I was thinking of taking advantage of the thanksgiving break to be ready for the presentation next week. So I sent a message to Leo asking for another meeting on holiday weekend or some other day. But as usual he never answers and nobody else shows up. Also, I sent 2 emails to Jacob asking him for the reference salary list to complete our slicing the pie numbers. Again, he never replied me. So I decided to avoid wasting any more time on them, the only thing I needed to do was my part of the presentation. I took some hours on Black Friday to expand a little my slides following the explanation Daryl gave me about how I should calculate all our salaries. So the first thing I did was fix Unity info to add Unity Pro numbers in case we need it. Then I rearranged our initial budget because we did no need anymore our paychecks calculation as we are now slicing the pie. After that, I explained a little why we are going to slice 60% for the company and 40% for us. Then I calculated how many hours everyone worked (nothing actually) in this 4 months. Finally, in the last slice, I break down how much our salary would have been if we have work this 4 months.
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After the epic fail, I was a little confused. I didn´t know how to refocus finances. I couldn´t understand how exactly slicing the pie should work. So I asked Jacob to help me doing a little research about the book, I also needed a list of skills, experience, and responsibilities everybody has in the team. Although I asked a couple of times nobody wrote anything. Then I spoke with Leo about the situation and he said he will put the requirement in the drive. Even so, nobody wrote anything. Additionally, I really need marketing numbers to complete my work and Tyreac (marketing chief) was rambling as always. In that moment I felt I had enough, this pseudo team was a joke. I was probably the only one trying to do something and I won't carry the whole team on my shoulders (I was probably already doing it in a way). Because I had pretty bad experiences when I tried to do that in the past. So, next class, I will be talking with Daryl about this situation. I just can't work with this people. After finished the game document I didn't know exactly how to keep helping the team as a gamer design. So I asked our leader James and he told me that he actually needed some assistance with programming. That's how I ended trying to do it the Main Menu and High Scores menu of the game. I little against my will I must say because don't really like programming even if I can understand it. Even so, don't take me long accomplish those two screens. Although I am still waiting for a background art (Julia said she will do it) to put in High Scores and the background music (Cara said she will search for it) too. By the way, Luis dropped the class last week. I think he knew it because he never shows any kind of interest in the project and as he never did anything it wasn't an important loss to be completely honest. On the other hand, Angelica also dropped the class this week. Anybody seems that coming was a surprise to everyone. She said she just realized that gaming industry it wasn't for her. I think that's fair that happens and everybody is so young around here anyway. I will continue helping as much as I can. The presentation was an obvious failure, I already knew that at least a week before. I must say I was pretty frustrated because nobody did anything even with the meeting we had the day before. I also was disappointed with Leo because he said he will paint my sketch to print a cover but he never did it. I was so naive thinking people from marketing will actually have something to show or at least send me some plans to finish CAC, CMC, and LTV. Because in my country people used to do homework a day before the evaluation but the things here are pretty different in that way. When the time came, nobody had even blogs to show with the exception of Sunny and me. I tried to defend the little I had but it was useless and even if a need the help of my classmates that does not excuse me, it was my responsibility after all. Although I probably had one of the best grades of the course, that was because almost nobody did anything else so I didn't feel happy at all. It was one of my hardest days since I arrived here that let me thinking how we will solve this situation because motivate other people is a really complex issue...
I haven been working on the game design document for the last 2 weeks. Discussing with Mei and Cara I was able to determine more general details about our game concept. First, I expanded and completed the introduction of the document. Then I wrote down a few enemies and other characters the game should have. Before this, I asked Carley and Xavier about what kind of fish they had been working on. Later I moved on to the environment, we will only have one basic screen with some climates changes on it. I had the idea to put icebergs in the middle of the way as obstacles to avoid. As the group was agreed Cara started working on the iceberg design. About Gameplay, we decided to keep it simple: only 4 buttons to move in basics directions (up, right, left and down) and the space bar to eat each eatable fish we may see. After this, I described which backgrounds sounds and FDX effects we should be using. Cara did a great work searching and uploading to our drive themes and giggles suitable to our aquatic design. Finally, I wrote about the Interfaces, we only going to have 3 screens: start menu, high scores, and the game screen. The pause button will be on the game screen and won't show any additional window it will just stop the game immediately. It won't be game over screen either because we want a quick game that just restarts after show your high score for a few seconds.
Heartstone is probably the most successful collective card video game ever made. Only 2 years after its launch the game already had 50 million active players and became one of the most popular in esports. But its formula has been proved before. The gameplay and main mechanics feel strongly similar to Magic The Gathering. Hearthstone never tries to hide this fact because Its knows how to upgrade and improve this old formula. The game brings the complex mechanics of Magic to a new public simplifying most of them. Everything feels simpler but no easier. Aesthetics: Following its heritage, the main aesthetic in Hearthstone is Competition because there is no game without an opponent (either IA or another person). As any collective cards game, we can build our decks and develop strategies the way we want so Expression is another important aesthetic. Related with this, finding new cards or ways to used is always very exciting about cards games and this one is not the exception so there is Discovery Aesthetic. Finally, as every action we do on the board (full of color and movement by the way) has an appropriate animation I would say that it has some of Sense Pleasure too. Dynamics: How the players choose to win the match, either drop their opponent 30 health points to 0 or making them run out of cards, would be the dynamics related to supporting Competition. Maybe the funniest dynamics of the whole game would be strategies. Each player may combine cards to create their unique way to play (strategies). Could be focused on attacking, making tokens or turtling, the important here is how this kind of dynamics support expression aesthetic. On the other hand, finding out what kind of cards are you facing or more important how your opponent combine them would be the main dynamics supporting Discovery. Finally, the board movement and animations that are triggered when we affect our opponent field would be dynamics related to Pleasure sense because they are only activated when we do several mechanics. Mechanics: As similar card battling game, we can invoke minions to attack our opponent life points or activate effect to destroy opponents minions. So pretty much everything we can do on the field would be mechanics supporting Competition aesthetic. Outside battles we can't do a lot more. The only way to earn new cards is buying booster packs. So this has to be the mechanic related to Discovery. If we are not playing we would be probably editing our deck. After selecting a class, we can pick or take out cards as we like until 30, this is how mechanics support dynamics expression. Finally, any action we do on the field has a specific animation (may be a sound) so the players could easily realize what is happening. So all battle mechanic are also supporting pleasure sense. |
AuthorI want to study Video Games in a theoretical way. Archivos
May 2018
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