Todays Class

I'm not going to be able to make it in. I've still got to finish the trailer for the game that will be shown at GO3, so what I'm going to do is work on it from home today and then drive up to Northbridge to deliver it rather than sending it by mail. It's hard to come up with 3 minutes worth of footage of the level we currently have in the alpha.

What we need to get done today really is putting together Ben's Space Debris level, my Space Agency level, and James/Marks Space Pirates vs Space Ninjas level, throwing bad guys into them and actually having some playable levels ready for Go3.

Final Push

Monday is the last day we have to get this game in some sort of form to send off to the judges at GO3 if we still want to enter that competition. We'll need to have it packaged by Monday Afternoon if I'm going to get a video made of it, post it off and have it arrive in North Perth before Wednesday.

On an unrelated matter, great job on the website, Curtis.

Also, I have a box full of awesome t-shirts I'll be bringing in on Monday.

Finishing Up

Just continuing from my Blog post, I've been thinking a lot about our schedule and what we should be really trying to achieve from here on out.

We've got five days left. Four days if you make the whole Monday of the 21st for packaging our game so far and ironing out the issues with it. So to make sure we're all on the same page I propose a (very quick) leads/design meeting tomorrow going over two points.

WHAT CAN WE GET DONE?

and

WHAT DO WE NEED FOR A PLAYABLE GAME?

I don't know what you guys feel you can do in 4 days worth of work (more if you include weekends if people are up to it). But I think that we should at least have a bare minimum to consider the game playable.

Programming:

• AI/Enemy Movement
  
• Fighting/Attacks
• Camera Angle Changes

Art:

• Completed Levels
• Walking/Punching/Dying Sprites
  

I have a few ideas as to how we might be able to make combat fun and interesting using that knockback we currently have in the game and making it an actual attack for the player, replacing the "kill all characters" on screen attack with a short cooldown on it to knock away groups of enemies in melee range.

If people feel there are more things we need for the game or more we can achieve than what I currently have listed, I'll append this list during the meeting tommorow.

Competitions

Okay. I still haven't been contacted by anybody at GO3 regarding the games competition so I registered again and searched around for details regarding rules and the like. This is what I've found out:

We need to submit our demo for judging by the 23rd of September. Which is a Wednesday - the last Wednesday we have to work on the game. I suspect that day will largely be spent wrapping everything up and ironing out code for the actual event, so we should send out a build on the Monday.

With it they want a 3 minute video of gameplay. I'll tie this into our trailer and whip something up really quickly.

We have to submit it on DVD or CD, so we can't just drop it off on the Wednesday afternoon unfortunately.

Everything else is largely detail - you need a game summary, instructions, details of team members and how to contact them, etc.

So lets really push out as much as we can next week, we've not got much longer left to go.

3D Modelling Stuff

So I worked on the Space Agents Space Ship this weekend and got it all finished up (as you can see above), but there's one thing I see being a blocking issue and one thing I see being interesting.

1) I really like how the model looks without any sort of texture filtering. It blurs the model too much. the pixelated look is really quite cool and suits our art direction. I'm not sure if there's any sort of filtering in our engine and will have to investigate that.

2) Any models we create as "objects" to appear in scenes are going to have to be placed by the programmers, since when I've tried to do it, UV maps have gone absolutely crazy. This is something we're going to have to discuss with programmers, because I'm seriously concerned about how UV maps are going to work on levels like the one Ben is working on.

Walk Cycle Update.

I know i've been working of this walk cycle forever... but i'm making some progress with it and its likely to be completed by the end of sprint 3.
so just to show how its looking and the progress thats been made in the last week and a half, ive compiled 3 gifs of each stage of production.

Stage 1; blocking out:
http://i80.photobucket.com/albums/j200/scott_higg/WalkTest.gif

Stage 2; Details:
http://i80.photobucket.com/albums/j200/scott_higg/Walktest2.gif

Stage 3; Waist Correction:
http://i80.photobucket.com/albums/j200/scott_higg/WaistCorrection.gif


its still not finished.. must clean and add feet.
~Scott

Art Vision Pt2

I worked on the textures for the Space Agency level a bit more from home tonight, since I want to try and get an art direction down for the levels. Right now this is all just low level design and conception. What I hope to eventually do is throw a light in the scene and bake some high contrast shadows onto the textures to end out with a result not unlike TF2's style, but this is the simple, minimalistic direction I thought would be good to take based on Scott's idea.

Rolling with the whole Perfect Dark theme, too. The two things I'm not happy with is the way the cafeteria walls blend with the other walls, and that the support beams look a little bit too rustic.