Weeks 7 – 12 ~ 16/03/20 – 26/04/20

Following the news about Coronavirus, my partner and I have made the decision to self-isolate our household and I have sent a message to the group letting them know how this will affect me and my ability to contribute to the project. I shouldn’t have any problem working from home aside from the unknown effect that being in “lockdown” will have on my mental health, and therefore also on my performance. 

I have merged weeks 7-12 because the amount of work completed by the group in these weeks was heavily impacted by Coronavirus and therefore not as substantial as some previous weeks. 

19/03/20:

We had a group call this evening where we worked through current issues with the game including speech and wall boundaries. We also discussed adding some backing music. Alvin joined the call to talk through options for what he could create for the game. We sent a number of links to dubstep/edm music that we thought would give an appropriate atmosphere for the game and asked if he would be able to create something similar. We also asked about having some footstep noises and some noises for the menu screens. We then arranged to do another call on the 21st.

I sent Nick some messages to check up on how he’s doing and he talked with me briefly about the situation that he’s in. I hope that we will be able to adapt the roles as a group to make things easier for him, with the tools he has available. I will talk to the group about this during our next call.

23/03/20:

We have a meeting with Stuart today. Unfortunately, I was unable to join the call earlier in the week because of my partner being unwell and not wanting to disturb him. I’m excited for Stuart to see the work that has been done to the game so far!

We got some great feedback from Stuart about the game and are planning to work through the day to make the changes suggested. 

Nick has let me know that it would be easier for him to work on text-based work since he doesn’t have photoshop available from home, so I’ve sent him a link to the google docs quest list for him to add some entries to as that’s something we’re really struggling with creative ideas for at the moment!

Since Nick is going to be moving onto text-based work I’m going to start working on a coloured version of the house for the final product. 

24/03/20:

Since I’ve had a slow few weeks leading up to now I decided to push myself really hard and was able to finish a coloured version of the house layout fairly quickly across last night and today. But after the conversation with Stuart, we decided to remove the stairs so as not to be too Ambitious with what we can do in the time we have left. 

I also started work on some furniture for the house:

And I created an animated light sprite sheet for the TV! 

25/03/20:

I created a background Garden image which I altered a few times before I was happy with it. Here’s the complete background image:

27/03/20:

Alvin has sent of some music to use for the game, which I love the sound of but I’m not really sure if it’s an appropriate atmosphere for the game. It’s also made me think about whether the rooms that I’ve already coloured display the appropriate atmosphere. I may have to go back in future and add some soft light filters or something to make it feel a bit more like a party atmosphere. I should create all of the household objects first though. 

29/03/20:

I went through on unity and replaced all of the uncoloured pieces of the house with the coloured pieces and also sneakily fixed some cropping issues some of the doors and walls were having. I’m really pleased with how it’s looking so far and have been able to finish coloured sets of the doors which Adam will be testing, along with making an exclamation and question mark.  

Starting into April and for the continuing time after that, I did not work any further on the group project. I’m disappointed in myself that I didn’t finish the house assets, after coming so far with the project. However, I’m really pleased with what I did achieve during the time I spent working on the game, and I’m also happy with our progress on the project overall. I feel bad for letting the team down by not being able to finish the project but I’m hopeful that we’ll go on to produce better and more *complete* projects in future!