Sensei Progress

Project Sensei is coming along nicely. For the past few weeks, we have been busy little beavers churning out this project like machines. In fact, our last few meetings have just been basically discussing what needs to be done (what has highest priority) and how well the last lot of things were done. There haven't been really many course-of-action changing decisions made or any major stumbling stones so to speak lately. You can catch all the latest from our individual blogs, navigable to from the sidebar.

Our poster is complete and awaiting approval for printing. The submission deadline draws near and we're feeling the pressure of it as it creeps closer day by day. We should be just about done on time, and we haven't lost any sleep. 2:40 AM? -- correction. Not much sleep!

Click for larger view.

New Neural Network and Input Processing System

"A brave new frontier. That is, I am rewriting the neural network to make it simpler and closer to specification. Also, Ryan revamped the combo input system and it's working quite well right now."


This post is in reference to this post by Jordan and this post by Ryan (follow these links for details!)

External Testing

20th September External Test Day

Today we had a few testers come in and evaluate our project. In essence we wanted them to pick up on important things that we needed to do in order to make the project easily presentable in an efficient way. Since not much of the actual gameplay is testable (for a player) we focused mainly on the interfaces displayed and how the project was progressing.

The following points were brought up

• The timer needs to be very obvious as it is an essential part of the game. It also needs to be obvious when time is about to run out, and when time has run out.
• Different players using the same characters need to be distinguishable.
• The in-game physics needs tweaking.
• Crouching and some other animations need to be really obvious.
• At the end of a round the fighters must take their original positions.
• We should have a few copies of the technical manual at the Trade Show to reference.

Most of these we already planned and have accounted for so it was good we didn't run into an unexpected problems. We may plan a test day further on closer towards the end of the project to get more feedback about the actual gameplay.

Session 2 Meeting 7

Tuesday 20 September
We had a short and quick meeting just discussing our progress and our plans for this week.
Agenda (PDF)

Session 2 Meeting 6

Tuesday 13th September 2011

Minutes: All went to plan. :)
Agenda (PDF)

Updated documentation

The Technical documentation and Project Plan documents have been updated on the web.
Check them out if you haven't seen them recently :)

Project Plan
Technical Documentation

Session 2 Meeting 5

Agenda

Meeting minutes: we pretty much just went through the agenda and everything went to plan. We confirmed that Friday was fine for another Skype work day.

Week 6 Project Diary Evaluation

Hi! Feel free to browse all the project-related entries in this blog, including meeting minutes and other project-specific posts. To see the blogs for our individual developers, click one of the links on the sidebar to take you there.

Thanks!

Session 2 Meeting 4

Agenda: PDF
Minutes: PDF

Session 2 Meeting 3

August 23rd

Agenda: PDF
Minutes: PDF

Session 2 Meeting 2

August 16th: we call another meeting to discuss workflow, progress, schedules and timelines.

Agenda: PDF
Minutes: PDF

Work meetings

We may be organising more meetup times on campus to do work. At the moment we only have a 2-hour slot allocated and for the increasing workload we're going to be pushing for, this won't be enough. Our Project Plan has been updated and is a final draft. There are probably a few things missing here and there but we'll wing it. It will be updated when necessary, hopefully once a week. You can find it on the website: Project Plan & Timeline

Supervisor Meeting: Session 2 Meeting 1

Everyone was present.

Discussed:

• Story mode screen to continue after each battle is completed, change of scenery.
• How we were to include direction of movement (walking, jumping etc) into the event class.
• Worked on getting camera to work with battle screen and multiple players.
• Having individual controls for each fighter in the battle screen.
• Applying the rumble feature to certain events.

Session 2 Meeting 1

8/2/2011 Group Meeting

Meeting Agenda
Meeting Minutes

Meeting 10, Supervisor Meeting 6

18th May was our second meeting in the Project Lab. Our group meetings are becoming more and more focused on the deliverables, diaries, website, documentation, than previously. We are using the time in here to work on whatever is next to do and pushing on doing our own tasks. As far as code is concerned, there is a little development here and there. Now that the documentation is handed in (43 pages of it) and we've pushed through our own wave of due assignments for the week, we can get back to developing Sensei.

Supervisor Meeting 5

Our first meeting in the Project Lab. Luke was happy to give his thoughts on our progress as usual and provide useful suggestions, and we could show him bits and pieces from the repository on the computers in there which was a +1 to productivity. We're going to be busy little beavers in the upcoming days.

Meeting 9

11th May 2011

Agenda: download .PDF (74 KB)
Outcomes (Meeting Minutes) download .PDF (29 KB)

Supervisor Meeting 4

Another catch-up with Luke. Our project is on track. We talked primarily about this week's focus: finishing up a draft preliminary technical manual (Data structures is the biggest section yet to complete) and polishing the user manual -- while wading in the shallow end of the project code by writing stubs. We also talked about the project cycle and our schedule plans. Luke seems to have confidence that we will do fine. Luke always seems to have an ambitious straight-off-the-notebook idea that could turn our already cool game into a revolutionary piece of work. Unfortunately, we have to turn these ideas down because realistically we don't want to be too over-ambitious and underachieve as a result. But they are good food for thought and tossing around crazy stuff is how we got most of our ideas. Go team!

Meeting 8

4th May 2011


Agenda: download .PDF (63 KB)
Outcomes (Meeting Minutes) download .PDF (30 KB)

Supervisor Meeting 3

We caught up with Luke again yesterday and let him know about all the wonderful stuff we've been up to. Mainly getting the manuals / documentation down and working on the animation engine. We discussed a few points about the game's story as well. All in all we're on track.

Meeting 7

27th April 2011

Agenda: download .PDF (62 KB)
Outcomes (Meeting Minutes) download .PDF (14 KB)

Meeting 6

20th April 2011

There was no meeting on 13th April 2011 due to the mid-session recess.

Agenda: download .PDF (75 KB)
Outcomes (Meeting Minutes): download .PDF (30 KB)

Timeline update

The timeline for the project has been revised, with the main change being that session 2 work is stretched out to start in the mid-year recess, meaning we have a lessened workload per week.

Timeline (.PDF, 62 KB)

Meeting 5

6th April 2011

Agenda: download .PDF (71 KB)

Outcomes (Meeting minutes): download .PDF (18 KB)

Supervisor Meeting 2

30th March 2011

Our second meeting with Luke was today. We basically discussed what we were working on, what we were thinking about, and he prompted us with some questions to get a handle on our goal direction and make us think about additional aspects of the project.

Meeting 4

30th March 2011

Agenda: download .PDF (62 KB)

Outcomes (Meeting minutes): download .PDF (33 KB)

Meeting 3

23rd March 2011

Agenda: download .PDF (58 KB)

Outcomes (Meeting minutes & Project Functional Requirements Outline): download .PDF (34 KB)

There was no supervisor meeting this week.

Website changes

I've made the website a bit more functional by splitting up the top navigation bar into Project and Game (and Contact) and it's now using the sidebar to select pages in those categories. Some pages overlap into both categories but that's not a problem.

Supervisor Meeting 1

16th March 2011

Today we had our first group meeting with our supervisor, Luke. He basically answered a few of our questions about the project timeline and what we should be focusing on and had some questions of his own about prototyping, our ideas of the game and AI engine (specifically) itself. All in all a good meeting and the primary outcome was a slight change to our project timeline guide.

Meeting 2

16th March 2011

Agenda: download .PDF (75 KB)

Outcomes (Meeting minutes): download .PDF (19 KB)

Meeting 1

9th March 2011

Agenda: download .PDF (62 KB)

Outcomes (Meeting minutes): download .PDF (20 KB)

And we're off!

This is the project blog for AlphaLogic's project SENSEI 2011. You'll find timely project information, announcements, meeting reports and other sundry paraphernalia here. Enjoy!