As fortune would have it, I was able to recover all the files associated with any sort of creativity; the written work and those images already heavily edited in Photoshop. I did lose a bunch of the tedious .html work, but was able to re-do it all in two or three days. Since my post a little under a month ago, I've gotten everything into the computer and ready for photoshop / HTML work. Heres a chunk of one of the games mysterious images:
What the heck is that thing? you might be asking yourself. Can it make soup? It's questions like these that drive the game play experience at the CITES Help Desk.
Currently I'm in Atlanta, Georgia. While my co-workers back in Illinois have been extraordinarily busy with the beginning of the fall semester, I've been scrambling to get the games images and text in proper working order. I've got a week and a half to complete the art for the game, with some wiggle-room (1 or 2 weeks) to handle any fancy image effects (like blinking lights!).
While this project is wrapping up I'm preparing for the next space-themed adventure, tentatively titled Incident at Long Rock Junction! Developing these games is a real learning process, and the road-bumps, pot holes and changes of course I've experienced with this project will hopefully be toned down in the next go-round. I've also been pointed towards a few books recently (thanks Carl!) which might be useful in upping the fun-level; Raph Koster's Theory of Fun for Game Design, and Katie Salen's Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals. I would like to order both in the next week, but it remains to be seen whether or not UIUC will be picking up the tab.
More to come as the project wraps up!

Working from the Office

I've spent the last few days working in my actual place of employment, which is an odd change of pace - they have no swimming pool here, or free coffee and complimentary newspaper.
What the Digital Computer Laboratory (CITES nerve-center) lacks in the creature comforts it more then makes up in the "poeple" department. Nathan and Chris are both here this week, allowing us to talk "for real" about the games development.
In other news I got my business cards printed today, which come in handy if you're visiting a strange university far from home. Also another Help Desk full-timer (Jon) spent a hefty chunk of time today assisting me with my busted hard-drive (see previous post, aptly titled Busted). Some work has been recovered, the rest is going through a 41 hours data recovery process. We'll see what our tough little WIN98 machine has cooked up Monday morning.

BUSTED

You know, technology's a funny thing. Sometimes it works for months at a time, and sometimes your hard-drive dies and you're left without a working computer 3000 miles from home.
My laptop's a paperweight right now, but luckilly I've got plenty of drawing to do before heading home for a short visit later this week. While there I'll swap out a new hard-drive, make a pot of coffee and reinstall everything. I lost about 4 days worth of stuff, but making it up should move quickly.

Progress!

I spent a big chunk of yesterday in a Starbucks outside of Modesto California. They charge for wireless internet in a lot of coffee-shops out here, which is a shock to me - I'm used to wireless being more of a right then a privilege.
Anyway, as the title of this entry suggests I made some progress, specifically on the HTML side of the game. Throughout the Help Desk Game Development Group's history, several different guys have had the task of turning the images and learning content into a web-based game (Nathan, Chris, and a long time ago a very hard working student named Josh Krohn). Being the least HMTL-inclined of our group (and a horrible speller), I typically stayed out of that side of the process. But this time around is different; since we'll have a lot of animated GIF's decorating the game it made sense for me to take over the super-basic HMTL stuff, because I'll be updating it as the game progresses. What I wrapped up yesterday was splitting my images up into pieces, tying those pieces together in HTML frames, and getting many of the frames swapped with animated GIF's. Let's hope I haven't somehow doomed the project with my meddling.

Sweating the Schedule

I had a bit of a heart-attack earlier this week when I was under the mistaken impression that my time on this project was 1/3rd over. We set aside 3 months to complete this project, and I thought I was coming up on 1 month of work. Luckily it was 3 weeks and not 4. This concern did motivate me to take a look at where I'm at in the process, and I'll share my findings with you;
- All told there are 12 images that need to be completed. I've developed the rough drawings for all of these, and have begun work on the final drawings. Of those, only one drawing is actually complete, with another close on it's heels. To be honest this worries me, because once the drawing is complete they still require coloring in Photoshop. Both steps are very time consuming, and I would rather be farther along at this stage. The sooner I complete these drawings the sooner Nathan can integrate them into HTML and PHP.
- The games written content is well under way; Nathan has an example of the branching method we'll be using for the game-learning aspects, and I have several one-off journal entries that will be placed around the game.

What has caught me off guard with this process is the amount of time it has taken to get a good workflow setup; I've spent a great deal of time setting up accounts, organizing files, and maintaining the documentation trail (a category under which this blog is included). The good news is that I've developed a personal method that should deliver on my end of the bargain.

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.