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)

Week Four: In Which There is More Modelling; Also, I Played Some Games

This week as far as progress I've made in the game goes, is a bit less than the last few weeks. This would be because I've mostly been working on other assignments we have from other classes; Sound & Audio, Graphics, some of the Game Design homeworks, and the beginnings of my first Business assignment. Despite all this, I have managed to work on a bit more modelling for the game. The basic layout of our level is now pretty much complete, I may go back and change some things from time to time, if something looks wrong, but for now it looks good. Our game was beginning to lag a bit, so I did end up going into the level and removing as many excess polygons as possible, which turned out to be quite a few, and got our game back to normal. I also began work on adding a tunnel to the level (it's not a requirement, but it does add to the level). I started out with a basic tunnel, but that looked a bit boring, so I decided to turn it into a giant worm, which looked much better. After building it, I was constantly berated with suggestions to add to it, and so I did, which ended up making it look worse, so I completely remodeled it again, with a final image in mind. I have also now been given the task to create a texture loader that will apply textures to .obj files, as before it was just applying them to objects made in OpenGL itself. I plan to look for some good information to get started throughout the next week and to, hopefully, get a large chunk, if not all of it, completed by the end of the break.

Just a quick texture for now; This worm will look more wormlike eventually

Week Three: In Which There is Much Modelling

I posted last week that I was working on the level and had a version to use for our game. This week I was working on editing it to make it look better as well as creating other models to use for vehicles and characters. First off, the changes to the level. Previously the level was basically just a flat surface with a bunch of walls, because that was easier to do when we did it in OpenGL, but now with Maya, we could go crazy with what we wanted. Because our game uses space ships and they fly over the ground we decided that we could use the ground to create some scenery as you fly around. I first made the whole track bumpier to make it look more realistic (you are racing on the surface of a planet, They aren't typically perfectly flat). I also add some craters and started work on a volcano to go with our lava that we already had.

Crash landing, probably caused by all those Ss

I've so far completed two more ships to be added to the game, whether or not they will be used as actual racing vehicles is yet to be determined. One ship I modeled, specifically, to be a crashed ship, and has been add to the course in the bottom of a crater. It was merged with the course and had faces removed to lower our poly-count. I have also done work on a Millennium Falcon type ship. If this doesn't make it into the game as a playable vehicle, we talked about either having it fly over the course (the Millennium Falcon is huge) and have it crash in the background, or have pieces of it scattered about the game field. I've also been using this ship to test out texturing in Maya, but we're still not sure how that will transfer over into OpenGL. Also this week I worked on a model for a racer, which is definitely more difficult than making a ship because you have to make it look more organic. So far I have completed the head, with teeth and everything, which means I still have the body and will hopefully be able to rig it before the semester's over.

- N. Gale

Nothing is True; Everything is Permitted

When asked to do an in-depth criticism of a recent game, I thought, ‘It should be something I’ve completed ‘and ‘it should be something I liked’ so it would be easier for me to right about. At this point in time though I hadn’t actually beaten a game in a while, I was slowly playing through a few different ones but hadn’t really gotten into anything. So I decided to play some Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood, the third console game in the Assassin’s Creed series (One of my favourite series this generation, alongside Uncharted). Over the weekend I spent at least two sleepless nights playing it (I just couldn’t stop) and finished it Sunday, which just shows how much this game pulled me in and addicted me to it. The Game is part Stealth, part Action-Adventure, part Open-World sandbox type game, published by Ubisoft and developed by their Montreal studio, with the multiplayer developed by their Annecy studio.

The Basic premise of this game, as with the other two games in the series, is a modern day war between the descendants of Templars and Assassins that, using advanced technology and genetic memories, search for powerful and ancient relics. Using the Animus, these memories can manifest themselves as actual experiences for the people using them. Playing as an assassin, much of the game is focused on sneaking around and killing people from the shadows, but there is much more to it.

Ezio Auditore and his band of Merry Men (and one woman)