Project 3 - Part A

This project requires the entire class to work together on the design and implementation of the Tetris game. At first it was a little unclear how we will organize the team and partition the work but a couple of people in the class took the intiative to start the discussion thread. One student started an email thread to get people engaged in the project. Another student took the first stab at creating a feature list in the project wiki page. I helped get the project rolling by putting together a first draft of the timeline for phase A and called for a Skype meeting.

Not everyone in the class were able to join the Skype conference, but we had at least 1 person from each team as the representative. We first discussed the overall objective of the project, then we discussed the immediate tasks required for phase A.  Our objective for the meeting were to identify the major components of the game and to assign component(s) to team. The meeting got off track a couple of times because some students wanted to go into more details of each component to evaluate the complexity of the component. Collision handling was the biggest concern for many students. By the end of the meeting, we were able to split up the components and assign them to team based on level of effort and the team's interest in working on the component.

Team A were assigned InputManager and ScreenManager. We had a Skype conference the next day to discuss our design. I have no previous experience in game development, luckily Dan and Jer on the team both had experience in this area. They walked me through the installation of XNA framework and an example code base of another game project from another class. The sample code base helped me a lot with understanding the basic setup of a game in .NET. We ended up modealing our class design after the example. I was not able to contribute a lot of input in the gaming aspect, but I was able to provide input in the code design area. After we were done with the first draft of the main classes, methods, and pseudo code design document, I took the design and created the stub classes in Visual Studio, then generated class diagram from the IDE. I feel it was the quickest and reasonable approach to creating class diagram. I could validate the syntax of the sample code, quickly create class diagram, at the same time getting a head start with the stub classes for when we are ready for implementation.

Overall it was a good experience working across teams. At first I was nervous about coordination among the team. However, for the most part each team had a good representative that were willing to lead discussion and effort to ensure the project is a success.