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.