ALPHA!!!!

We did it! We made it to alpha. I was assigned to work on the UI HUD for the player and getting the menu system to have all the art from the programmers. Making the UI appear for each player on the multiplayer split screen has proven to be my hardest challenge.

 This is when I started the HUD it only has the scroll on the top right.

The Game menu Screen.

Multiplayer Screen with health and Energy Bars. They get lower when you get hit or use and ability.
A TODO for me is adding numbers on them so you can see how much you have.

Mind you these screen shots are w/o the Xbox avatars. They will be in place when deploying to the Xbox. Our animators have lots of good animations for running and jumping and wall running. :)

Long Sprint of 3-4

I've been continuing work on the cameras, but I have also been assigned the UI of the game. I've found some free domain UI Screen Managers that will help us with GUI HUD and UI controls. I've been working with Ron Romero to put in place a the screen system where the games starts out on a main menu screen and we can go from there to the Game screen. There are some of our coding that needs to be organized to make the screens system better, but it's working right now. I foresee problems when it is coming to a pause screen though, but I'm doing some research and some digging into the problem to help that. I'm a tad worried for our game that we will not have actual gameplay read in the next couple weeks, but only time and work will tell. I'm excited to keep working and getting the front end of the Game to look nice.

End of Sprint 2

My tasks for Sprint 2
-Add Drag to Camera
-Add a Vector grab function to obtain vectors based on the camera position
-Create a Controller Layout/ Mapping code.

Well I got them all finished for the sprint until git attacked. From some human error and the frustration that followed with git all my code got deleted. It's been a fun adventure trying to get my build back up to everyone else's. So far I have the Layout and the Vector function back, but I'm still trying to put the drag back into place. While I was having the frustration of my code jumble there was some major refactoring to have camera's worked so that both the AI and the human player could have a camera. So I have to take all of that into account with my code. This semester needs to slow down so I can catch up. I have a strict homework schedule in place so that I can get all of my project stuff done and also get in line for the next sprint that's due this next Thursday.

Snapshot of current build

So pretty! the level is for testing controls, camera, AI and other things. I don't have the Avatar on there because I built it to my computer not the X-box. More to come in the future :)

End of Sprint 1

This Sprint I was assigned to work on camera functions for the player. I had a couple of things I wanted to accomplish.
-Wall Collision
-Full range of motion.

I'm pleased to say that I have accomplished these tasks even with a busy week of other school work. I'm still tweaking numbers to make the camera as smooth as possible, but the main tasks are done.

At first when working on this small project I ran into the problem of not knowing the existing code as well as I should have. With some pair programming with Blake Sleight, I learned a little more of what I needed to about how the camera was initially set up.
The Camera now checks if there is anything between it and the player and reacts when there is something colliding.
There were two ways that we implemented into the code to interact with a collision. First was it automatically jumps to the walls position, and Second was that it moves forward until there is not a collision.
Through test with both of these implementations, I decided that having the camera move forward to avoid collisions was less jarring to the player.
The Last task I had was to give the camera a full range of motion. So that you could move it Vertically as well as horizontally as was in the prototype code.
I have implemented this and tested different speeds, and I have chosen numbers that made the camera feel smooth to me. These numbers are all prone to change for later in the game testing stages.

My goal now is to put into place a bound on the vertical movement before tomorrow (right now you can move up has high as you want), and to get it submitted to git. I find that most of  my hold ups in programming are coming through working with the repository. I've never used git before and am running into lots of problems with it. With help from Mavin Martin our Programmer lead, we've been able to resolve most of the issues, but I find it still takes a lot of time out of valuable working time.

Game Concept in place

Our team finally has a game concept! The game was originally pitched as a 3d Battle Arena Online type game (Mario Kart Battle-esque). From the suggestions of the panel, we have steered away from that and with a team meeting last Tuesday we have a concept in place.

Our Art concept is Feudal Japan.

Our Design concept is a we have a 3d Platformer. The movement mechanics are parkour like (similar to Prince of Persia, Assassin's creed). The character has objectives around a small set arena like location (a village/ town). To complete each objective the player will obtain abilities upon completing objectives to help access more of the level. The hook of our game is that you it is finally something fun to do with your xbox avatar and the funny element that your avatar (dressed  however you dress him/her and being you) is in this Ancient Japanese era town doing all of these tasks.

Specific Game design elements that have not been determined are: What are the abilities? How many Objectives? Level Design? ect..

We finally nailed something down that was not just a narrative for our game. With this decision we can now move forward building an alpha phase of the game. Something that doesn't have all the additive abilities ect, but that has our core mechanics that we need for the game. 

As an update on what I've been doing in the game is camera movement. We have a basic camera that can be pivoted left and right based on input given to the right joystick and lerps back to behind the player when released. This was in place with the prototype. My list of things to add to make it better are:

-Collision Detection for walls and other objects.

-Full range of motion not just left and right but up and down also. 

These are my goals for this weeks sprint. 

Getting Started. Camera Project

Our Team has chosen to use git for the repository and after some instruction on that I have access to the code base. And with some instruction from our team lead who wrote the code base. I'm moderately caught up to speed on how the base of our 3D ninja game works. 

I have recently been given the charge to work on the camera function of our game. Something that I've never realized is a big factor in how a 3d game plays is how well the camera works. So I've been going through different games just playing around with the camera. Some examples that I've observed are: Mario 64, Zelda Ocarina of Time, Starwars Force Unleashed 2, Darksiders. I have plans to look at more. Some on my list are: Assassin's creed (which I know Blake Sleight our team lead is looking into since I don't own a copy), Batman Arkham Asylum, and I'm finding more games to add to this list to check out camera function. 

Of most of the games that I mentioned that I played just paying attention to camera movement I found that there were times in all the games that I felt the camera hindered my game play. They also are all very differently paced games. Force Unleashed is very fast pace hack and slash game, and the camera got disorienting at some times. Mario and Zelda were more relaxed paced games, but they also were for the N64 and used directional buttons for the camera. We are using the Xbox controller which allows us to have the right joystick to help with directional movement. The camera controls that I've liked so far is Darksiders. It has full 360 control of the camera and the movement of the character is based off of the direction the camera is facing. This is the movement that has already been placed in our game via the prototype made by the aforementioned Blake Sleight. Some of the things that I'm going to be working on is making the camera know when there are obstacles in the way of the camera. So it doesn't go through things. This causes a zooming in effect when the camera is next to a wall. Also if the player goes around an obstacle good camera's do a simple pathfinding to go around the obstacle. These are all things that I plan to implement into our camera. 

My plan of action:

-Do I little more research to know exactly what works and what doesn't.

-Really because super familiar with the code that is already in place and layout a plan to add and tweak it to make it better

-Program/Debug

-Tweak and get a super smooth and smart camera.

As far as the whole team project. We are have decided on the core game mechanics that we can start implementing and that it is a 3D Platformer. For core movement mechanics we have running, jumping, wall running, edge hanging, double jump. Similar to the movement mechanics in Prince of Persia. We still have yet to decide on what the overall goal concept of our game. The panel we pitched to shot down our area battle idea so we have to come up with a new concept. 

Overall, I am excited to work with this team. Our team leads are great at what they do and are strong leaders. Our art and engineer team have so much talent. This is going to be a busy yet awesome year.

Ninja Team!

Yesterday we were notified of which finalist pitches were chosen for our senior project. Sadly our team wasn't chosen, but I'm now on the Ninja team project! All around we have an amazing team with amazing team leads. It's looking up to be a great semester. I'm excited to have a planning meeting and to get to work on this game. I know this is a short post, but more is to come once we really get talking about the game.

Video of the Prototype.

Nearing end of Prototype

Working with the Farseer Engine, I have developed a small example of using the weather changing game mechanic.  Here's some screenshots to demonstrate what has been developed.

 The player is making his way through the level and jumps his way to the top of a cliff. Finding no way across the player must use other means to cross the giant chasm.

 pressing Up on the right joystick causes rain to fall filling the giant hole with water only to discover a boat that was at the bottom.

Jumping on the boat there is no way across (I know you  can't see the player but it's behind the raft) You hit right on the right joystick to cause a wind to blow causing the boat to float across the newly formed lake.

For a prototype the Farseer Engine has worked fairly well. Speaking with the instructors of the course, there have been groups in the past that have tried to use the Farseer Engine and have run into problems. While working with it I could see some of the limitations, and have thought that if this project would be chosen then writing our own physics that work well with the game would be the right direction to go.

Working on a Prototype

So we're getting down to business working on a Prototype for the game Overcast. We started with a group meeting to flesh out an more of a solid idea of what we are going for so we can get some of the basic coding in place as well as the concept art flowing. One of our team members mentioned a handy tool for XNA called tIDE or Xtile (http://tide.codeplex.com/) It is a Tile based map construction kit. With a few hiccups I managed to get it working just fine in the XNA code, but the second problem pronounced itself. For the game we will need a character that moves and jumps that could be blown by wind or other such things. So I started looking for a free usable 2D physics engine that we could use in the prototype. I didn't want to be spending lots of useful time on making the physics of the prototype work when we could be iterating through the best gameplay mechanics to show off. I soon discovered that probably the best one would be the Farseer Engine (http://farseerphysics.codeplex.com/) This Engine is amazing. the capabilities of it far surpass what we could have done in the short amount of time given. So then came the task at making the Farseer Engine recognize objects from the Tide code. This soon became frustration when objects that used the physics engine had to be created a certain way and Tide was doing it's own creating methods. I even tried using the locations of the created tiles to create them again with the physics engine to have the colliding ect, but the result was the viewport for Tide and the dimensions used by Tide couldn't map together. Without more documentation on the Tide side I couldn't get the layout correct. Not wanting to waste more time, There had to be a decision made. Either continue to plug away with the two sets of code or only use one and make the other one work. My preposition to our group is to use the physics engine and then develop the map not necessarily a fully functional Tile Set Editor, but using objects creating in the Physics Engine with our art and design. This I believe is the direction we are heading and hopefully in the next couple of days we will have a white box working to play around with different weather abilities.

Prototyping Phase

My Pitch was not selected to be one of the 8 to be made into a prototype. I was a little disappointed but looking ahead to the future I'm excited to work on almost any of the 8 games chosen. I was selected to help Prototype OverCast ( http://pia-dev.dreamwidth.org/1312.html) follow the link for the description of the game. We have had a team meeting and have discussed the direction of the game and defining  where we wish to go with it. More to come after more team meetings and some programming sessions.

Week 1 Pitches version 2

Here's the second draft of my Pitch One Pager. I changed the text to be more detailed about what the game mechanics consist of. Upon further thinking there might be more updates to come on this before I have to present it to the class.

Version 2

Week 1 Pitches

I have decided since this is a Blog that is going to record my Game Development Process, It is going to start at the beginning with the idea process and the Pitches of games.

I started out with a puzzle game that included Wombats and their natural tendencies to hide and burrow. This was an okay idea in my head but the more I discussed it with others it just didn't have the feel I wanted for my pitch idea. 

I decided to continue with some of my other half concocted ideas. So I worked out the idea for this game: Requiem of Dreams. 

Ta Da

You take the role of a demon with a nasty looking hook (note Dota pudge cobble art) that is out to destroy the Dreams of the world. He is to be stopped by the Sandman, but we can't allow good to win this time.
You make your way into the dreams of people and lay waste to everything dream sight causing terror and havoc through villages, city, and nations.
I envision this game as either a 3d 3rd person view game or as a 2D platformer like game. Some things that I'm excited for is the hook mechanic that can add challenge and fun to the game.
Some parts of the game that I have not put a firm choice on is how the sandman is trying to stop you. It could be himself or he could send minions. The win condition of the game is something I have not made a choice on.