A lesson in relying on nylon

I'm attempting to travel lite, and that means not lugging around a huge amount of stuff to get my job done. So for art development I'm using a sketchpad, a camera to photograph images from said sketchpad, and a laptop to add the color to those images with Photoshop. Well on Saturday a critical element of that trio fell onto a very sharp rock. My camera's strap broke while I was gingerly stepping over a colony of small sea creatures on a beach near Santa Cruz CA, and now it's in very poor working condition. So later this week I'll be tracking down a Best Buy when we move onto Napa Valley Wednesday, and finding out if they're going to honor my 3-year warranty.

Floorplan!

Quick update! Our development team had a meeting this morning to bring each up up to speed on what we're doing. The game's visuals now have a blueprint, as I wrapped up the written descriptions and accompanying thumbnail images this weekend. Nathan and Chris are confident that the communication method we're going to use will work, and we'll be soliciting the rest of the Help Desk full-timers for content starting tomorrow. This week I'm going to move forward with refining the images, as well as get my feet wet on the written story-elements.

My First Screens

This afternoon I finished a very rough mock-up of an interactive "image". These screens will be the foundation for presenting game content dynamically.

Check it out here

The screen is basically divided into 5 parts: a top image, a left image, a right image, a bottom image and the dynamic content area. All parts are contained in divs and formatted with CSS. The content area is currently pulling names from our student bio database. I think it's pretty neat!


I did run into one problem. Yesterday Michael and I discussed panning images. I thought that I could CSS-format scrollbars, which I can but they *ONLY* work in Internet Explorer. That is a major bummer. Looks like it's back to the research room for me...

Say, "Ahoy!" to The Captain

Nathan "The Captain" Carpenter has been on the Help Desk game crew since it's very beginning. He is currently stationed at the landlocked UIUC home base.

His lack of artistic skill is more than made up for by his ability to covertly slip pop culture references into games and write hacky, bloated PHP code.

Two feet on the ground

Having safely arrived in San Francisco on Monday night, I spent the majority of yesterday getting everything established on my laptop. Nathan and I had cause to use the WebX tool yesterday, and after some initial confusion we were both able to "draw" on the screen. The goal is that I won't have to pick up the phone every time I want to communicate an idea, and it looks like chat and WebX are going to do the trick.
At this stage i'm completing the written descriptions of the games various visuals. Here's a sweet example:

Node A: Crash sight
Image A1: Crash landed spaceship in a jungle – it appears to have plowed through an alien statue on it’s way down.

- An opening in the ships hull extends off to the left (mouse-over (MO) brings up an arrow pointing left) (Image A1)

- A grown-over pathway in the jungle leads off to the right (MO shows an arrow to the right) (Image B)

- Broken-off, blinking headlamp (animated GIF)

- A piece of fallen statue is here

- A teleport platform is here (MO lightening bolt symbol)

Once this document is completed, thumbnail images like the one below will be drawn to match the descriptions. The thumbnails will serve as the first draft for the art in the game. Once all are completed, we can drop these rough images into HTML and actually start testing the game out. When we've determined everything is visually making sense, work on final images can begin.
A few games back we just kind of hit the ground running and came up with ideas on the fly. While this was a very exciting way to work, we didn't really have a "game" until the very end - in our case the day before we launched. It's our hope that planning ahead and thoroughly testing the product will make the process a lot smoother for everyone involved.
I'm off to UC Berkeley later today to see the campus and get some drawings done.

One Small Step

The Help Desk training game development team is composed of Nathan Carpenter, Chris Ritzo and Michael Curtin (me). After a long game-making hiatus, the three of us began collaborating again only one week ago.
As I'll be leaving for San Francisco on June 11th, that means we had 5 days to figure out how we we're going to keep communication up while being separated by 5 states (including 2 time-zones).

Communication:
Here's a quick breakdown of the many communication methods we'll be using to keep in touch;

• The conference-call: we setup two weekly meetings in order to review completed assets, pass along ideas, and talk about organic gardening.
• Email and Instant Messenger: faster then setting up a conference-call, instant messaging allows us a no-hassle environment to quickly pass information back and forth.
• Shared filespace: UIUC hosts a file-storage service called CITES NetFiles. Nathan, Chris and I share a common directory where we can add and remove pieces of the game as they're being created.
• Web X Remote Help: a fancy remote assistance tool, Web X allows Nathan and Chris to view what's on my laptop screen. I can even draw and write text on my screen (or theirs) to illustrate an idea.

Work will begin in earnest once I get settled on the 12th.