Week 5: In Which Exams

This blog post is arriving a few days later than my usual Wednesday night timeframe, for reasons obvious to those that read the title (Exams). Most of my week was spent preparing for a multitude of exams while working a bit on some assignments and trying to get some asset creation done. I'm pretty sure I did OK on all my exams (at the very least a sixty percent; I tried to mark myself pessimistically so I could be pleasantly surprised). Enough about tests though, what everyone should be here for is to see the progress made on our game PIVOTal, which personally isn't too much because of, you know, Exams.

First things first, and update on my character model. Recently we started using Mudbox to add more detail and texture our low poly Maya models from previous weeks. I did some preliminary experiments with my character, but as this doesn't have to be handed in until the semester's end I can see that I will be trying to learn much more about what's possible and make the best model I can (hopefully 2 million poly's, super detailed, and professional quality). The tutorials have been really helpful and have taught me a lot of new tools that I can see will be very useful in my future.

Beware the Mud Man

Week 4: In Which My Weekend is Programming

So I definitely didn’t write a blog last week, mainly because I didn’t make any progress (I have other classes with other assignments too), so to make up for that I spent my entire weekend programming, flipping through books and finding as much help on the internet I could. Somehow programming kept my attention for at least 24 hours allowing me to learn tonnes about the engine we’re using and get enough assignments done to be able to write my exam. I also decided that, even if it doesn’t count, I’m going to try and do every assignment, just to learn as much as I can about the engine.

A Nice Gross Rainbow Arm

The first thing I ended up working on was creating an arm with each finger segment individually controllable. When I first saw that question I thought it would be really hard so decided to avoid it, but after messing around in the engine I found that it may actually be the easiest to implement. All it required was creating each joint with a pivot in the right place and connecting the scene together, and of course assigning button presses to move each joint. Working in the scene graph here would turn out to help me in creating…

Week 3: In Which I Stop Humanizing Abstract Concepts and Assignments are Completed

Well I didn’t get a chance to play Shadow of the Colossus yet, nor did I attend the Great Canadian Appathon, I just had too much work I had to get done over the weekend (also it was my birthday, so I did do nothing for about a day). I first had to get done some business that took up about an entire day, but explaining that work would do nothing but bore you.

I got a start on some programming work this week, mostly in trying to set up scenes in Maya and getting them to work with physics in the game engine. I have yet to add in interactivity between a player and the game (making it basically a video) but it’s a good start. This way of importing objects, with physics attached, is much easier than what I was used to from last year, meaning we would likely be able to set up our entire game world quite easily.

Watch the ball hit the wall, see it fall. That is all.

Week 2: In Which an Idea Takes it's First Steps

This week our group worked more on refining our idea as a whole, laying out level designs and various mechanics we’d have to implement to allow our world rotations to work. Everyone in our group worked on one or more level designs over the weekend, some focused on puzzle design, while other’s focused merely on mechanics. I chose to work on designing a level that could be playable at all of our main rotations. What I created involved the level decaying and falling to pieces while the world moved, although it could require more dynamic movement then we may be able to implement (especially a level flow that melted platforms in half). We also decided on a more concrete scale of our levels, giving a basic size to each room being 20 units by 20 units where one unit represents the height of the player character. This was so that each level could connect to the other nicely and fit well on a grid. In addition to this standard size for each room we agreed that if someone wanted to create something larger to just take the space of two or more rooms to keep our nice grid-like structure.

20 seconds in Photoshop, because I don't have a scanner,
and someone wanted lots of images.

Week 1 (again): In Which an Idea is Born and a Blog is Reused; Also Art!

Another year has started and so has our next game (tentatively title PIVOTal). Over the past week we have brainstormed many, many ideas narrowing it down and refining it to something achievable yet still challenging. We even managed to pick a perfect theme to go with our game (I’ll let that be a surprise, but I’m sure someone else must have posted it anyway).

We decided to make our game in a Metroidvania style, somewhat similar to Shadow Complex. As is common within a Metroidvania style game we have agreed upon trying (and hopefully succeeding) to make a huge game world, inside a factory, with many power ups and collectables. The main action of our game will be dedicated to solving puzzles with occasional combat. In order to make our game more unique we added the element of rotation. During the players time in the factory they will come across rooms that allow them to rotate the entire world (as if on a pivot, like our title; clever, I know). This rotation opens up new paths for the player to advance as well as alters existing paths to create new puzzles in order to return from whence they came.

Week Six (+2): In Which Forgotten Posts and a New Hope are Discussed

Well I haven't blogged in a couple of weeks and, sure, I can blame it on the fact that I didn't have Game Design class so I forgot, but I'll man up and take responsibility for it. The past few weeks have been filled with very little gaming and lots of working on projects and studying for Midterms. Added to that I've also started working on my own separate game, which has been the most fun I have ever had programming, because I finally get to be the one who decides on absolutely everything I want. I've only been working on it for about Three days now, but it's come a long way. Currently it looks like some sort of MineCraft clone, if only for the fact that it is easier to load cubes than anything complex, and the movement is very digital as opposed to free-roaming analog (that may be harder to change in the future). As for the code, I really, really need to organize it better, I consider myself pretty bad at making things readable, everything is in the same .cpp file and variables are declared all over the place. Lighting needs to be fixed to, I want my code to actually be correct and not exploiting random glitches I found that makes it looks smoother. It started out as a really simple 2D texture mapping program and hopefully by the time I'm done it'll be a full fledged 3D adventure game (or RPG, one of those two).

I don't care how hard the coding is, the hardest part will be coming up with a name.

Week Five: In Which I Play Lots And Lots of Games

This past week has been one of the busiest weeks I've had in the past while. I've not only been doing lots of work for the game, but also lots of assignments, and playing lots of games as well. First off my progress on the game. As you can see from my last few blog posts I've been working on modelling the level, and this week I continue with that. I have actually completed the modelling for the first track and have started some work on a second track. One thing I will have to change, though, is the scale of the objects in the track, they look good in Maya, but are way too huge when actually seen from our racer's perspective. I have also watched a lot of online tutorials and read some discussions to help me learn to use Maya's hypershader so I could texture the objects in the game. I managed to completely texture every object and have been exporting their texture maps which takes a long time. Once we can figure out how to load and apply these textures to our object our game, on a visual level, will be pretty much done.

A nice garden with a huge worm (From the perspective of the ship, too huge)