such for our group. Trello allows us to set deadlines, members to work on, priority and checklists. Another example for one of the design cards I have been working on:

As for our project plan, I had to use Microsoft Project to create a more indepth overview of our 9 month project. As such, I won't post loads of images of each indiviual tab and what it contains, but it's extensive and allows the group to get a good idea of where we are in the dev cycle and what they should be working on. With the help of Chris and Cory (The two art leads for Interwire) they will be helping to assign deadlines and milestones for the art pipeline:

As a final note for our meeting this week, we have made the group decision to change engines. Due to some technical issues with programming within Unreal Engine 4, our programming has asked to change to the Unity engine. This was a difficult choice, mainly due to the teams lack of experience with the engine and myself and daz (designer) creating the level blockouts/whiteboxes within UE4 already. Though we aren't too far behind in our pipeline, we could have utilized the last month learning Unity in lieu of UE4. That being said, our programmer and several artists are very comfortable using Unity and this will increase our work capabilities exponentially over the course of the project.