There has been a lot of activity since my last post.
We have been working on getting a game that fits our limitations the best, we discussed a lot about what kind of mechanics we wanted to have. One of the main discussions was about procedural generated levels or experience oriented levels, along with this discussion we had to consider the human resources that we had so we could estimate how much time stuff was going to take.
On the engineering side a lot of code was done since last semester, must of the stuff we did only needed a few hours of polishing in order to make it to the final build. At least on the engineering team our main concern was the art (ironic but true), we don't have enough art members on the team and they do not have a lot of experience doing 3D art in general. We also fell that they were not being able to create assets as fast as we were demanding them, they had the skills but they were just not giving us enough stuff on time. Our engineering lead asked me to start working on some 3D models too, we started setting deadlines for the art assets (even thought we were the engineering team). This actually worked very well, we had to push our artists a little bit in order for them to know that they needed to put more time on the project, again, they have the skills but they were just not giving us enough art on time.
After we saw that the art department was back on the fast lane again, I was able to keep working on my engineering tasks. I am still polishing the Kinect poses recognition tool, the tool was working fine but I just need to re-architect some of the code so it could be more generic easier to implement with different modules. We also started working with the new version of the Kinect SDK, it is basically the same but there are some changes on the API, luckily enough we were able to tackle those changes in just a couple of hours.
For this presentation I worked on getting a more robust architecture for the poses, I had a really intense coding week but I'm really glad the new implementation is intuitive and supports more changes than the previous one. At the end we had to crunch for a little bit in order to get all the code back in the final build, hopefully for the next deadlines we will be more organized so we can avoid rushing a few days before the actual presentation.
