This Week In DigiPen: Chapter 5 and Chapter 6

Two weeks and a short post!? What gives? Where's my weekly DigiFunk photo? >:(

If this thought crosses your mind, I guess I'm sorry. However, things are really picking up around here. Seriously, sorry about the lack of photos. I have them, they're just still on my phone or on my other computer or otherwise not within reach from here. So, let's get this done so I can sleep and wake up and get back to work.

Week 5
So, I warned that week 5 was going to be rough - and it was. I'm still hurting from week 5 honestly. We were given another program to write for Cryptography (currently still in the number theory section) that we were supposed to have done between Tuesday and Thursday. It would have been great if we had been notified that we were expected to return on Thursday with the Chinese Remainder Theorem working perfectly in our TI-89's. Usually, he's said that we should have such things done after a week, but this time he decided to throw a quiz at us.

Sound synthesis had three written problems that took approximately 40 minutes per problem. Luckily, I had planned for that. However, realizing homework takes 40 minutes per problem is kind of depressing.

By the end of the week, I barely had the steam to work on graphics. Luckily, it got pushed back to be due on Monday, which gave me plenty of time to finish and make sure I got lights working properly. Screenshots will be posted, I promise. Likely with some of my graphical bugs too. Those are always fun.

However, my game is beginning to suffer at this point - without a team relying on me, it does get pushed to the back burner a lot. I found out that I can do some cool things in Flash that will allow me to make an engine similar to the C# engine we use for ProjectFun Summer Workshops Videogame Programming Level 2. Basically, I get to make my sprites a bit more modular, such that I can add behaviors to a sprite so that I don't have to write a bunch of specialized classes for each object. That does mean I've put more of a workload on the engine - but the time invested now should have a nice return later on.

Week 6
Recovery week. Sort of. With weeks 7 and 8 being the weeks for midterms, and week 5 having hit so hard on all fronts, this is my last chance to try relaxing before "hell weeks." We have three such weeks at DigiPen: Weeks 7 and 8, as already mentioned, and week 14, which is when games are due. Coming up next week is the tech demo for our games, which I hope to recreate my prototype for. However, far too much of my time was taken up by writing documentation - the functional specification document.

Since I'm on a solo project, I was required to write this document in place of a GDD and TDD (Game/Technical Design Document, respectively). However, such a document is usually written for websites, not games. I spent a fair amount of time researching these documents this week, which I really felt was wasted time. I can say, without a doubt, that this functional spec was the worst game document I have ever written. That makes me a sad panda.

It really sucks to have such horrible documentation, but some of the prep work for this document was extremely valuable. I now have a much better idea of what game I'm making, a basic level design for my first iteration before playtesting begins, and quite a few little design decisions were made (will my game include lives, spikes, pits, pickups, time, score, etc.). As important as all of these decisions were, the functional spec did little to organize these thoughts and decisions. What really makes it suck is that I take great pride in my documents, so having this horrible one for my solo project really makes me feel like a failure.

Since everything was due last week, that means nothing was really due this week (except for some math that got pushed back). Therefore, everything is due next week. So let me break this down...
Monday - Nothing due since all I have is game lab.
Tuesday - Math homework due. AI project proposal due.
Wednesday - Tech demo due.
Thursday - Math midterm. Sound Synthesis homework/program due.
Friday - Graphics due.

And the next week...
Following Tuesday - AI A* project due.
Following Thursday - Graphics Midterm. Sound Synthesis Midterm.

:(

Don't expect a post next week. If I get it in, it will be a treat for us all. In the meantime, go read my friend's blog. It seems to be more clever than mine...