Thursday Oct 28

For today, I added player ship and camera classes. Since my sprint's task is to perfect the player's movement, I've begun adding code to the player ship class. There are currently no impediments and by next time, I should have the player ship movement completed.

As for what happened in class today, we did not have a lecture and so our group continued to work on the project. For us programmers, we were able to get together, look at the way the current framework of our game is built, and edit it to make it more flexible and efficient. We also discussed future impediments we may encounter such as optimizing the content manager such that we can minimize the amount of resource and power needed for the xbox360 to load and run our game.

Tuesday Update

For this week's stand up meeting, I set up and began adding some classes into the repository. I organized the code and tried to set up a format that everyone can follow and makes reading each other's code much easier to read. I added a .doc changelog that may be updated when an individual commits a new revision into the repository. For the next time, I will be working on the user ship update movement such that the user will move to its correct position and velocity has been given.

During our discussion today, we've decided to actually start out at XNA 3.1 and wait until next semester before we convert to XNA 4.0.

Thursday sprint goal

Today our group talked about some core classes we need to start building our core game engine. This includes having screen manager class to manage the state our our game, and receiving and passing inputs along to the correct object. We also discussed creating an entity object which is the parent of all our objects. We created a inheritance structure to ensure flexibility and that all objects are organized correctly in terms of their functions. For example, we would have collidable or non collidable classes from which a space ship for example would inherit from the collidable. For stand up meeting today, since all the tasks are still not fully partitioned, I have gone ahead and set up my microsoft visual studios with the new xna 4.0 and I've also installed and set up the repository so I can begin coding. For the next time, I plan to start on and finish what I will be assigned to do.

Tuesday After fall break

So Chase Dickerson from last year's urban space squirrel came in to talk about the level editor he made last year as well as some challenges and speed bumps the team encountered. For our stand up meeting, we actually did not have much to talk about since we did not assign any tasks during fall break. However, we divided up the task for this coming sprint on tuesday, and James will finish splitting up the tasks up next meeting time. I have also downloaded the new xna 4.0, and installed it on my machine.

Finalizing Product Backlog

On thursday, we finalized what we must include in our release as well as what needs to be accomplished by the first sprint. For the artists, they need to have some space ships and sky boxes complete. They will also need to settle on an overall theme for the game. As for the programmer side, we need to implement all of the major mechanics that make up a space ship game. Physics to simulate movement, fluid controls, and a user interface. The work will be split up by James and once he finalizes the task for the programmers, I will be able to start on my sprint.

First day of product backlog planning

On Tuesday, we began producing our entire product backlog. This includes all features that we would like in our game. An example would be having a economy and customizable space ships in our game. Next, we trimmed down and created a log of what our user should see in our game. An example for our game would be a tutorial, a space ship load out screen that allows user to change pod types and upgrade ships. Next class, we will be trimming our backlog down to parts of the game that needs to be in our initial release.