Level 3 Team Project - Week 16

In the past week, the team has spent much time considering summer work and assigning what tasks need to be completed and by who. After the verbal report with Brian, Phil and Claire, changes were made to our milestone dates with the cut off point for the second moving back until the end of July rather than the end of June. This was done to give the team more time with the Alpha build, as it'd take far longer to create a fully functioning Alpha from scratch than it would to turn that Alpha into a final product.

For sake of convenience, the second and third milestones have also 'merged' so team members need not present half way through the summer. Team members will still be treating milestones two and three as individual sections of the project, but both will be presented as if they were merged into one, longer presentation during the second week of October. During the summer break, team member Steve will be liaising with Brian and presenting the work completed up to that point for some informative feedback.

Over the summer, I will be performing some in-depth research into the emotional factors of our test, specifically chivalry, sympathy, empathy and engagement. I'll also be helping to create physical builds of our level in hammer and writing various other research pieces that hope to back up the decisions made during our levels production.

To view the Team Fable project blog, click here.

To view all of the Team Project diary entries, click here.

Level 3 Team Project - Week 14 and Week 15

The past two weeks have seen slow progress with Team Project work as deadlines for other subjects have been coming to a close. Meetings with Andrew Williams have taken place of the course of the last two weeks, with positive feedback and recommendations given.

Now making a summer plan, the team hopes to pick the pace back up during the break and have a fully functioning alpha build by the end of June.

To view the Team Fable project blog, click here.

To view all of the Team Project diary entries, click here.

Level 3 Team Project - Week 13

This week saw the team starting work with Milestone II, picking straight up with a meeting on Monday where team members discussed what work was to be complete and who did what.

After reading an Environment Study completed by Kyle on the secret bases of 'Goldeneye', I decided to write up a study of my own on Left 4 Dead's 'Dead Air Office Complex.' You can find the three page investigation here.

To view the Team Fable project blog, click here.

To view all of the Team Project diary entries, click here.

Level 3 Team Project - Environment Study (Left 4 Dead)

After reading Kyle's recent environment study on the secret base of Goldeneye, I decided perform an investigation of my own. I decided to look into another area of our test location, the beginning office section, and decided that the office complex found within Left 4 Dead's 'Dead Air' campaign would be an ideal candidate.

"The office complex found within the second chapter of the ‘Dead Air’ campaign in Left 4 Dead is an environment worth our team analysing for a number of reasons. Firstly, Left 4 Dead has been built using Valve’s ‘Source SDK’ [2], the same editor we will use to create our testing environment. This means the tools that were available to the Valve Developers during the production of Left 4 Dead are identical to those available to us when creating our environment. It also means we can study Valve’s metrics, getting an idea what dimensions door frames, rooms and other areas should be. Secondly, the office complex found within Left 4 Dead has a sense of crisis and panic between the player and the NPCs on their team, similar to that of ours when test candidates are ordered to exit the office building at the start and when gunfire is heard."

To view the three page document in .pdf format, click here.
 

Level 3 Team Project - Week 12

This week saw the team delivering Milestone I, of which concluded on the 30th of April. All goals and tasks were met with the presentation taking place on Friday.

Aside from helping out create the Milestone I Presentation and deliverables, I wrote up an article on Katherine Isbister's study 'Consistency of Personality within Interesting Characters.' You can read the source analysis paper here.

To view the Team Fable project blog, click here.

To view all of the Team Project diary entries, click here.