Day 75: Final Post... Probably

     This year in infotech has been a real journey. I have learned many important lessons throughout the semester, through mistakes of my own, and others around me. We all(mostly) have worked very hard and made some awesome progress so far, and we don't plan to stop. This year has also been a real learning experience, and through that I  have managed to come up with a bit of advice for anyone who plans to start out on something like this with their own group.

    

    Working as a team is extremely important in a setting like this, as you need to constantly communicate with your peers.You need to know what is being worked on, and need to collaborate on things so that they turn out the way the group wants. It is also important to be an active member of the team; you can't just slack off and ride along on everyone's coattails. Everyone needs to do their part for the game. Otherwise you will end up with angered people and a dysfunctional group. It is important to be working with people that you can trust, as well as people that you can count on to get their jobs done.  

    We bit off a lot more than we could chew this semester, and I will bet that you will make the same mistake; in an attempt to make an amazing game, we tried to incorporate too many things into the game at one time. Now that we are nearing the end we are finally getting it together, however throughout the year we were quite the unorganized group. If there's one piece of advice I could give, it would be to only tackle jobs that you can handle, and not to go overboard on the details. You will spend a lot more time on pointless things than you will actually developing the game. Once you get all of your important bits set up and working, then you can start adding extra effects like particles, game features, dialogue, etc. 

    I learned a good amount of things this semester; from technical coding things to artistic and musical design. Aside from the bigger topics above of course, you need to be aware of many different things. For one, it is very important to stick to your original ideas and not get ahead of yourself. You'll want to change things as you go, just try not to outdo yourself. It is also very important to make sure you are organized with your code and your setup; make sure everything is put together neatly so that when you do need to change something, it isn't too much of a hassle. 

    This class has been by far one of my favourites in all of my time here; I enjoyed every minute of it, whether I was spending hours fixing errors, or  I was composing some music for the game. I, along with some others will not me ceasing development of the game; we do actually plan on continuing to develop drop dead and other games in the future. Now that we know what we are doing and have a good team with the right skills and software, we can work together to make some awesome video games. The blog posts are done for now, but they may return; just not on a daily basis. That way I can still have some sort of showing my progress to the outside world. 

(Don't forget to check out my soundcloud as I will be posting some new music there in the near future. My keyboard is here and  I have the hardware to hook it up to my computer, so production will begin again very soon)