Its break time!!

The GDD draft was handed in yesterday. There are still a few things that need to be added to it but the document at the moment seems like it is in a pretty good state to pick up and improve when everybody gets back from Christmas holidays. The biggest worry about it at the moment however is that we still do not have a name for the game. The name will probably keep changing during production until someone comes up with something that will blow people's minds, no pun intended.

My biggest disappointment for the week is how long it took to format the document. Although it was planned to have the document finished by midday to get some feedback from the tutors, it took nearly the whole day to do it. Such are the joys of Microsoft Word I guess. Oh well, live and learn.

I guess that is me for the moment. Hopefully everyone enjoys their time off...I'm gonna try. Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year everyone!

Michael -Friday 19 December

"Captains Log 19/12/08"

Its another Friday and so it means its time for another post. This week I spent most of my time with pencils and paper as I was tasked with a number of concepts to draw out. This week I managed to do initial concepts of the four types of enemies. These enemies are the Mother, Exploder, Grunt, and the Reaper. Since I was designing the look of the enemies, I also spent time with one of the programmers working out the AI behaviour of the different types of enemies. As well as designing the Enemies I also designed the weapons for the Humans and the Aliens and I also did diagrams for how the player interacts with the environment.

So these are the intial concepts for the aliens above. To design these creatures I was asked to create ocotopus styled aliens and was then free to let my imaginaion go crazy. From left to right the creaures are...

-The Grunt- This is the standard type of enemy. They use one of three weapons which are fused directly onto their bodies. For the design I was trying to design an alien that was brutish in appearance and although its an octopus alien it still resembles a human. I also had to be careful as far as tentacles are concerned since too many tentacles might give our brilliant animators a couple headaches later on.

-The Mother- This alien lays eggs which then turn into Grunts and occasionally Reapers. The idea was to create a slow moving tank like alien with a gian mortar on its back. It also has a giant gaping mouth which spews out Exploders. This is only the intial concept and I have intentions of developing this alien from being bound to the ground to a large floating fortress style alien.

-The Exploder- These aliens are designed to be slightly cuter than the other designs while still maintaing the creepy octopus alien theme. Exploders are designed to blow themselves up when near Humans as well as acting like living grenades and are able to be thrown by Grunts.

-The Reaper- This is my favourite design mainly because im a fan of getting close and personal with the enemy after sneaking up on them. The term I used to describe this ruthless alien was that it was an "Alien Octopus Ninja". It has a weapon simply named the tentacle sword arm and has the ability to go blend into the environment in order to sneak up on the player.

Since there probably isnt that much room to cram in all the concept drawings, Ill just mention some of the design considerations for the weapon designs.

-Alien Weapons- These weapons are part of the alien themselves. They are organic wepons and drew inspiration from the Tyranids from Warhammer.

-Human Weapons- Human weapons were a lot more difficult to design. The weapons needed to resemble weapons from the 1930's but at the same time needed to look somewhat futuristic. Another issue was that since the nano-bot weapons form over the arm, the weapon needed to be somewhat glove like in order to fit the arm of the character.

I also helped with the class in an attempt to work out the game more. I was glad that the class finally came to an agreement on the character types being a part of the military as it will allow the story to make much more sense. I really do believe that this game will be incredibly enoyable to play PROVIDING things go as planned, which as many people will realize, is never the case. In any case, im off to enjoy the Christmas Holidays and fingers crossed for great weather

Merry Christmas Readers!

-Michael

Project Managers final sum up for the year

A draft of the GDD has finally been completed!!!! As I am writing this it is being formatted and proof read.

The lead artist and lead programmer are still busy working on an updated preproduction schedule. The schedules needed to be updated as they still required a further break down of tasks. Once completed I will be able to merge them into my final schedule for the class.

As for what is to come for the remainder of preproduction, it is due to commence on the 12th of January. During this time the TDD will be drafted and finalised along with the prototyping of core technology and functionality by the programming team. The art team will be busy working on the previsualisation for the concept.

Everyone will be busy proof reading and looking over each others shoulders to ensure we really nail our documentation.

schedules schedules everywhere...

Discussing the art visuals is going to have to wait till after some management updates...

So I've spent a large amount of time dealing to scheduling, which is not a task to underestimate. Planning for several artists to be busy and efficient throughout a month long pre production can be lengthy and tedious, but is a definite requirement.

I've made some large changes to our initial schedule to break down the schedule into more tasks to give accountability (to artists for tasks they do/do not complete) and give artists a better understanding of what they have to accomplish without having to consult me on a regular basis.

So far this has already shown some positive results in the group and in the process of breaking down tasks I've caught some things I’ve missed (as well as attained a huge knowledge for our art production - assets especially).

a conclusion to the visual style will have to wait till next year, merry Christmas :D

The stress of scheduling

The Schedule this week has been an interesting task it so far has taken me almost 2 days to finish up the scheduling for 4 weeks of programmer tasks. The tasks are to start creating the TDD once we get back from our holiday period, at this stage I have scheduled in 3 prototypes over 4 days, the prototypes are creating pathfinding with a changing environment, Polygon and Bone limitation test on Gamebryo with testing into bone LOD's and testing Raknet and PhysX components between two networked computers.
We should have enough resources on all prototypes to make sure that we gain insight into the difficulty of these technical challenges. The only prototype not yet being tested which may be of importance to us is shader testing, but I believe I have left enough time during the documentation stage of our pre-production to make sure that the algorithms, references and some sample shader code should be able to be documented.

The shaders we are looking at atm are:
- Edges on objects
- Darker Distance draws for artistic silhouettes
- Vignette shading
- Camera effect - head bob
- Muzzle Flash
- Tracer Rounds - unsure if this is the best method so any replies as to other methods would be appreciated.
- Alpha-blended camera transitions
- Vert extrusion and alpha/coloring for shield effect

The base mechanics for how we wish to balance the spawning of characters, weapons and resources has been discussed and a tree based, random points system will be used to control the release of higher end wave weapon releases.

Looking foward to moving past scheduling and into prototyping but its almost complete and 5 minutes now should save an hour later so its good to have it almost done and available for the team to reference.

Happy holidays to all.

Last week for the year

Hello E!

This week a lot of work into the draft of the games design document. I was placed on the control section and later the combat section.

I had to review a lot of FPS games to see which kinda of controls they used both in game and in the menus. It was interesting to note that most FPS games especially allowed for both the mouse and the keyboard for navigating menus beacuase some players feel the arrows are faster. I adopted a similar menu control system for our game. The in-game controls a most similar to Tom Clancys Rainbow 6 Vegas.

For the Combat section I came up will a weapons balance table, that balances weapons with different ranges, and ammo types for the best variety. I came up with weapon names and made sure to Google them to check for any matches,, and followed up with weapon descriptions to give everyone a better idea of how the weapons functioned and what they would look like.

Tim Bewick - Week 2

This week we wrote the game design document. I have been writing the scoring, cheats and Easter eggs section, the game modes section and I was secondary writer for the detailed level / mission descriptions section. I also wrote the day and night cycle section. Today we will be handing in the game design document draft. We get three weeks of holdiays and then we will be working on the techical design document.

Final push before the break....

This week the team has been focused almost single-mindedly on the game design document. The week began with a final game testing session and a final brainstorm of what the game was about. The playtesting went really well and the team was able to grab a few more ideas of what could be added to the game.

The brainstorming session was a bit different. Although the team was coming up with some great ideas, and the discussions were moving the design in a good direction, the team was having trouble agreeing on certain aspects of the game. The leads decided to properly define what the game was about and now that they are on the same page in terms of the design of the game, this should help in the long run.

In terms of the design, the game design document draft is coming along smoothly. Some sections will need to be developed further however the draft should be ready for the hand-in tomorrow. The major worry is that there is no name for the game yet. Illithidia is not as great as initially believed. Back to the drawing board I guess....Keep posted.

Week 2 Entry

This week we have been working on the draft GDD and I have been assigned with the Animation Assets and the Cutscenes. Overall the amount of animation already looked pretty epic with around 10 characters in total. Hopefully the character design will allow the rig and animations to be shared to minimize animations. From the looks of things there will be 3 male nano Soldiers and a female nano-tech Scientist. With the aliens, the Stealth and Grunt will have the same rig and animations as the Soldiers and Scientist but the Mother and the Kamikaze will have their own rigs because of their sizes.

As for the cutscenes, there will be 1 main cutscene and 1 in-game cutscene.
- The main one will introduce the player to the avatars and the setting.
- The in-game one will begin when the player switches from Construction Mode to Battle Mode during the game. The setting will change from dawn until dusk and the camera will show the aliens approaching from a distance on the horizon.

Chur

Jason - 18th DEC - WEEK TWO

"Dear Diary"

This week i have been focusing on the combat and interface section of the GDD Draft, i did a quick complete draft of the whole combat section for Will, the interface section ended up being an epic eleven pages, going into depth and detail of the whole interface section, and is finished and just needs to be proof read by Luke for any errors.

I have also been gathering videos for our pre-vis section, all week and uploading them into the repository, and today i began to cut up some of these videos in Premiere taking out the parts that are relivent so we can begin to get a nice pre-vis video setup, at the moment ive only worked on getting visuals for how the cameras and cover system will work, more to come!

Found a great trailer of the "Terminator Salvation" game trailer, which looks as thought it is going to have a similar enviorment to ours, and looks like it has a cover system almost identical to Gears of War.

Since this is the last blog entry for 2008 see you all next year, have a happy chirstmas and fun holiday classmates/tutors and other readers!

[=

Shiney

Alright... so this is Jono, programmer on the team. Pretty much repeating what everyone else has written, but that's okay. In pre-production at the moment, ironed out most of the details of the concept (Octopii anyone? =O) and are writing it all up into the great Game Design Doco. We're having a bit of a problem sorting out the characters and how they fit into the story, but we'll get there eventually.

I'm out.

Week 2 post :)

During our second week we have been working pretty hard on ironing out the rough areas of our game. In particular, we spent a huge amount of time talking about possible weapon systems; from having the typical FPS weapons to having different ammo upgrades to having 12 totally different weapons to having the gun be a part of you and then back to having different ammo upgrades. Finally though we worked out a system that seems like it would work best, were we upgrade our weapons by absorbing the enemies or finding weapon blueprints.
We also spent a lot of time trying to get the back-story to make sense. I'm still not sure if it does

I myself have spent most of the week working on the Level Design section of the GDD. Tim helped a lot with this section as well, and I guess so did a lot of other people who stopped by to offer their suggestions on level design.I'm done with the level design for now but I know the map will be changed probability countless times before we get to actually making it.We got a lot of helpful feed back from the tutors and they seem pretty happy with how we're working.
So far I'm still having fun with this project, I don't think I'll get sick of this game for a long time.

WOOT i can post

Finily i figure out how to post so here goes
This post will be for last week

Last week we did a lot of "research" into other co-op stype games we looked at Gears of War 2, Savage 2, Wolfenstein, Left 4 Dead and Natural Selection a Half Life mod. It was a real fun week and we acually did learn stuff from those games.

Little bit on art Part2...

I guess I last left off talking a bit about our considerations when trying to create something interesting for our game visuals. A little time has past and the team has had a bit of discussion on the mood and setting of the game so i guess it's time to talk a bit about our art direction.

The main focus will be to create practical art: Focusing on the silhouettes that communicate to the player the threat and capability of enemies. Generally we want our art direction to directly influence the flow of game play.

Teamfortress 2 (Valve,2007) - Silhouettes that tell us a lot about the characters and how they're going to fight!

The Godfather (Directed:Francis Ford Coppola,1972) - Gordon Willis (cinematographer) displays a great use of chiaroscuro effects using black and white to create focus and mood.

Our world's architecture and visual appeal revolves around the 1930s and how the 1930s is displayed in movies (like the Godfather). Looking at illustrators of the time (J.C Leyendecker) and illustrators from our generation who have similar visual style (J.P Alvares Ruas), qualities can be identified to help us craft our characters with the distinct shape we want (slick, sharp lines, clean shading and strong silhouettes).

Batman: The animated series (Warner Bros,1992) - 1930s art deco styled buildings, with strong chiaroscuro effects.

Extra reference:
http://souvlaki.jp-ar.org/ - J.P Alvares Ruas

This doesn't conclude where our style is going, but I'm out of time for this entry :(

Be back soon with part3.

Whoa Whoa Whoa Whoa Whoa....What game are we making again????

It has come to my attention that not everyone is on the same page for the features that are going to be in the game so the leads have decided to flesh this out more. Now that myself and the rest of the leads are all on the same page, we can all successfully answer any queries without contradicting each other.

As for the general progress of the project thus far, the GDD Draft is almost complete and a draft of the pre-production schedule was completed. This schedule still has tasks which need to be broken down further.

The rest of the week will be spent mainly in correcting the schedule so everyone on the team is clear about what tasks they need to complete, and also redoing the pitch document into a more finalised copy as well as a powerpoint presentation to show to any industry people who might decide to drop in and check out what we are working on.

Late Post For Last Week

Hello E!

Last week we play tested several games on a variety of consoles and the PC. Most of the games featured similar game-play aspects to our concept for our final project.

I analysed how each game involved teamwork, how their UI was designed, what controls they used and how their menus worked to further my knowledge when writing up the games design document for the project.

The team came together after all the playtesting and we got an early game pitch together that took all the best gameplay and ideas from each team member.

Senior Animator - Tame Tahana

Kia ora,

During the first week, we spent most of the time testing games on PC, Xbox 360 and Nintendo 64 getting to know more about our main concept idea, which are Team Management and a Dynamic Covering System.

Our games we covered included:
PC:
- Savage 2
- Wolfenstein
- Left for Dead
- Half Life 2 mod: Natural Selection

Xbox 360:
Gears of War 2
Army of Two

Nintendo 64:
Super Mario 64
Conker's Bad Fur Day
Donkey Kong 64

I can see a lot of work in the animation part of the game with the amount of enemies we are comming up with. I can' wait to get stuck into it.

Week 1

Quick intro - Roy Lye, programmer that applied for and became lead for the current project. We are making what should make for an interesting title in terms of challenge for our programming team. The major challenges I see coming from our project are the expressive AI we want to implement and the multiplayer components.

The challenge of creating an AI system that is able to smartly move around a constantly changing environment and the MAJOR technical challenge of implementing some kind of multiplayer physics system that we would like to get across a network. Network Physics. Yes. Anyway I’ll leave on that thought as development moves forward.

End of the First Week

This first week has ended very well. The team has been play-testing games that seem to share common elements that inspiration can be drawn from. It has worked out quite well in the brain-storming and development of ideas. The high concept and pitch documents were handed in with everybody contributing in some shape or form.

At the moment, the game is centered around the idea that the player must survive against waves of attacking enemies. There will be a day and night cycle where the player can scavenge during the day for resources as well as set environment-based traps to help defeat on-coming waves. The waves will come during the night and the player must survive using the environment. The game will be based around the phrase "Control the environment to the control the enemy."

As mentioned in a previous post, cover will also play a major part in the game. The player will need to use cover effectively to survive, either by creating it using their nano-bots, or moving parts of the environment around to create better defensive positions.

Resource management is one idea that came up during play-testing. To simplify this, only one resource will need to be managed; nano-bots. The nano-bots can be harvested from fallen enemy foes. They will also slowly reproduce over time. Players will be able to use the nano-bots to access higher tiered weaponry, ammo and even create forms of cover. Players will also be able to breakdown anything that is made using the nano-bots. This means that players can sacrifice their cover to replenish their ammo, but this means that they will be open to fire. This will introduce a new dynamic to game where the player will need to think carefully about how they manage this resource rather than being gung-ho about blasting everything they see.

This is pretty much a breakdown of what the game is at the moment. Next week the team will be ironing out the finer details of the game while writing the first draft of the Game Design Document. Scoping the game appropriately while keeping the gameplay fresh and fun will be a difficult task but this needs to be done properly. Keep posted for further updates....By the way, the game has a name, "Illithidia."

Tim Bewick - Week 1

This week I worked on the design of our game with the other team members. We play-tested several games for inspiration including Gears of War 2, Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory, Savage 2, Natural Selection and Mario 64. I also helped work on the high concept and pitch documents. I am happy with the game concept we have come up with and I am looking forward to working on the game design document next week.

Jason - 12th DEC - WEEK ONE

"Dear Diary"

The game idea has come a long way this week, lots of changes have been made which overall have in my opinion defently improved the game concept, the "pitch" will soon be completed and handed in around 5PM, the game concept still needs to be scoped, things like, number of weapons, level size, etc.

This week involved testing a lot of games that had similarities to what we are looking at doing, and seeing how well those aspects worked.

Some of these games included:
Savage 2
Left 4 Dead
Gears of War 2
Mario 64
Natural Selection

I found that alot of these games were not anywhere near as fun single player as they were multiplayer.

Michael -Friday 12 December

"Captains Log 12/12/08"

This week has consisted of the class testing and researching a number of games. A number of games were tested in order to find out the importance of co-operative teamwork in games as well as games which share similar themes to our initial idea of enemies attacking in waves.

It seems that most of the idea for the game is starting to come along. I have a number of concerns on how the final product will scope down and what the actual "scoped" game will end up being. I am also interested in seeing how the art style decided by Anthony will work for the game. I believe that when we start pre visualization next week, a number of ideas concerning the art style need to be discussed in detail with the rest of the team and whether or not it will help with the overall aesthetic of the game.

-Michael

Little bit on art Part1..

So I'm the art lead in this project. My role is to manage the time of the art team as well as look at cohesive design and style for the games visuals.

With the pitch document around the corner and the setting and theme still partially undecided, I thought I'd just quickly run through the considerations the group is taking to get something fresh in the department of game visuals.

• Has it been done? The last thing anyone wants to do is recreate the visuals of another game. Of course this doesn't mean disregard the stylistic choices of previous developments have made to get successful visuals. In terms of this decision making Team Fortress 2 (and Valves documentation of their visual design process) have been referenced by the team.
• What elements make up the visuals we're looking for? Taking into consideration the main game themes (defence, survival, interactivity) and the so far decided gameplay (interacting with the environment to defend your position). The group has looked at tactile, solid, square environments to place emphasis on the strength and utility of the game world. On top of this the cohesive reasoning for our game situation is war. War is depressed, hectic and reeks of desperate people. How we represent this will be crucial to a successful mood in-game.
• What do the characters look like? Where the elements of our environments are geometric, sharp, crisp and squared. Our inhabitants will be organic, smooth and quite abstracted - a complete contrast. In making this decision we had a focus on the silhouettes of the characters and how easily identifiable they will be within the environment.
• Where does the architecture come from? This really breaks off from the previous question. What we have described is tactile, solid square environments; however this could be represented by a series of cubes - which isn't that interesting. The team has looked through several time periods looking at buildings that show strength of structure and diverse design - built with purpose but viewed with interest (by the general public and us).
• Why will people like how this looks? This is the toughest question to answer... Using previously successful visuals (games, movies, illustration and concept art) as references and points of learning, gives us an understanding of what aesthetics people like to see. However it's the feedback through the development cycle (from anyone who play tests our game or anyone who sees our work) that truly decides whether people like our visuals and what we need to change or tweak to make it what people like.
  

Anyway, that's a quick look at our considerations for the visuals of our game.

Thanks for reading.

Project Managers post for how things went down this week

With the games Pitch document due in tomorrow, I can safely say that we have settled on an idea but there are still a few kinks to iron out of the concept.

So far scope has not been factored in to the idea as we feel that this needs to take place during the creation of the GDD and TDD.

As a previous post stated, the key ideas are Dynamic cover and Expressive AI. This has now been changed to a Dynamic environment and Expressive AI. This decision was made after we agreed upon the idea of using the environment for offensive purposes as well as defensive.

The majority of this week was spent play testing existing titles and brainstorming ideas for our game.

In conclusion the concept is shaping up but there is still a lot of work to be done.

It Has Begun

The beginning of a game has begun. High concept is in and the team is ready to get stuck in. Keywords at the moment to focus on are "Dynamic Cover" and "Expressive AI."

The First of My Posts For the Week

As a lead I am obligated to post twice a week on this blog. This is the first of those posts

Jason - WEEK ZERO

"Dear Diary"

"FIRST" "IBTL"

Today we got all our game concepts and finnaly decided on two ideas to begin working on more