This was the last week for team AllClear ! Could not believe the time went by so quickly.
For this week , the team mainly worked on the documentations and the open house event on Friday. As the project is getting to its end point, the process for handing the project off to the client became important.
We used a google shared drive as the archive place for the clients. These drive would exist on the CMU server and should be accessible for any users invited by our clients. In the archive, we put everything about this project: kart assets, design docs, user guides, game executables, game trailers and so on. The clients could easily utilize these resources for continuous development after this semester.
As for the Open House event on Friday, it was an open event where guests outside the ETC department would come and see students’ work. This year was a special one due to the pandemic. We moved everything to a virtual world where guests could walk around and interact with other people through microphone and camera. Different teams could host their own project room where they would demo the project to the guest. The central lobby could be joined directly through the browser which was convenient for people to come.
This is how our project room looks like when the guests entered the room. A huge display board showing our team logo and the digger robot from our game.
The project room had three different sections: one for displaying the level design, one for team member info and the last one at the far corner was a live share board where the team could do some lives for our game. The guests were pretty amazed by how much work we put into the game and most of them found the team to be educational due to the fact that it showed some real world demining consideration like the limitation of using detonator in level 2 to protect the nearby buildings.
In addition to the live demo showed in our project room, the team prepared a walkthrough video showing the major game features just in case some guests could not make it to the project room.
The last major update for the game was the addition of the third party dedicated server. In order to let the players join the game anytime they want, the team moved the dedicated server onto the AWS virtual machine so that the server can accept connection 24/7. The engineers needed to work on the extra synchronization logic so that the server can run on itself own forever. Our game could support reconnection when a player disconnected and would automatically manage the server status for different game sessions. A job well done!
All in all, the team member had a good time working on the project which was both entertaining and socially impactful. Personally, we liked the idea of E-Demining and felt honored to participate in the first stage of exploring toward it. The game itself is a fine product mixed with various game features and educational elements on the demining task. As the producer of the team, I would like to thank for clients’ patience and guidance throughout the semester. Love you guys all.
