Week 6 overview.

Week 6 has been the fastest week of this semester, it has gone too fast that I've only come to realize it  after Ms. Alyson said:"enjoy your weekend!!" following the end of the class last Thursday.

Despite it being a swift week, there was much more productivity in our group. Abbas and I sat more to think about how we are going to design the stages; Fatima worked on drawing Mr.Pen (which in my opinion looked horrible); Mohammed who has had unfortunate health problems last week attended this week and I believe that his strong presence helped get the G4 engine up and running again. He and I talked about the technical aspects of the game and how the coding would work. At first, I suggested an idea that instead of working on a single flash file we would do something like the last semester with the mini application, in which we split the pages and stages into separate flash files and then link them all together. However, the idea was not well received by the team, therefore, it got revoked.

Because I think I've been assigned to a not so difficult role which is music and sound effect, and that Mohammed has already gotten  his hands full with the other courses' projects, I thought why not try and help out with the programming and coding of the game. That's when the invisible light bulb over my head had lit up & another idea sprung out: we keep all the design in a single flash file, while the codes would be in separate ActionScript files so that the coding process would be made far less stressful and more flexible to edit and debug. Later, the smaller code segments would all be linked back to the main ActionScipt code. Mohammed was very delighted and pleased with the idea and thought that we should stick to it and apply it in our game developing.


On Thursday, I asked the members to send me copies of their work for the sections they were assigned to; those are: technical aspects(Mohammed), story (Abbas), and Art & Animation(Fatima),. I've got the boys' copies but I'm yet to receive anything from the great Ms. Fatima for reasons probably related to procrastination and laziness.^_^. As of this writing, I'm currently working on the design document attempting to conceive a general idea of how the stages will look like , as well as how the puzzles may be designed.

After walking back and forth in my brother's room like a Nazi soldier patrolling inside a P.O.W camp, I've brainstormed some ideas for the 3 stages: The initial idea was that there would be a drawing of a sea in the 2nd stage; that's when the word logistics popped into my head! The 3 notebooks would simulate a  a typical Bahrain Polytechnic student's foundation, logistics, and engineering notebook. and in each notebook, the player would be able to see and read parts of lessons and equations and drawings etc.. I fell it would be awesome and that it would facilitate the hardest part of the planning which is puzzle creations. However, I'll need to introduce the idea to my fellow team members and listen to their feedback so that we could all agree and add it to the design document.

I've got some pictures of my brainstorming attached but the storm was so intense that I don't think my drawings and writings will be easily read...

cheers ^ _ ^

(above) proposed items to be collected to form a boat. At the bottom  the notebooks and how each is divided into two pages: easy and hard.

 I thought a player could summon the PBL map at any given time... below it is the map for the whole realm...
below that is stage 2's items to be collected to form an airplane or something...

A Bigger view of the "Three Books Realm".

Week 4 & 5 summary

Almost 2 weeks have passed since my last post, and at that time I was still struggling with the game proposal; we diden't have a game name; we diden't have a group name; and I diden't even have my group members' full names. xD. But thank god, the game concept document has been done (with awesomeness if I may add) and we are now working on the game design document.

As for our group name, Abbass was kind enough to "generate" group and game names, the following is the message sent by him:
""
 1. Group name:

• Night Vision
• K4/4K (4-Knights)
• G4 (Group-4)
• Quad-corp.
• Neo-corp.

 2. Game name:

• Tri-realm
• Damsel in Distress
• Stickman & the magic key
• liberation

that's all of what I can get ^^

hopes they'll do

later... =) ""

My personal favourites were 'Quad-Corp' and 'Stickman & the magic key'. During the next PBL session, we, the group, after long discussions decided to go for the group name of "G4" which ironicaly stands for "group 4", the number our tutor gave our team. As for the game name, we all agreed on ''Stickman & the magic key''.^_^

After the submission of the proposal, Owen, the Flash tutor showed us a game design document template done by the university of Quebec. My team and I immediately began analyzing and defining the key content of the document. Mohammed thought we should all print hard copies and then split or atleast assign general roles and specialization of each member for the time being. I printed copies in the lab, handed them out and then we began work; Mohammed would handle the technical and programming sections; Abbas would work on the storyline and scenarios; Fatima on visual design of the game such as characters and enemies drawing as well as obstacles and puzzles. And finaly, I 've been assigned to an intersting role which is music and sound; I have experiance in sound editing and mixing therefore I am really enthusiastic about. Imagine seeing my name in the credits screen: Music composition/sounds effects/sound engineering by Khalid Abdul Majeed, ain't that EPIC?!!
Ofcourse, it's not like the next Hans Zimmer or Harry Gregson Williams would emerge from Bahrain, but still, it would be awesome!

In week 5, not much had been done besides my work on the tutorials. Apparently, the absence of Mohammed has had a bad effect on our group as a whole; He is like the core of the group, much like a computer motherboard with an Intel Core i7 processor in this case. When you central proccing unit is gone, the rest of the hardware components are rendered useless on thier own. In this case: Fatima (graphic card), Abbas (RAM), and Khalid (sound card). In other words, we all do our awesome part, but in the end,  Mohammed is the dude who processes the inputs and gives awesome outputs.

Though the above would've been a great thesis statement and/or a heroic conclusion for my post, i'm not finished yet.

Today will be the last study day for week 5, at the moment I'm with my group in the lab and I think i'm going to attempt to get the document done with my fellow hardware friends without Mohammed. The tutorial is done and i've captured my entire work using a a screen recording software, I will then put it all together and edit it so the whole work will be shown in exactly or less then 3 minutess. I think it will be awesome!

As for next week,  we are going to have to work harder to finish the game design document hopefully by the end of the week, so that we would have more time to acutally begin building the game and also prepare for presentation.

...PeAce...

The Game proposal!

Short self-reflection essay

 // Ignore this line:"My first post on blogger Wo0o0ohoooo!!"

Ms. Alyson Rowe, our Web media English communication tutor had recently "asked" us to write a short essay. I had sent a draft today and received a copy back with my usual errors: punctuation! sadly, I missed a semicolon, a punctuation symbol that I've been trying to nail throughout last semester,what an epic FAIL! Oh well, it's my first writing therefore, I reckon Ms.Aly would say: "Don't stress on it :)". So here it is:

 

Self-reflection essay

Last week Ms. Alyson Rowe, the Web Media English tutor, gave us 2 assignments; one of which was  to write a self reflection essay. The purpose of this short essay is to reflect on what I have done and learnt so far from the first week of class until the date of this writing (3^rd May), as well as what I would do differently next time.

At the beginning of the previous week, our first class was Mr. Brendan’s Web Authoring . We were given an exercise in which we were to work in pairs or groups to find out what the polytechnic website was missing and then write them down and email them to our tutor. My partner, Abbas, had already come up with most of the points by the next class and I just revised them and added a couple of points.

The game design classes felt more energetic and filled with group activities. I have been brainstorming with my game development group and have participated with game ideas. In addition, I have been assigned the role of the ‘observer’ and have given some feedback to our new tutor, Mr. Owen.

The English assignment, though very useful, felt tedious and repetitive at times. That is not a good excuse to procrastinate, yet I did not start working on it until the beginning of this week. As a result, I have learnt a lot about social bookmarking and actually felt quite pleased from the idea of sharing my knowledge of websites and discovering new ones from others.

In conclusion, in spite of my not so good start, I am keen on improving and catching up with my fellow students.