And so all the frustration with my teammates boils down to this e-mail.
This is serious. Read it up.
It has been eight weeks since we got together and worked on this project.
Out of the time that we spent designing the game, I treated each of you as
an equal member in the team and so the game idea that was decided was
based on a majority vote, and that’s how our idea was chosen.
After that, I ended up writing half of the design document. There was a
serious excuse so I let that one go.
When we started coding, I wasn’t too insistent on everyone turning in
their portion of work because I wasn’t finished with the core engine; I
let that go as well.
On the subsequent weeks, I’ve made requests every week for each of you to
do something; you either ignored me or turn in something that is broken
enough that I need to take more time to fix it than to rebuild it from
scratch. The only piece of code that was turned in to me that works was
the main menu, and that’s only because I wrote the entire back end to that
module and even then, it’s still not functioning as it’s supposed to.
As it stands right now, this is not teamwork. This is a one man project
where I put out 12-14 hour work days and you guys sit around and do
nothing productive. I know that you’ve might have tried, but trying is
not good enough. I didn’t even expect elegant code or anything, just
something that works.
Fine. I’ll just take it that my code is unreadable, and so I’ll even let
the entire coding issue go.
But now it’s 10th week and I’ve done everything up to this point with no
help; I’ve even finished LevelLoader so you can make levels without
touching a single byte of code, and still, I get nothing?
This is where I draw the line.
IF YOU SKIPPED THE REST OF THIS E-MAIL, READ THIS. I EXPECT ONE LEVEL,
FINISHED AND WORKING IN THE GAME, FROM EACH OF YOU. NO SLOPPY DESIGNS, NO
HALF FINISHED WORK IN PROGRESS. I WANT SOMETHING THAT IS DONE.
COMPLETED. STUFF THAT I CAN THROW INTO THE GAME AND IT WORKS. I WANT IT
DONE BY WEDNESDAY MIDNIGHT. IF THAT IS DONE, I WILL LET YOU GO AS HAVING
CONTRIBUTED ENOUGH TO DESERVE AN EQUAL GRADE FOR THE PROJECT.
OTHERWISE, IT IS ONLY FAIR THAT I’D GO AND TELL DR. FROST THAT YOU HAD
DONE ABSOLUTELY NOTHING FOR THE PROJECT, AND DESERVES AN F FOR THE CLASS.
I’ll post the rest of the instructions for making levels after I send this
e-mail; look for it under the same thread where you recieve your level
design assignment. As always,
I’ll not be attending school tomorrow; I’ll be at ICS 131 on Wednesday.
Use the BBS to ask questions if you need help with the file format. Use
the built in debug option in ImpossibleDream.java to let LevelLoader print
error messages. Ask me questions when the LevelLoader can’t find errors.
I’m sorry that it has to come down to this, but as much as I want to keep
good friendships, I do not want to feel cheated. This is my ultimatum.
You have been warned.