November 8, 2007

Congratulations! You're the Project Lead!

Hooray! Wait, no, that's just more work... :)

We got our assignments for our next team project today, and as we had suspected it ended up being that our small 6-person teams ended up getting merged into much larger 13 person teams with similar goals to the last project. This time we need to two maps, 30 meshes, and 30 textures, though we were allowed to extend off of our previous projects. Sadly, my group was one of the smaller teams that got broken apart, so I doubt you'll be seeing anymore floating islands or catapults. I was assigned to the soccer team which was the professor's favorite of the six, and was admittedly pretty cool if a little rough around the edges.

Given that the teams had doubled in size, I think it became clear to all the teams that the sort of ad-hoc no leads, completely collaborative style of teamwork wasn't going to work in this case, so we all went about setting up department leads and in our case a project lead. I'm not sure if I'm actually a good leader or just the most willing to go up to the board and start organizing things, but the team named me the project lead and elected/appointed a member from each department to be the department leads. The leads all seem pretty motivated and quickly began organizing work with the other members of their department, so I think we did well there.

I requested each lead give me a schedule for their department within the next couple days, and then I get to go about creating the master schedule. It's a lot of the sort of mundane project management that I am happier letting people like Jane handle if they are so inclined, but I seemed to be the only one inclined on my team to do it. At least it should mean a proportionate decrease in my LD tasks for the project which will allow me to focus on other things. Anyway, I should get going, I just finished studying for a midterm tomorrow and now I need to work on my map, which needs to be done for testing by tomorrow afternoon and...well, right now it just isn't.

As for screenshots here are a couple from my LD midterm on Monday:







The theme we were assigned was 'Caverns' and it had to include a terrain with multiple layers, a little pool of water, and multiple small rooms attached to a larger central rooms. There were also some simple requirements like it had to have a teleporter, a jump pad, and some pickups. I think it came out pretty well for being concepted and built in three hours. Soon we start "speed mapping" wherein we build a map in about an hour (or less, I'm not sure) and then playtest it for the rest of the class period. Not quite sure I'm ready for that, but we'll see :).

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