Month 10: Operating Systems and Structure of Game Production Part1

This month we had a lot of work. First in OPS, Gary Miller taught us how operating systems are designed and structured. He also introduced us to multithreaded programming. In SGP1 we began design and production on a group game called Spectrum. John O’Leske, Rob Martinez, Ron Powell and Sean Hathaway all lead us through industry standard production cycles while we put together this game from scratch.

In OPS, we learned about operating systems and how they use multithreaded programming in order to have seamless functionality and user interfaces. During Lecture Gary told us of the old ways computers functioned as well as their evolution and his experiences in the industry over the years. The book was a little hard to understand at times but the more you read the more it makes sense and the more ready you will be for the weekly quizzes and the final. In lab we tackled classic multithreaded problems which had Gary’s own modern twists. The “Dining-Philosophers” problem became the “Not Enough Alcohol at the Party” problem. We even got to work on Pong again except this time we set up multithreaded simulations of variable amounts of players and games.

In SGP1, we split up into groups of 4-5 people to work on games we prototyped in ROG. The class is broken up into sprints (2 weeks) were each team member is assigned user stories that they are responsible for getting down on time, the amount of user stories accomplished as well as effort determines how much money (fictional, represents grade) your team gets in the end of the sprint. The first 2 weeks were designing and documenting everything we wanted in our game. We had to be extremely descriptive using other products as examples. These documents ended up being more than 100 pages long which means we had little sleep during that sprint. The next 2 weeks were building tools we would use to create assets for our game. For Spectrum we had, Albert Jen doing the Tile Editor, Tyler Berry doing the Animation Editor, yours truly working on the Particle Editor and Mac Reichelt working in the code base to get our game up and running. We also had to spin the wheel of misfortune (a tool used to inject chaos into the class). We spun Dev Blog and Dress Code which meant that we had to keep a daily blog of our progress and now have to dress professionally when we show up for class. Other possible spins include Localization (to a foreign country) and Team Swap, switching a random team member with another team for the sprint.

I am looking forward to this month were we only have to worry about SGP it will be a lot of work and many hours not sleeping but I think we will have an awesome game when all is said and done.

Here are some pix of my Particle Editor: