Week 9

Last week we continued working on the Flash games updating and polishing as necessary.  We added the Benxing splash screen to all the games and a ‘from BambooBunch.com’ text in case anyone links to the bamboobunch website.

Doug got Bridge and Version Cue online which will keep us from stepping on each others toes when working on games.  It allows the user to ‘check out’ a game while you work on it.  Once you’re finished making changes you check it back in.  This process also automatically creates versions in case something get corrupted.  Very nice tool.

 On friday Tom, Bryant and I went to Reston to a Maya event sponsored by simulistic.  For a couple hours we watched presentaions on Maya and 3DsMax’s new powerful features.  Very interesting and powerful new tools are available in the Maya 2008.  We then got to watch ‘The Golden Compass’…. for free.  After the movie they gave away prizes and we got to walk around and mingle with industry experts and ask about their products and experiences.  Despite the drive down 495, it was very fun and a nice break from work. 

When we got back to the office we discussed working on a ‘tower’ feature for the website.  This is a customizable tower that gets built over time on the website.  Each user has their own tower.  We aren’t sure exactly how it’s going to work yet but it will add more interactivity to the website and give us a chance to use Unity again.

Week 8

November 26-30th we continued working on the Flash games…. We only have a few left that haven’t been touched or aren’t functioning.  We also updated the website with all the finished content.  I went through and made sure the names and icons for each game matched up while also fixing minor bugs and polishing a few games for release.  We registered the ‘master game matrix’ which is a list of all the current games and their status. 

Week 7

Last week we had a progress meeting to see what was finished and what needed to be finished.  Getting the site ready for launch, we need to make sure we have enough content/bulk.  We decided to take a break from the new unity project and finish up the flash games.  I finished a few this week.  For one of the games I modified the actionscript to make the game more fun.  Originally fruit launched out of a tree at a pretty constant rate.  The player had to bounce the fruit into a basket on the other side of the screen.  I changed the code to start out slow and then speed up the more fruit the player got into the basket.   It’s easy at first but gets frantic quickly if you do well, requiring you to juggle multiple fruits across the screen.  I had fun with that.  We also spent some time normalizing all the file names since we had maybe three different ways of naming files with their build numbers.  Soon we will be polishing the games and testing them on the website to see if there are any problems.

We also had a meeting to discuss budget, marketing, and intern status with Steve, who I believe is the marketing man.  This was interesting because I got to see how a company goes about figuring out how, who, and where to market their product.  We discussed how having video tutorials online somewhere which demonstrate how and what the site can be used for would be reassuring and incentive to pay for the account.  I am very excited about the website service and hope it does well.

Week 6

Last week we continued to work on the squirrel game.  I made a new acorn model, textured it and imported it into unity without any problems.  However, when we tried to bring it into doug’s computer the textures didn’t follow.  We fixed this by bringing over the jpeg textures in a fbx folder blender created after exporting. When you import into unity it creates .mat files which are actually just pointers to the actual image file.

Doug has been working on most of the code and has the main build so I have been making assets and giving them to him to import.  I’ve been looking over his shoulder though, trying to understand how the code works.  I also made a hollowed out tree which will serve as an acorn hopper.  I am now much better at modeling in blender than before I worked here.

Week 5

Last week at benxing I eased off the flash games some and started to work more on the new Unity project.  I made some models in blender and imported them into unity.  I had a common problem with the normals being flipped once imported and was unable to resolve this.  It happened maybe half the time.  Ususally there is a flip normals option in most programs but I couldn’t find it in Unity.

I also tried to get the 3D connexion device to work with blender because of its usefullness.  It’s basically a high tech door knob that you hold like a mouse.  It allows you to move/pan/rotate the camera around the 3D space with ease.  I read on the website that it can save 30% of the time spent and 50% of the button pressing required to camera around.  So… 10 plugins and 5 versions later, it still doesn’t work with blender.  Tom got it to work with Maya so I have been messing around with that, having wanted to learn Maya as well.  The 3Dconnexion device is very nice and saves a lot of time.  I wish it worked with blender because the Maya version we have there is the personal learning edition, which has all the features of the full version except the ability to export into another program.

I also made some graphics for the website.  Was an interesting week because I was able to do a little bit of everything.

Week 4

Last week at benxing I made icons for the flash games I finished.  On friday we had a meeting to discuss the assets we would need and basic concept for the next game we will be making using Unity.  I’m not sure what I can disclose but it’s going to be a game that teaches multiples and has a squirrel as the protagonist… Bryant worked the whiteboard and I took notes.  We made a list of what textures and models we were going to need as well as the code required.  Basically an outline for the game.  We decided to use C-sharp to program with and will more than likely use blender to make the models.  I started to look at some C-sharp code from another project and talked with Doug to make sure I understood how it worked.  We started by making a rough scene of the game using basic shapes and attaching scripts of code to them.  I wrote code to make a cylinder move left when the left arrow key was pressed.  I have done this in other programs before, but not by actually writing the code by hand.  It was nice to see how it works.  I now have a basic understanding of how to set up a scene in Unity and attach scripts to objects as well as some C-sharp knowledge.  This week I will write code to make the cylinder move right! Wooo!

Week 3

This week we continued working on flash games. We are almost done with the top priority games and are waiting on text files for several of the games. The text files are for quiz and crossword games. They allow the developer to input questions and answers to be used in the games. Coming up with different categories of text files will allow the player to easily select which type of game they want to play based on their age and what subject they are interested in. This will allow us to make multiple games out of one. I had one problem with flash and editing animations but nick introduced me to the edit option allowing me to edit an object I thought was unmodifiable. I am sure this will be a useful tool in the future.

The beta site will also be up soon so we need a couple finished games to upload and test for bugs. They also set up the forums which will allow us to communicate better with the brand designer and receive feedback from teachers and students. This week Tom treated us to lunch at a Vietnamese restaurant restaurant down the street. Being an unpaid intern this was quite nice.

Week 2

This week we continued work on making the flash games fit with the ‘feybell’ brand theme. I am now comfortable using Adobe flash and the Mac OS. So far I have five games which I have modified the graphics and instructions to fit the ‘feybell’ theme. I am still figuring out the animation part of flash and have had success doing simple animations. Earlier this week Tom showed us the rough website and what features would be available on it. Friday we had a video meeting with the brand designer to make sure that our work so far fit with the theme. Other than some minor color changes she seemed pleased. I then did a rough presentation of the next Unity game we would be designing. We have two weeks to make a working game (unpolished) and still have about 30 flash games to modify. Now that I am better using flash and Macs things are and will be going faster from here on.

Week 1

This week at Benxing we set up the new office and computers. They use Macs so I spent the first day getting comfortable using the new OS. We networked the computers to share files, installed Adobe Suite CS3 as well as Unity. One of our first tasks is converting 37 flash games to fit their genre. So I have also been learning how to use Adobe Flash. So far things have been going smoothly. I have finished a couple games and am much more comfortable on the Mac than I was earlier this week.

Benxing it is!

I got an email from Tom today asking me when I can start!  I gave him my school schedule and told him I would like to start as soon as possible.  I look forward to working with Benxing and think I will be very useful to them.  After my interview last friday, they suggested that I send them some meshes of my work.  Since their soon to come out game website has a panda theme,  I modeled a panda for them over the weekend and sent it with my other meshes.  It came out better than I thought it would.  I did this more or less for myself too, wanting to make sure I could model something this complex.