Capstone: Another Week Another Post

This week current progress in continuing ahead as planned. For my part working on the level editor has continued on the side.  The piece you want to build with can be selected from a pop up menu by pressing the Y button.  The piece can then be moved around and placed snapping to a correct location.  You can then pick the object back up, spawn another, or delete it.  After having the player have full 360 degree control I also decided to limit the builders movement and rotation, we are a 2.5D, so there is no need to allow the player to move in the z direction, it just causes confusion.  Camera controls will still need to be work on within the editor but for now it's fine.  I'm much more focused on making sure builders can't play multiple objects on top of one another, and visual feedback for where the piece will be placed.

Outside of the level editor getting or games controls to work on anything but Pc and Xbox have become an inherent problems especially since our professor has a mac leaving him unable to see, play, and get a better feel for our game.  So it made the perfect excuse for me to go ahead and implement a input wrapper for unity. As of a few days ago I have a class that will allow input to be completely separate from out game , this means that as long as we set it up our game can and will run on any platform Mac, Linux, OUYA, Android, you name it and we can make VXT work with it, all without changing any code.

In other news it looks like the designers are starting to come up with other features and task for me to work on.  I was told I would receive a priority and specification list within a day or two, I can't wait to see what they have come up with to make our game even better. Either way it's time to get back to work.

-Ian

Senior Production - Full Steam Ahead!

This marked the first full week of our team working together on VXT.  After cleaning up all the loose ends from last semester and getting out teammates up to speed we were ready to dive in headfirst.  We joined together as a group, sat down within our respective division and worked out what we need to accomplish.  With our core gameplay in our minds very solid, we picture this semester more focused on reach features and polish, our game is fast and simple we'd like to keep it that way.  On the designer front, the have decided to create 4 zones of level each containing 4 levels and introducing a new mechanic in each.  As far as I remember (but this is all subject to change)  The first zone is a factory type setting in which the player will get accustomed to the controls and shields.  The second zone is a city where players will have to navigate through our railgun structures which brings the player to top speeds.  Next the player will go down into the cavern where they will be met with moving platforms and speed pads.  They will then move to mines where they encounter the phase walls surrounded by the unstable energy.  We see this is a nice progression of basic mechanics, scenery, and VERY subtle story for players to interpret in their own ways.  With the main amount of work on this front for the artists to make the environments and the designers to create the levels  with the tools already available to them from last semester.  Mike and I will be able to focus on our reach features. Mike will be progressing on our web presences and account system, while I look into our in game level creator for players.  Knowing how large of a task this is I have already hit the ground running on this task.  After a nice long thursday of programming I have a basic creator controller which allows the player to navigate around the space.  The ability for the creator character to spawn objects, move objects, place objects, delete objects, and re-pick objects that they have places down.  With this base functionality in place hopefully within the next week or so we will have something we can bring to testing.  I've already taken the liberty of speaking with the artists letting them know that all future models will need to be very modular to allow the pieces to line up nicely and allow easy creation for our players.   Overall I'm very happy with the current team progression and overall state of cooperation.  I'm excited in seeing what we will end up making over the next 15 weeks.

Till next time

-Ian  

Senior Production-A new team joins

This is the first week after winter break and we are about to start the final 15 weeks of our senior project.  We made the cut last semester and welcomed 5 new members into our team.  1 programmer 1 artiest and 3 designers.   With this new combined force, and fresh minds on the project I think we can make VXT into an amazing game.  This week started with cleaning up the repository and getting the new team members up to speed with our documentation but that's about it.  Stay tuned to see our progression over the following weeks as I will be required to post once a week by Friday at midnight.  Wish us luck!

Capstone 6 A ray of hope

As I spoke briefly about in my last blog post we decided to make a radical change to the direction of our game in a last ditch effort to get something more presentable, fun, innovative, and simple to even have a chance to move forward.  We liked the idea of opposing forces attracting and repelling, we didn't like how bogged down and sluggish the game felt to not only watch but play.  We decided to make this game much, much faster.  And drop 85% of the mechanics/controls.  You are still a generator wheel...thing  the story behind which is still being worked on but now there are only 3 main controls.  left in right on the right control stick moves the character while the right control stick aims a polarized semi circle shield and right trigger changes that polarity.  The idea is similar, you have to navigate the space to the end of the level while avoid obstacles and using the environment to your advantage.  At a much higher speed and with more fluid interactions.  You can now climb on walls and ceilings if the walls are polarized and you aim your shield of opposite polarized towards it. There are speed boost that if you hit with the same polarity will send you flying in a specific direction to help you get places faster or over objects.  There will be projectiles that hone in on you that you can reflect by using your polarity shield of same color.

Overall the game is much more simple, fast paced, fluid and fun. Which is exactly what we were hoping for from the beginning.  We can only hope we figured this out with enough time to spare in order to continue to move forward. Only time can tell.  Wish us luck.

Capstone Innovation

We were recently assigned a group project to choose a game that we found innovative and write about how it accomplished these tasks.  Our group chose the game Journey on the PlayStation 3.  While I myself has never played it (who has time to play games now a-days)  I did a little research on it and it did some pretty amazing things for being a small project. Which I can say without a doubt inspired my team.  Journey had one goal, to tell a story.  It accomplished this feat without using any words/dialog and having players who do not know each other work together to accomplish tasks with the same constraints in place.  Journey fed of the psychological aspect of humans to create a powerful and lasting game, which immerses the player and captivates them to continue forward.  The world of Journey is a desert wasteland. While beautiful very lonely.  Journey uses a seamless player drop in/our system where after playing alone for hours you might run into another player online somewhere.  You don't know that person and you cant communicate with them  and unlock other massively Multiplayer games. Instead of trying to avoid this other player due to the emptiness of the world you feel drawn to them.  The game itself is also very simple.  It's like 3 buttons at most.  The game delivers a fun, captivating, and simple product.  This allows the game to reach a much larger audience.  This is exactly what our game is missing and is why after completing this assignment we took a 180° turn when it comes to the direction of our game.

Our game was way too complicated.  We had more controls then we knew what to do with.  It was artificially difficult due to the interactions with the world and controls.  The learning curve was through the roof and if we even wanted a chance to move forward we needed radical change.  Which is exactly what we did and what I will go over in my next blog post. See you there.

Capstone 5

Well, we challenged this week. I felt like it went horribly.  The prototype was messy. Our pretension ran too long.  Our mechanics are super over complicated and as Gilly and Evan attempted to demonstrate our prototype it became painfully obvious.  After attempting to sell our train wreck of a game we had a large meeting about how we were all on different pages. Chris pictured this game as a fast pace racer. Our designers looked at it more as a puzzler and I just wanted it to work better.  We decided to have a meeting at Chris's house for him to show us some games he thought we should be more like.  After watching them play a large variety of games that I can't remember the names of we stated that we were all on the same page and went back to work.  We somehow pasted stage one and started working on market research for stage two. Which for me meant just try to make the game work better while they worry about target demographic and so on.  Even with this "new" understanding our game was still very clunky people were very focused on story and there was still no fun game play to be had. We have a meeting about new innovation next week hopefully that will put us back on the right track because it's looking to be too late at this point.

Space war Clone Jam With Melissa Gill

Upon walking into Networking class last Tuesday (9/24) I found what I would normally not expect instead of the normal present homework and listen to a lecture about bit packing or packet loss, we were split up into teams of two and ordered to create a 2-4 player version of an old 1984 game called Spacewars fully networked of course.  I teamed up with my lovely girlfriend Melissa Gill and we started on our assignment.  We initially only had until the end of class (3 hour) to complete this task but anything we did not finish in the allotted time we could finish at home during the week.

Our first major decision was to decided whose code base to start with,  after a "short" and heated debate both of us trying to find whole in the other code we settled with using Melissa because she had a more "fun" menu system.  Working in a largely different code base from my own took a little bit to get used to and  looking back I wish I spent less time arguing on which code base to use and more time learning the code and coding we wasted a good 30-45 mins of class working on this part. However once we were settled the game started to come together.  Melissa the more math oriented one worked on gravity and acceleration movement and the such.  Meanwhile I worked on our projectiles and ready system.

One of the largest road blocks Melissa and I ran into was over packing our packets.  We filled them way past capacity and was giving us reading errors on the other side.  We of course did not know this for a very long time and it took a while to hunt down the error.

Our biggest accomplishment although I did not actually assist in this part much would be our menu system/ color selection.  Players in the lobby fly into a color selection lane and unless there is only one player in a lane and game will not start.  Once the game is started they inherit the color they were standing on.

Below are links two my lovely partners blog as well as my professors who came up with this great experiece and a nice break from normal everyday class.

@ John Pile I don't have fraps so ill try to add a video later

http://prof.johnpile.com
http://mlssagll.blogspot.com/2013/09/networking-for-games-game-jam-space-jam.html