Wednesday 19/10 - The Alpha deadline

I am getting pretty bad at writing up my posts on the day when it comes to Wednesdays and Thursdays, but I do have a good reason, at least I think so. "Today" was the 18:00 deadline for the Alpha stage, which is basically having a full working game as an .exe (an executable file which can be run from any computer) with all the graphics done to a high level. So basically I got there nice and early once again and worked non-stop all the way through the day creating nice pretty pictures for our game. To be fair I didn't have all that much that I HAD to do, but as I am a bit of a perfectionist and do want to work to the highest of my abilities (something I rarely did on my bachelor) I ended up going back to previous works and changing them, adding more detail and making it more realistic/pleasing to the eyes.
Steven and Varun were also working very hard on the technical side of the game, except that unfortunately they encountered a bug which took them the best part of the day to figure out the solution to. Though I am happy to say that, along with the help of the talented Alex Darby (programmers' tutor and who also used to be a programmer at Codemasters) they managed to eventually figure out the solution to the problem, although I'm not sure exactly how permanent that solution was.

One of the main things which I spent a long time working on, and seemed to progress ever so slowly as time was slipping by closer as ever to this deadline, was adding some details to the HUD (yes AGAIN, you can never do too much polishing) but this time I added some erosion and wear to the console, and I have to admit that I am very happy with the outcome.
The rest of the work which I did today was to just polish everything up to a good standard while creating more assets which Steven and Varun would ask me for.

Like I mentioned before, at the moment most of my posts will be very similar and will not have all that much interesting to say.

I would post some pictures of the progress that I made in this day, which to be fair is quite a fair bit, but as I have the power of hindsight having only posted this the following Sunday I will post the pictures in the next couple of posts (as I know that I worked on these things again).
But just to keep the main blog page interesting, I will post something for you anyway:

Aaaaaah yes, after careful consideration I have thought of a really nice something to share with you. The animations for both the Winning and Game Over screens (game won't be published so I'm not bothered about sharing this). These are both created in 3DS Max and then edited in Photoshop:

Game Over animation

Game winning animation