Thoughs on my leadership

Today’s Blogpost

Since this will be one of my last posts for awhile I was considering doing this as a recap of what I have done good and what I need to improve for next time.

First of all I think that my team has made a good game and that I feel proud to have been part of that team. The effort and dedication they have put in to make it possible is something I admire and feel will make them excellent game developers in the future.

However this journey has been rough at times and I think much of it boils down to my leadership. I have tried to have a hands off approach on how they have performed their tasks and to allow them to have as much freedom on how to finish them. Sadly I feel that in the process I might have become slightly detached from the developers and that in the future I will need to find a balance between creative freedom and restraints.

Secondly was working with Scrum. I like the tool and think it could be a great way to organize a team in the future. Still I feel that my own experience is a bit too small to use it effectively and need more practice with it to manage a team. I feel that overtime I have made some errors that have stacked and slowed down the process. However this just allows for more improvements from myself and that for the next project I can make some adjustments.

For example I had some issues organizing my daily standup and finding things to discuss. Secondly I feel that I didn’t ask my team enough questions and that in the future I need to do that more. My reason for this was that I assumed that if they had problems they would tell me, but that proved to not be the case all the time.

Luckily my team has been kind enough to give me constructive feedback on improvements and what they thought I did good. So now I feel more confident that I can do this aslong as I keep the problems in mind and work on them.

This is all for now.

Sound Script

This week has sadly been a very slow week when it comes to the current game design work due to me catching a fever and needing to rest. As such I haven’t had the ability to do the work that I needed.

However I did manage to get a script working in the game that allows a sound effect for when you take damage.

When I started with this task I first tried at first to use the same method as last time in which I only added an audio component to the right prefab. My first thought was that I could add the component to a sprite when the character takes damage. However I quickly realized that the sprite didn’t exist as when the player takes damage it simply creates a red overlay. So I had to scrap that plan and instead start to learn how to make a script for it. This however wasn’t as easy as I had hoped. At first I used the Unity website to learn some basics regarding scripting, but it was hard since I had never done anything similar to that before. While guides were useful I still wasn’t making as much progress as I was needed to finish the task within time. So instead I asked my programmer and game designer to help me with the script and to teach me how it worked. When they helped me I realized that I had barely done anything right with the script since I had skipped several steps when I tried to rush it. As such I hadn’t defined the audio source in the script or even found the correct place to put the code later. Lastly there was also an error in my code since I used the wrong command, but luckily they helped me with that as well.

With their help I managed to get the code working in the end, but I also learned many important things about coding. First of all never rush tutorials. I realized too late that skipping the earliest parts of the tutorial made everything else impossible to fix for me. This was obvious when I couldn’t even define the audio source in the code.

But most important it taught me it is a good idea to ask for help with coding and try to learn from more experienced people since they have a better understanding than myself at this.

This is all for today. Have a nice day.

Sound Implementation

New Post Today

Hello for the third time everyone (unless I am counting wrong in which case I do not apologize.). This week I have mostly been working on implementing the sound into the game and doing some preparations for the Beta presentation.

While I found the sound last week I still needed to implement it into the game which was more difficult than I had expected. To start my work I first started watching tutorials on the Unity website to start my work, but I realized I faced some larger issues as I had no experience with coding or scripting so I needed to avoid that as much as possible. So while I viewed the tutorials I started fiddling around with the different setting and components on Unity. 

After what I would consider a long while I started testing the Audio Source component and tried to get the sound working. I added the sound file and set it to activate on awake. Due note that I set this on the projectile so basically it meant that the sound would play as soon as the projectile spawned. At first it seemed like a good idea, but I ran into the problem that the sound file was to long and would overlap to much. So I returned to the internet to find a solution. At first I thought that I could write a simple script with some help from my programmers that would make the sound fade after the next projectile spawned. However this seemed a bit to much so I thought that maybe I could edit the sound so that I could remove the overlap.

In the end however I decided to change the sound entirely however since I wasn’t confident in my editing abilities and not sure if the sound would still work. When I tested the new sound however it seemed immediately like an improvement, the overlap was removed and with some slight pitch changing it would work for that gun. I then did the same thing for the other weapons which was basically just adding a Audio Source component to the projectiles. Next week however I will need to make a script for the enemies as I can’t add a sound component to our melee enemies since they don’t use projectiles. But that will be for next week.

Regards Oskar.

Sound Design

Hello once again my readers.

For this post I will talk about sound design and finding it.

When I first started on the sound I had a big problem finding a site where I could find copyright free sound for the weapons or ambient noise in the game. I tried searching for different sites, but a member of my game design team sent me a link to a website called freesound.org which contains many different sounds completely free.

The biggest problem however except from finding the sound was deciding which sound would be the best suited. For example I was looking to find a sound for our assault rifle in the game and got a large amount of results. As I was scrolling through them I found that it was hard to find a sound that would match in a manner expected in a game. I first found a sound from a real rifle, but decided against that one since it sound more like an explosion than a “proper” rifle. Instead I would look for the sounds made from other sources such as drums or dropping marbles on sheet metal. This created the more expected bang sound needed for our rifle in the game.

 

This gave me an interesting insight as I studied more about sound design that quite a large amount of sound that is used in games aren’t really common in real life and this continued as I searched for sounds for our bazooka and other weaponry.

However the most difficult part came when I needed to find an ambient sound needed to convey that the game takes place underwater. Searching for underwater ambient noise was just a dead end since most of the recording didn’t match my expectations. 

However I was a bit lucky since the term yielded one useful result which was a cool tide like sound I would say that conveyed a sense of being underwater while not being to obtrusive.

As such I decided to use that as an ambient noise and tried to move to the next part which was finding game music. This task is something I am still working on since I have tried contacting people I know to do it for me for compensation as I lack the skill to create my own song and finding one that isn’t copyrighted seems impossible.

This is all for me this week so see you next time. Bye

 

First Post

Welcome to my blog.
For this first post I will write about group dynamics and project work.

Working on a project for me has been a big eye opener compared to other work I have done before and it has forced me to learn.

Before I came to this school I didn’t really think that there were models for how projects should be executed or models for how to organize them. In fact I thought that most projects relied mostly on that people “winged it” and then solved problems as they arose.

When we started working on this game we were told to use a method called Scrum which we had learned a bit about in project management class. At first I felt that it was a strange tool to use as the way you documented and had sprints, but as I became more secure in my role and my understanding of the progress I started to see the advantages of the system.

 

Last semester when I was still learning Scrum I felt that progress was much slower and that it was hard to organize the different members of the group. And as such the performance seemed to drop with time due to a generally lackluster leadership at that point from my side.

However now when we use Scrum it is much easier to see when problems arise and to deal with them. The main reason for this is the daily meetings and also the sprint planning and sprint reviews allowed me to catch problems as people reported them more consistently.

Why this happens is that the agile method of Scrum allows for a lot of variation on how to work within and how to divide tasks allowing the group members pick tasks that they feel confident they can finish in time. Secondly it also allows project managers to focus more on working on solving problems rather than spending most of the time working on the documentation.

However a downside would be that I feel that if a group is to big then Scrum won’t allow the project manager to have a good overview and also the communication between group members will be cluttered and no one will know what they are doing and why.

As such I can understand why we learn working with this methodology in this course as it will allow us to get used to it in a working environment and also is one of the more efficient ways to manage for now.