OVER 1000!

Our game has been on the market for a little over a week and we have almost 7500 trial downloads and  just over 1200 purchases!
We're excited at the success we have had! \(^_^)/
Now I'm just getting ready for the Graduate program in the Fall! Let's do this!

Passed in REVIEW! RELEASE FRIDAY APRIL 24

It's happened! Our game passed review! There were no bugs. Everything worked! We put tons of hours into making the project bug free and it's all paid off. We passed review in only a days time! We're are hopeful that the indie community will have the same response when it is put on the market. Only Friday will tell how we are going to do.

Game Breaking Bug

So we have to wait a week because our game broke when a Guest Account was logged in and then tried to buy the game we got a code 4. It was a big hit to our team because we thought we covered all of our bases. Now this last week we had to fix our small bugs and now we play the waiting game. We have been talking up our game to different press areas and trying to keep moral high. It's been quite a week because the amount of work has gone down, but things to do has remained the same. So this coming Tuesday we will push our game again and we are hope it will finally get accepted for publish.

IN REVIEW!!!

Our team gathered Thursday afternoon to start our final push towards finishing the project. I was placed in charge of getting the last pieces of the UI working and polished.We finally got the credits screen to work. We placed each of our avatars on the credits screen next to our names. It looks pretty sweet. I added the ablility to Trial and Purchase our game. We even added a feature that if you select a level that is locked in trial mode then it will send you to the market place.  With a lot of work and a late night we finally got everything  working and without bugs. Now with our game up for review we need 12 people to pass our game. We are now reviewing other people's games in the hopes that they will reciprocate the review and help us get our game onto XBLIG Arcade. Now we play the waiting game and reviewing games.  I'll update later when we have results.

Ready for Review?

The Last week has been crazy busy. We've been getting the game ready for it's second review.

 Blake and I fixed a bunch of multiple controller bugs to start off.

I've been getting the new UI working. I had to get a different better font formatted and textured to be able to get it in the game.

After that Max sent me some screenshots that we are now using for background art for the menu system. I got those working then set moving on getting the option screen to have a controller displaying what the player currently has as a layout. In the end I ended up blowing the dust off my photoshop and getting some art whipped up for that.

 I had to then get Layouts to work. I implemented the ability to use a controller layout, but it appeared that it was easier for my team to hard code the buttons into the game. I worked my way through the code and implemented the ability to change the controller layout along with the changing pictures on the option screen.

After implementing this, I quickly learned that my code did not have the ability to change controller layouts mid game. With the lack of time to the push time, I quickly put together an  in game option screen that didn't give the ability to change the controller layout.

A few more tweeks later and being 1 or 2 am (I can't remember >_<   )  we ended for the night still wondering if we should push the game for review.

In the morning I loaded the game up and deployed it on the Xbox only to find that some of the scaling was off when the television was widescreen. I jumped on it and started coding again. I could only get some of it done because of my lack of knowledge of certain areas of the code. That is where we were as of this morning. More end of game craziness to come.

GDC!

So with GDC come and gone, I learned some great lessons that I'm hoping to be able to apply next year.

-Make a game plan of where you want to be when. There are tons of speakers and discussion sessions plus things happening on the expo floor. Laying out a plan of where you want to be when will help it go smoother and you won't feel lost.
- Be prepared to feel frustrated with HR reps. I was told this by a professor but I didn't understand the extent of frustration.
-Go knowing what your strengths are and sell them. Too many times I told people I was a programmer and their response was "send in an application" The real conversations about jobs that I heard started when someone said "I excel in Tool making" or "I'm excellent with Game Engines" If you can narrow down your interests then they can further investigate if you are right for their company.
- Roger told us this but it was true. Swag run first to get your stuff, then go and wait in lines to talk to people.
- Don't be satisfied with a one time visit. There are many different people at the booths all day. Take time to go back and see if you can talk to someone else that you might click better with. This is one of my fatal flaws of this last trip. I was satisfied with everyone telling me to just go online and apply. I didn't try going back to talk to others.
-Plan to go to after parties. some of the best networking experiences can happen at an afterparty. Even if you are tired after the convention closes. GO TALK TO PEOPLE! In this program everyone has a game they can promote or show off. Talk to everyone about it!

GDC was a great experience and I would like to go to more conventions in the future.

Getting ready for GDC

We have some new screen shots up for the game. It's looking super nice! 

We've been working towards getting a couple of trail levels for GDC. 

  My Start menu in Action. hopefully the next thing is to put the logo in the background once we get a logo.

Some gameplay examples. The Trail following the character is a ribbon like particle effect that is going to follow the character.

So recently I've been on the fine tuning of the start menu. My recent adding have been a level select menu. Now I need to add a unlocked locked visual feature on it.

Moving forward, I have a lot to work on with it to make it a smooth navigation process.

More Main Menu Work

With a couple weeks worth of playtesting, our team is hard at work putting into place a lot of things we learned. We've focused a lot on controls, camera, and animations. Also our level design is in need of some attention, but overall I think we have got a handle on designing and I'm excited to see what our designers come up with.  This semester has been really really busy with other classes and lots of testing our game getting it ready for the review and submitting process.

I'm still working on the Main menus and trying to make it interactive. I've overcome a lot of hurdles (including now getting my own xbox to run it on). And now I'm just iterating on different layouts and cameras and control schemes for the avatars making them look right and placing them in the right spots. I wish I had a way to get screen shots from my TV, I'll look into it and post pictures if I can. I don't want to take pictures with my phone and have bad res. shots. I'm finally feeling comfortable with my programming skills and with some guidance from some of my team I'm more confident that I can do the tasks assigned to me. My goal is to have the Main menu stuff done by the end of this week and get another project that I can work on :)

Overall this semester has been crazy, but I'm excited to see our game go through the submitting process. \(^_^)/ Hopefully I'll be able to get some gameplay and screen shots up soon.

Playtest in Two days

Our team has our first playtest coming up this week. We are all really nervous and have tons to do. We had a meeting last night to discuss a couple of big key areas that we need to cover. That being having an level loading and playable. We have a starting level created but the process of getting it all loaded into XNA without lagging the game has proven a challenge. Also with one of our artist leaving last week, stress has been high. Time has been an impeding factor for almost the whole group. Between this project and all of our other senior classes added on to most of us working so we can stay in school, time has been short. Nevertheless the team is working hard despite the stress. I am still working on the UI and getting the starting screens to be a sort of introduction to the game. You will be able to see your xbox avatar and play around with some animations. It will default to a  couple animation loops if the controller is left alone. Also another block has been passed, I finally got a harddrive for my xbox so I don't have to travel the hour or so to the school to work on the project.

This week is going to be difficult but our team is amazing. I know we're going to pull through.

Sprint the 1st of this semester

I have been put on getting some of the Main menu stuff working. What I have accomplished this sprint is getting my Layout scheme, that I worked on at the beginning of the project, to work with a place in our Options menu. I have created multiple Layouts that get cycled through.The coding is in place, I just need a graphical representation of what layouts are being cycled through.  I was also assigned to get all the avatars of signed in players onto the start screen. I have code in place to test this and I will be testing it in the near future.
So far this sprint we are working quickly to have a game we can submit for approval and start the testing sequence of the xblig dev process.
Also on the plate to do is to test games with our business license. We are approaching deadlines and things are getting tight. Today we are hopefully going to have a level and more in the game.

Second Semester

The semester has started and out team has hit the ground running. We had a good sit down meeting to really flesh out out game and the direction we are going.
We really nailed down what the UI system is going to be. and some of the GUI elements. My job right now is to make the menu system look and reacted nice to the player input. First we are going to add the players avatar onto the start menu screen. This start menu screen will give the player the feel of there avatar is what they are playing with. We are adding the ability to press buttons besides start and see different ninja moves that your character will have in the game. Though there will be a scripted sequence that you can watch if you don't want to press buttons. My next task is to take the ability to have multiple layouts that I created last semester and add it to the Options screen.

So some of the cool things we have decided was the starting tutorial like area of your avatar breaking out of a prison cell. This will give you small challenges to learn how to move throughout the game. When you finish getting out of the prison cell. When you get out your character set out to complete trials/quests/objectives.
I will post pictures ect once things change and get working.

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.