I SURVIVED THE NIGHTFALL- Kei Kasai

We're finally finished...its been a long winding road full of challenges and as the course finishes I cant help but feel glad and proud about where I'm at, and how I strongly survived and acomplish a lot. I have finished all my tasks, worked with some brilliant people, learned new things, and most importantly have produced high quality work for my team and of course for myself. For the past weeks I've been helping our marketing person Stephanie to produce posters, box art, etc., also have worked on with the trailer with Tame and Jason, the final version will be edited by Steph and can't wait to see them on the big screen. Thanks everyone! Ciao!

Tim Bewick - Week 25

We are handing in our gold milestone today! This week I worked on making mouse wheel scrolling alter the zoom level of the sniper rifle, I made the multi player menu correctly display the players and their names and remove them when they leave. I also helped fix memory leaks and bugs.

Its all over red rover!!

So thats it, our game is done and dusted. What an experience!!!!!!!!

Its all over red rover!!

So thats it, our game is done and dusted. What an experience!!!!!!!!

FORUM

Just incase anyone missed what i wrote on the whiteboard, i have set up a forum so we can all keep in contact after the course has finished, the URL is:

http://gdfeb08.forumotion.com/forum.htm

Battlecruiser Operational

Greetings Command.

For the past several weeks i have been doing all kinds of crazy random things for the project, from creating particle debris objects too further LOD'ing all my objects.

I enjoy doing small parts for loads of diffrent parts of the game, keeps things alot more intresting rather then working on one long boring thing.

Now that most of the art stuff is finished, the work load has become alot lighter which is nice, since the game gold is due in four days we cant add anymore new assets, due to time restrants, but all our planned assets for the enviroment, plus extra have been creating ;)

Im looking forward to the final build on friday, as our game is already quite fun to play and with the final annoying bugs knocked out i think we will have a solid fun game, especially in multiplayer.

Michael Bastiaens - Monday 22nd June

"Captains Log 22/6/09"

We are in our final week of production and all thats left on my side of things is a few more re-exporting issues to do and im still the main person changing and attempting to balance the game through the LUA scripts. I also suggested the idea of making a yellow coloured tooltip whenever a player finishes researching a weapon to give the player more feedback so they arent just being bombarded by blue tooltips. Some of the issues ive been balanced include making the guns fire faster but do less damage to increase the pace of the action in the game, ive also decreased damage from enemy snipers and made them shoot slower as there was an issue where whenever 3 or more appeared you were pretty much guaranteed to die. Ive also adjusted the enemies that appear each wave trying to ramp of the difficulty of each successive wave in smooth progression. Other than that theres nothing else much to report and yet again no pictures.... However if you still have a hankering for some images.... heres a link to my competition entry since im working on a new reel in my spare time over the weekends; http://www.cgcoach.com/beta/index.php?option=com_kunena&Itemid=340&func=view&catid=19&id=2993 Enjoy XD

-Michael

Tim Bewick - Week 24

During Week 24 I got quitting back to the menu and starting a new game working (this was quite a task). I also worked on the HUD, made the avatar be revived when they are healed by team mates when incapacitated. I also changed the crosshair when debris is picked up to show you if it can be dropped.

CARRY ON MY WAYWARD SON!!! YOU HAVE COME SO FAR AND NOW YOU'RE ALMOST DONE!!

So the game is set for gold on friday, and its getting really stable now. We have had some great feedback from play testers and we are doing the best we can to deal with their issues.

Unfortunately there is still no networking.....BUT ITS SO CLOSE!!!!!

A HighPolyMonster Production, :)

Well, today was definitely very interesting. We got the chance to present what we are working on to some of the school. I was really surprised by the turnout and it kind of blew me away that alot of people seem quite interested to see what we have. I was even more surprised to see the animation classes there as well, especially after all the grief we have been giving them during this production. Thanks to everyone for turning up.

Having said that, there are still some things that I need to work on for the next presentation. First is volume. I thought I was loud enough, apparently not. I'll be reaching for a microphone the next time we give a presentation which will probably be sooner than later. Also, I want to make the next presentation more interactive, which is what it should have been today. The point for the presentation was to get people interested in the game, and also to get some playtesters to help us track down annoying bugs. I think we did manage to get some people interested in the game, we even got three playtesters in who helped us track down some bugs which Roy managed to fix today which was really cool. Hopefully we can get more this week.

At the moment, the team has entered crunch mode. The main focus is stability, gameplay and bug fixing. Luckily alot of the gameplay code is exposed to Lua so some of the suggestions for game improvement made by testers can be "tweaked" easily enough. Hopefully things will pull together nicely for our hand-in next week. Pray for us, later days.

Tame Tahana

Ok now the animations are all ready for the programmer, which they are finding quite hard to get running smoothly. The animations now have Sequence Layers, which allows certain animations to have a higher priority over others.

For example: Run Forward would have level 0 priority, Idle Left would have level 1 and Machine Gun Shoot would have level 2.

Now this seems simple enough but the blending between animations is proving to be very challenging. I am relying on this to be completed to view my animations not only running smoothly but having it also run in Multiplayer aka Co-op mode.

Right now I am "on-call" with the programmers working with the animations just in case they need any help. Other than that I am working on Animations for our credits, check it out at: http://www.youtube.com/user/tametahana

Ka Pai

Awesome, apart from the animation syncing, the networking is almost done and dusted. I just need to fix up the respawning part. Oh and I would love to test the whole reviving a team mate thing but too many class mates are pre occupied with other stuff *cough* Dota *cough*

Tim Bewick - Week 23

I worked on displaying intro screens when the game is started during last week. I also worked on displaying tooltips when your team mates choose skip to night in multiplayer and I made the menus use widescreen textures when the game is run in a widescreen resolution. I fixed a couple game crashing bugs in the AI as well.

Michael Bastiaens -Friday 12th June

"Captains Log 12/06/09"

With the ever looming deadline fast approaching things are starting to get a lil hectic and its time to start thinking about where we are all heading for jobs and sorting things out for said jobs. This week I took part in a video interview which I am very fearful of seeing since im pretty damn sure I said some things that were REALLY high up on the "Most cheesiest lines" list. Apart from that brief bit of excitement work continued as usual. I made a few more sounds and tweaked a couple more. Ive also been tweaking the LUA scripts while testing the game as well as trying to find a few bugs here and there. Last but not least... We finally managed to get the corpses with an alpha texture on it. It was surprisingly difficult and not as straightforward as it seems...thank you gamebryo for that little headache.

Sadly no pictures this week. But on a lighter note... its ROY'S BIRTHDAY!! HAPPY BIRTHDAY ROY!

-Michael

HMMMM

I'd be lying if I said I wasnt worried at this stage. The networking and animations are still not finished and the entire thing is due in less than 3 weeks!!!!

The good news is that both those things are almost done and the rest if pretty much finished. Just need to do a bit of play testing and more bug fixing and that should be us.

I have been helping out with the networking and I have fixed a lot of the minor issues. I am going to be getting the respawning in multiplayer fixed up...touch wood.

And ah its a great way to stay in shape..

So...can I have a job? [insert fake laugh here]

Well, two and a half more weeks to go before we are finished coding...Its getting close. The past few days have seemed to drag on in class and the main reason is that the Incredibuild trial version we had expired. Incredibuild has been a godsend for our class and has cut-down 17min build times to around 2-3mins. Luckily Roy managed to score us an extension and we were up and running again by the end of the day.

We were pretty lucky this week to get a visit from Phil Mayes from Krome Studios in Australia. He gave us some helpful insight into what we, as budding game developers, can expect when we take our first steps into the industry. The fact that he was smiling constantly did provide hope for the near future. He was also kind enough to give us feedback, tips and criticism for our game which was much appreciated. One cool suggestion was making things "sink into the ground." At the moment, when a player absorbs anything in the game, it simply disappears. I had hoped to hide this using a particle effect but he suggested we just make it slowly go under the ground and then remove it. Simple and effective. That will probably be my task for tomorrow morning.

I have been working on the Reaper melee attack and also trying my best to fix a pure virtual function call I've been getting with the AI agents. I have tracked the problem down. One of the things I hate about PhysX is that if you set the orientation of a shape so that it is now entirely inside a trigger volume, the trigger callback does not register that the shape has entered the trigger. The same thing is true for exiting trigger volumes as well. The agents themselves use triggers as sensors. Shapes are recorded as they enter and exit certain sensors so that the agents can steer away from them. Sometimes, not all the time, if debris is destroyed while in the sensor, and the agent begins steering away from it, a pure virtual function is called because the shape knowledge that the agent has contains the wrong information. Getting this to happen has been such a mission.

Anyways, I'll probably continue looking at that problem. I've also got to get the mother attacking when a target comes in range using one of three melee attacks. Fun times ahead....Later days.

Art Update ! -1st Lieutenant

Finally had the time to post all the things I've been doing for the past weeks and for some reason I wasnt able to post the 1st Lieutenant's update that I finished ages ago so I thought that since I'm just finishing our Marketing materials now I'd post this up too. Cheers

Art Update ! UI / HUD

Hi ya'all , been very busy for the Beta and updated all the designs for the HUD/UI, they're all running and implemented thanks to Tim ( who did an amazing job implementing and helping me with everything ) and the constant feedback/help from Will, Roy and Blake. Will keep you updated Cheers!

Tim Bewick - Week 22

We just handed in our beta. This week I worked on getting Kei's new menu graphics into the game using Crazy Eddie's GUI tools which are not very user friendly. I also made the HUD graphics work properly in widescreen resolutions. Today I just worked on bug fixing. We have just three weeks until the gold milestone is due and then we do our post mortems for a week and then that is the end of our course.

Grr?

BETAAA!!! It was beta hand-in today and I must say that I am pretty satisfied with where we are at for the moment. There are a few cool things that are in the game. First is the particles. The particles that are not blantant placeholders look soo cool. The one I am most impressed with has to be the Mortar. When you are chilling out on one side of the level and you see a blue thing being lobbed in your direction from the other side of the level, you can't help but be impressed!

My main focus for a while now though has been trying to fix random bugs and crashes. As with all software development cycles, you fix one bug and a whole lot more end up rearing their ugly heads. This will probably be my focus for the rest of the development. This, and random AI stuff as well, including getting the Mother to swipe at the player when it is near them, and also have the Reaper swipe when it makes no sense to lunge. There are still some issues with animation blending which Im confident can be fixed. The environment artist also wants AI agents to push things out of their way because it looks "cool." We'll see what I can do. Until next time, later days.

Michael Bastiaens -Friday 5th June

"Captains Log 5/6/09"

Today is our Beta hand in and its been a rather hectic week of trying to troubleshoot a number of issues. There are still a couple kinks that need to be ironed out such as the alphas on some textures not showing up which means I need to wait on a new shader which would just add to Josh's mouting list of things-to-do so at the moment that seems to be a bit of a gold milestone fix as there are bigger fish to fry.

Ive spent most of this week re-exporting a number of assets but ive also redone some of the other placeholder art assets for the rocket projectile and the mine. Ive also worked on a number of the overheat textures for the weapons and top things up ive also done a few sounds like the exploders explosion which has lots of chunky flesh and blood splash sound effects mixed into the big bang ;)

Next week ill probably be doing some more asset re-exporting as well as cranking out more sounds as soon as the LUA script gets updated so I can fill in the blanks.

-Michael

Tim Bewick - Week 21

During week 21 I worked added cheat modes into the game, I added the controls menu and players can now set their controls which get saved in their profile. I also worked on some of the other menus, the HUD and I fixed some problems with the rocket launcher and the avatar's TakeDamage function. I also fixed some errors that happened when the game exits.

Beta is due on Friday!!!

As some readers have probably noticed, the blog posts are starting to become more few and far between. This is due to the fact that Beta is on friday and everyone is working very hard to make the game more and more awesome.

We had a little demostration today which went quite well. We have some cool particle effects working but most importantly the enemies are ruthless and they can hunt you down and get you!!

The main issues to deal with on friday are the animations and the networking. There are still some issues with animation blending, mainly that I cant switch off the certain animations when I need to because of a limitation in Gamebryo's animation system. I am currently in the process of a work around for that. As for the networking, the deal with that is getting the animations to sync across the network. Most of the code to implement this functionality has been implemented in the past but since the overhaul to the animation system, it has to be refactored into the existing code base. I am aiming to have this complete by the end of today.

Other than that, guys are just working on touching up stuff so that we can get play testers in to play our game and help us tweak it.

Anyway thats my 2 cents.