Weekend 6

On Friday groups did paper prototypes for projects.  I worked on code to get the other developers setup for the weekend.  The intent was to take pictures of the paper prototypes and put them into the web pages... that didn't happen, but we are further along with some things so that is ok. 

My visual story team met and we picked a story... progress.

I also attended the Think Global, Hack Local Hackathon which Kim is involved in.  I went as a mentor for the teams of comp-sci students.  A few other people from the MDM went to for mentoring.  Due to hockey games on Sunday I couldn't see what the end results were, but Kim said that they were well done.

Weekend 4

Not too much going on this past weekend.  On Friday we shot our films for the visual story.  It went quickly, which was the plan.  We are pretty sure we got all the shots we need.  If not a re-shoot is easy enough, it was all done at my house and almost all inside.

On Saturday Arron showed up with a DVD of the pictures, since 2.11 gigs is too much for dropbox.  Sneakernet for the win.  He joked (correctly) that it was like an old datacomm question of how fast does it take to transfer bits... I took it to school with me and Matthew (my son) who was helping another group shoot their movie.  That didn't go so smoothly... the shoot was a 2:00 and at 1:15ish it turned out the other kids could not make it.  That meant a script rewrite on the fly.  I managed to help a bit with wardrobe and entertainment by juggling apples :-)

Patrick had is do some research, agile development and improvisation.  I'll need to read what everyone posted.  I also need to read the essays from Visual Story.  I didn't get a book from Richard on Thursday... I could get one today... argh.

On Sunday Judy, Matthew, and I hung out for his birthday.  Presents, hockey game (him playing), and a movie: Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs 2.

Still sick... but feeling much better.  One more day and I should be back to normal I think.

Weekend 3

This weekend was quiet.  We worked on the projects course on Friday, finished up most of it.  I had a long talk with Larry about this, that, and the other thing.  I also did some talking on the Visual Story movie thing, we are now really trying to do the iteration thing - iterate the whole movie.

On Saturday I did nothing to do with school.  Yay me!

On Sunday I did the journal drawing for improv, I made the list up earlier in the week but finally got around to drawing it.  I managed to get to one of Matthew hockey games too, they lost 5-1, but it is all about the fun.  I finished up with watching some Magnificent Seven and working on the Visual Story essay about the Casino Royale climax and how it is different then other Bond movies before it.

The Saturday off was a great recharge!

Weekend 2

We had an Alumni supported Hackathon starting Friday 10:00am and ending Saturday 5:00pm, followed by presentations.

I worked with Dylan (writer), Alex (writer who wants to do game design), Ginger (artist) and Emmy (artist) to make a story based game.  We quickly decided we wanted to do a game, and tossed a number of ideas around.  In the end it is a scrolling game (side-to-side, but we want you to go down) where global warming has caused the oceans to rise and a girl is given a sub and sent to find a new place to live.  She finds her way to Atlantis and dies (or not, as George says the audience owns the story).

I decided to use ImpactJS, a really good (from what I can tell) JavaScript game engine.  I did that because I don't know JavaScript and I've never made a game, so it seemed like a good idea :-)  It took a while to get my head around graphics etc... and some back and forth on file formats, but we had a plan and 8 iterations on the board (like install the software, figure out graphics, get a thing to move, make a maze).

Artists were arting, writers were writing, designers were designing, and programmers were figuring out how the heck to program :-)  By the end of the night, after Dylan's homemade waffles topped with homemade fruit compote from Alex, we had a simple game running.  The alumni were helpful with ideas, focus, and hammering us on scope.

I went home on the train and grabbed some sleep and came back to a bunch of tasks in the morning.  We got fade in/out working, an animated opening, an animated closing, sound, music, moving jellyfish.

We finished with 9 minutes to spare.  The story didn't really get told in the game, sadly, but elements are there.  Another day would have been perfect... but if I had that it would have needed another day... etc.  In the end we had 31 hours to make the game.  Everyone did a great job, some really neat ideas.  Hopefully everyone is comfortable with getting things done under pressure now :-)

Here is a link to the game, Into the Sea.

Weekend 1

Friday was busy, with non MDM stuff.  But everything I did so far in the MDM was done for TerraTap, so it is like I get double the practice! Hopefully that means less failure in any one place.

Did some reading, fell asleep... oops.

On Saturday got to stay home for the most part.  Did more reading, did my journal for the clown (waves as Patrick).  Man i hate drawing elbows, feet, and fingers!

On Sunday went in to meet with the projects team. That was very productive - we are finding our feet. I give 50/50 odds of us being broken into new teams on Tuesday. We are very low rez now. We were going to do videos, those turned into us talking. We were thinking about an animated logo, that is now slightly less than stop motion animation, complete with shots of hands holding things. We were looking at doing an infographic, that is now a simple power point presentation.

We all have our parts, and we managed to do two prototypes of the presentation to see what would work and what would not. We threw away the idea of shooting videos before we brought out the camera and tripod. Iteration, prototyping and scope - check, check, and check.

Other teams are doing Unity based hand draw vector graphics based website. That is not a scope I would like to be involved in!  If we throw all that we did away on Tuesday I think my team is fine with it. We learned how to work as a team, and get something done quickly to what we think is the right resolution. I guess you will know on Tuesday afternoon if we succeeded, or how badly we have failed.

Now heading home, after missing Matthews first balancing game in hockey :-(, to do more reading. The improv reading is incredibly dense, but we now have a couple of questions to answer... perhaps that will give me something to retain while reading. I need to read more of the book for Richard and get that index card written... keeping my head above water so far :-)