Multiple abilities!

Our game is going well, most of the code needed for alpha is already written and working. We only have two artist so that was definitely delaying the development pipeline, they have to do a lot since it's a videogame and obviously the visuals are one of the main hooks.

There was so much stuff to do on the art side so I had to help there, we didn't have a level so I worked with Josh (our game designer) on laying down what we needed for the first/tutorial level of out game. He had a good idea of what he wanted the player to experience in this first level but we had to polish a lot of the specific tasks to do this. 

I had been working on the code before so I knew what we were capable of doing with the code that we already had, this made it easier because we could present our different features as much as possible, that way people will actually notice good advance and find the fun of the game.

After deciding the tasks the player need to do I started modeling the different art assets in order for this to work. A lot of testing had to be made together with this, I had no problem modeling the level and then testing it in Unity, even when the importing process is really simple, making sure assets work before committing them is very important (hopefully all artists know this).

I modeled the entire terrain for the first level, including mountains, rivers, etc. I knew different specifications needed for it so that made it simple enough for me. I tried to do it as organized and fun as possible, that way the players would understand what they were expected to do and how they were expected to do it. 

At this point we have a game, with good interactivity, scoring system and a winning state!

Getting beautiful

I've kept working on my pose-recognition tool.
It definitely is at the stage where it can be used efficiently, outputs and inputs data properly. My next step is to keep polishing it, it has several pose recognition algorithms that I am planning on using on the game and I would like to change the functions just so they are as generic as possible.
The problem with this is that the team is already working on the with the stuff I wrote. Even though Unity allow us to have multiple coders working on the same files with a significantly easy way to combine it, the is no scene merge option, if one guy works on a scene in Unity it's impossible to merge changes done in it and that makes the development pipeline much slower.

Pose recognition tool!

I've been working on my Kinect-pose-recognition tool!
We are using Unity as our game engine and there are some built-in tools for Kinect, that has helped us a lot because it makes it really easy to start working with the Kinect and at least get something on the screen. As our engineering professor said "the hardest part is to get stuff to be drawn in the screen" (he was talking about DirectX and getting started with it).
I put some good hours of work on this tool and I was happy about the progress that I did over the weekend. I showed the tool to my fellow engineers and they were pretty happy with my progress too, the code works very well and the user-interface that I coded for the tool is also well developed, it has some very interesting features that hopefully will help a lot during our game development process. I can output and input information about different poses and skeletons and I've been working on some vector interpretation math in order to be able to recognize the player and different stuff that the game will need in order to determine success or failure (I will keep more details about my tool for later).

We are getting close to the end of the semester and stuff is getting tough, hopefully I can finish this tool as soon as possible, I want my game designer to have something to work with over the summer but definitely I will keep upgrading it over the summer too, it is going in a cool direction and hopefully it will give me good amount of information to study about for my final thesis!