Month: November 2020

This week for the project, we continued working on the design document. I think things went well for our team, we were able to fill out the document, fix holes that we had in the document and get the questions in for the other review team. One thing that went a little wrong was when we were mending our review design document that we were going to send to the other team, the improved version was turned into a separate document. The other review team commented on the first document instead of the improved one, but that’s not really a problem and is our fault anyway. When we were supposed to review and answer the questions that the other review team had however, there was only one question that they listed on their document. I am not sure if it was because of initial confusion with how the comments were supposed to laid out or external reasons, but having almost nothing to respond to was a little strange. The same person was also the only one to comment on our document, though it was really helpful that he replied to a couple of comments. His opinions and insights were really helpful since they were the first comments that came from a third party (someone outside of our team and the instructor). He gave us some things to think about with regards to our current design plans and implementation strategies that we will have to iron out before next week, but it’s very nice to have a direction to work towards.

The project this week involved a lot of confusion. We submitted our design document drafts to another team for review, where we had to write questions about the project on our own review document before giving it to another team. There were also comments from the instructor on how to improve our own design document that we had to deal with at the same time. The extension that we were given for the team reviews was very helpful. It allowed our team time to solve the problems highlighted by the initial submission to the instructor before sending it off to the other team. We were able to get it done without much trouble and I feel that we put together a pretty good document. Hopefully we will be able to get more insight into different design options and criticisms for our document so that we can continue to perfect it. By building the document in the first place, we were opened to various options for the different sections of the project, so any ideas for narrowing down those options will be nice. Personally, I am glad that the document writings are almost finished and, more importantly, we can start getting into coding the project. The project partner in China is started to get busier, which means that the little time we have to communicate is growing smaller. We have been able to make it work so far, but live conferences are very difficult to include him in and the closer we get to starting on coding the project the sooner more of an issue this will become. There is about a month’s gap between finishing the documents and starting coding so hopefully a rhythm can be established where we are able to have a live conference.

This week in the project requires our team to form a design document. The design document will act as an outline for the rest of the project. For me personally, this assignment is amazingly helpful. I love having an outline to follow as it makes everything more straight forward and also provides a set of rough checkpoints that can mark progress. Since the document will be an outline, the checkpoints will not have any specific meaning as far as completing the project goes, but it will help to move the team in the right direction. The design document is something that may be updated or changed as time goes on and the specifics are likely change, but it is still good to have a written plan for the course of the project. We did run into a slight problem this week with working on the design document. One of the team members currently lives in China so there is a large time difference that we work around. We have been able to work around that so far and we have kept in touch on a regular basis, but he started work this week. With a work schedule of the typical 9am to 5pm, he will be unavailable during weekdays as that correlates to 5pm to 1am PST. We usually held group calls on weekdays so we will have to try and find a time that will work on weekends for conferences. Other than that snag, the project has been great so far and the team has good people on it so I am not too worried about this difficulty. There was a sample design document given to us and Gantt charts were used to chart their timeline for the project for the upcoming terms. We will adapt similar charts to those since that is likely the timeline that will be used for this project. It is helpful that those timeline charts were supplied to us since it was able to give me an idea on what needs to be worked on when and it will help me formulate my schedule for future weeks.

This week in the Senior project was very relaxing. We had no team assignment for this week and worked on a technology review paper. The paper explains what technologies will be used for the component of the project that we are responsible for. I wrote on UI design. The base of our draw and play video game is the Unity engine, and Unity has a built in UI component simply called Unity UI. It has been out for a while and because of that, the reference pages are detailed and there is plenty of tutorial and example content available online. Unity UI offers a lot of what our project needs: multiple pages that are able to be linked through transitions and an event controller, multiple options for the design of the various aspects of game (directions, page selection, and stage layout for example), and it also allows the incorporation of C# programs in the designs. We will be using Unity UI as the base for our design and front end, so I am very happy about all of the reference material. The course as a whole is going good so far and it is helpful that it’s progressing one step at a time in a logical and inclusive way. The discussions each week are a good way to discover new technologies and get feedback and ideas on the options available.