WOW What a cool week!!!!

Hey readers!!

This week was awesome, we are starting to see some really cool pictures from the art team and some really good design from the programmers. We only have one week left for pre-production and although I have no doubts that we are far more prepared than some of the other GD classes to date there is still a lot of work to be done!!!

The Art gang are busy working towards their Art Design Document(ADD) and the programmers still need to fill up some of the holes in the TDD not to mention fix all existing issues with those two documents as well as the issues still present with the GDD.

Unfortunately we lost our lead designer for the week due to bereavement issues, and he never got a chance to submit the bulk of his changes to the GDD. This was of course a minor set back as we appointed a replacement who did a really good job at fixing up what he could of the document.

We are just waiting for both teams to pull everything together by next Monday so we can have three really shiny and useful documents which will make the actual production of the game go as smoothly as possible.

Anyway, since I am not only the project manager but a programmer as well, here is what I worked on this week for the TDD:

I fleshed out the documentation for the event system so now its more than just a mere UML class diagram.

I also wrote up a little section on how the co-ordinate space in Gamebryo works and talked about how their matrices are in column-major order as people can get confused between the two. If you studied Mathematics at university like myself, chances are you will be used to a right handed system with matrices represented in column-major order.

I also drew up some UML class diagrams and some explanations for how the multithreading part of our game will work. The idea is to recalculate our navigation mesh for the AI and simulate the physics on different threads so that, if the system hardware supports it, these can be computed on different cpu cores for a more efficient framerate overall. Being one of only two university students in the class I think I am the only person who has covered concurrent programming in the past. Its going to be an awesome learning experience trying to implement it.

Until next time, PEACE!!!!

Michael -Saturday 31 January

"Captains Log 31/1/09"


Yet another long hard week of drawings. Im really enjoying it all, especially since this week I was able to tidy up some of the artwork to make it look better. Ive had to pick up learning the pen tablet pretty fast lately and have finally been convinced that this is the way to go. I still need some more practice with it and thankfully with the tasks I have to get through next week there should be some more artwork coming out soon. Unfortunately I seemed to have left some of the touched up artwork back in class so most of the following images are of the final concept of the creature with some more in depth color studies into them. Ill post another entry early next week when I get back.


Reaper Design and Color studies



Queen Design and Color studies


Exploder Design and Color studies


This weekend ill be working on some new concept art work pieces depicting things like how the exploder blows up and so forth. So sorry guys... cant head out this weekend. So until my next post...

May the force be with you....




...Always.

-Michael

Tim Bewick - Week 5

Hi all, I have been working on risk analysis for the technical design document, documenting how the team will be using Gamebryo's scene designer for making levels and how the programmers will be able to access properties of entities in the level. I have also been doing a bit of research to decide what texture sizes we will be using in the game.

Tame - Week 5 Entry

The workload this week included adding an Animation section for the Art Developement Document (ADD). Some of the work included looking into the Bone and Mesh Level of Detail in Gamebryo, working on a quick and easy Tentacle rig and basically getting it all working properly with Bone LOD and working in Gamebryo

Here are some examples of the tests for the ADD:

Bone LOD

Mesh LOD

Complete Rig with Tentacles

Jellyfish Tentacles

Heres a screenshot of my rig wip:

Soldier Rig

Week 5 - Blake

I spent most of this week working on an environment secion of our Art Design Doc.  I also started doing some concept work for the indevidual assets, like street signs, dumpsters, things like that. 

Heres a few drawings:

Hello E!

With the loss of our lead designer for this week, I was asked to step up and fill his shoes.

Looking into the GDD I have found that a lot of the smaller details are missing and are working hard to fill the gaps.

I found out however that the most recently updated GDD has not been committed to our repository and is still in the hands of our lead designer! So to save changing the current GDD and attempting to manage the daunting task of merging the two documents, I have instead constructed a document of recommended changes that can be inserted later when our lead designer gets back.

Yesterday an issue was raised: Will the daytime cycle of your game be fun? of which some suggested that in it's current state it was not. Below are my suggested changes:

Spicing up the Day.

There have been worries and concerns that the day cycle of our game is not going to be fun and that players will simply want to skip the day cycle making it redundant.

A few ideas have been brought to mind by me and others to improve the day cycle and make it more fun, they are as follows:

• Adding a proximity mine launcher to the weapon list.
• This allows players to set up mines around the level during the day.
• Uses include:
• Laying a field of mines around the area enemies will come from
• Placing mines in choke points and small passageways
• Placing mines on structures and objects to make traps


• Removing shared weapon research
• The main problem here being that all of the games weapons will be acquired rather quickly if the whole team is sharing the research of new weapons giving them less to do during the day once this has happened.
• More daytime team co-ordination is needed, questions will be asked like:
• Who needs to research new weapons? You can scout for weapons today.
• Who is close to getting a particular type of weapon? Go find it.
• Who has all the weapons? You can scout out where the enemies are coming from.


• Removing the radio transmission that told the players where the enemy’s next night fall spawn position was and adding a ‘spawn marker’ that must be found by a scouting player during the day.
• Adds yet another daytime objective and more team based co-ordination gameplay.
• The spawn marker could be some cool squid-ink-like cross or symbol that is clearly recognisable by the player.

Of course there are still the daytime features from before:

• Moving physical objects to form traps, choke points, high-ground, walls and fortresses.
• Co-ordinating with team mates to move larger physical objects and determine who is scouting, scavenging or constructing.
• Scavenging for weapon blueprints.
• Scavenging for nano-bots.
• Viewing team mate scores and statistics.

We will see what the feedback is like, but hopefully now our daytime is spicy enough!

Jason - 29rd January - WEEK FIVE

During this week i have worked on adding a sound section into the GDD, along with creating an asset list for all sounds, music and particele that will be required in the game, these two tasks took most of tuesday and wednesday.

Today (Thursday) i did a complete overhaul of the entire Interface section which i worked on in the draft of the GDD, this involved redoing all the menus that will be in the game, and making sure every menu had a basic layout, which i completed today.

Tommoro i will begin work on a sound section for the ADD document, detailing more to do with mood music that we will have in the game.

Here are some of the interface layouts:

PREVIS STUFF!!

Hello everyone! Finally got my account running and all, for the past 2 weeks I've been doing some art concept for the Nano Tech Scientist, 1st Lieutenant, and the grunt, Also did some research on UI and will be working on it some more..Anyway here some stuff that I did so far...

NANOTECH SCIENTIST

1st LIEUTENANT

GRUNT

Cheers!

Second to last Previs Week

So this week has been cut short by a day due to Auckland anniversary day but luckily things have been rescheduled to accomodate for it.

The art team are carrying on with what they were doing last week and the programmers have made some progress on rim lighting and UI stuff within Gamebryo. Where available people have been redoing documents and fixing up the GDD and TDD.

Unfortunately we have lost our lead designer for the week so we have appointed a deputy who is doing a good job.

We'll keep you posted on the progress of this week

AI, Rim Lighting and Inking

Hi, spent the majority of last week sussing out the details of the AI system. We are looking into co-operative A* with a goal orientated action planning system, similar to that used in FEAR (See Jeff Orkin’s paper ‘Three States and a Plan’.) We see a lot of risks with this kind of system, mainly concerning speed; therefore we are exploring the possibility of moving the AI system to a separate thread, grabbing new paths as they become available, this should stop the AI from locking up the game.

I’ve also explored the implementation of rim lighting and inking in a shader to create lighting that is desired by the artists, here are the results:

The art direction post pre-vis

So I’ve babbled on… on countless occasions, about the direction of our games art and the decision making processes that has landed us with something that looks like it’s going to be quite unique.

I guess it’s time to move a little into the technical stuff that’s going to happen the we hope will bring these concepted visuals in-game.

First we’ve identified the elements of our style, creating strong silhouettes for purposes of communicating character quirks (or in our case, enemy threat levels) on smooth-shaded characters with nice low-key palettes (for our playable characters at least).



Once we've identified what we want from our style drawings we can pick out what has to be done on the model and texture (the lovely smooth shading) and what we can pursue with a shader (diagram below)



And there we have a shader that will support our visuals ^_^!

disclaimer - chuck norris not included :<

UML, State transitions, Use cases, narratives…

It has been a week of engine design and documentation for the programmers. There has been no major design wow factor except for the size with which our TDD has managed to grow in such a short time. The only sub-system that is slightly different to any we have done in practise is to use function pointers in our event system, thus trading off some compile time for processing speed. As our state machines will be done within Lua there is no other major hits on templatised classes except for what function pointers require in the event system. The TDD surpassed the GDD in total pages of work and my consensus is that the document is quality as opposed to just quantity. This point will probably be proven on Monday afternoon with a Sidhe programmer coming in to look over it, so we shall see.

The Previs Box Has Been Ticked!!

So the previs was due in on Friday and although it was a tough deadline to hit, we managed to put together a quite a good reel of footage for how stuff might go down in the game. As you readers have probably worked out from looking at the concept art, our art team is good!! I have no doubt that they can't produce a really shiny looking game.

The programmers have been stuck into the Technical Design Document. I spent the duration of the week compiling and documenting information about the most important parts of the Gamebryo Engine as well as knocking out Use Case Diagrams and Narratives for the key differences between the Day and Night phases of play. I also drafted out some UML for our games Event System which is looking pretty cool, it uses function pointers to avoid having to iterate over a large switch statement in some handle event function somewhere that some class has inherited. We should be able to combine it nicely with Gamebryo's one. Finally I knocked out some UML for the game's weapon system.

As for the project management side of life. All the other programmers are busy working on Diagrams in some form or another. UML has been started on the AI's planning System as well as how our 'DREADED NETWORKED PHYSICS' is going to work.

I am doing my best to make sure that all documentation and is up to scratch and all UML diagrams are fully fleshed out. I am also really enjoying critiqueing the Artists concept work. It all looks so fantastic, one can't help being a little jealous that they can't draw.

I think i'll just stick to my diagrams. I happen to think a few of those look fairly "bad ass".

It has also come to my attention that some of the readers of this blog have been requesting that we post certain things which aren't being posted. I have told the art team to post more pictures and videos so expect to see more of those.

If anyone has any requests feel free to email those to me at write.wil@gmail.com and I will happily pass those on. I am looking forward to hearing from you.

Michael -Saturday 24 January

"Captains Log 24/1/09"

Its been a long hard week with a few late nights crunching out designs for some of the enemies on the game. Despite a minor misunderstanding in the schedule I managed to pull off the required tasks assigned to me by our art lead. These following concept art pieces are for the Queen, Exploder and Reaper enemies. I am truly looking forward to creating the final art pieces for the enemies and cant wait to attempt modelling them in Production. So as promised in my last post... here are some "shiny"pictures for everyone following this blog.

Queen Design Process

Reaper Design Process

Exploder Design Process

So in the next post more concept art work pieces can be expected and they will be further rendered in more detail now that the schedule is back on track again. So until next time take care and remember to slip on a shirt, slop on some sunscreen, slap on a hat and wrap on some sunnies...chur :)

-Michael