Nearly all of my passed 2 weeks have been divided between Game Design and programming of the game itself. After several meetings throughout the two weeks, we have cleared up several questions on the game design that we had along with questions the faculty had, especially pertaining to map size, layout, who wins specific player conflicts, and several algorithms. With all of these meetings, I also took the chance to write out the first draft of our GDD, as we are moving more and more into the coding of the game, with the Alpha due next week, this GDD I hope will be extremely useful in guiding and helping that process. https://docs.google.com/document/d/13H5HFZIjrCVwLf61U1Nqzdoz6kGS2KMzmQpwi87XvwU/edit One example of what is in the GDD is the planning for how the the neutral floating islands will attach to the main island. This is the tier system for how islands will move into the base island, with islands always filling up the first tier before moving onto the second. Special cases have also been considered, such as if players lose islands from the 2nd tier, and then the first tier, the island AI will move to fill in the first tier first. Also, first tier islands can only be captured if they have at least 2 adjacent sides free, if not they cannot be captured by enemy teams.
All of this is in the process of being coded right now, but is not in a show-able state yet. Pros: Game idea is much clearer and schedule for coding also clearer Progress has been made integrating the different scenes and the Island blue prints GIT has been set up Cons: Programming team is still behind on planned Gantt activity however. Fact that lab computers still do not have Unreal is not helping Some features, such as AI, are extremely close to being cut due to time restraints. Will decide on this later when Alpha is built
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Unfortunately, as far as programming goes, I'm pretty far behind. My home computer broke, and hasn't been repaired yet. Between not having a computer at home and not having Unreal in most of the lab computers, I haven't had as many opportunities to work in engine as I'd hoped. In the mean time, my time over the last two weeks has been spent going over game designs with the art and programming teams, especially after the critique we received from our pitch presentation. A large part of the redesign has included figuring out exactly what role we want the dragons and riders to play, and how to promote that to the players. After making a paper prototype to play out our ideas, we figured out that through the map design, we could influence what players did with their characters. Teams would naturally break up their game in to two stages. The first stage has been the dragon guiding the rider to nearby islands to capture them. This is done through one of the rider's unique abilities, which is to place and reinforce totems, which are used to claim islands. Once islands become more scarce, and the timer gets shorter, player strategy changes drastically as teams are forced to plan out attacks on each other, trying to kill other players and take advantage of re spawn time to steal their islands.
Pros: Game Mechanics came a long way since last pitch I was able to help a bunch without my computer Paper prototype turned out to be very helpful Cons: Without Unreal, I got pretty far behind and need to catch up The majority of these past 2 weeks for me have been spent on taking a step back and looking at the bare bones of our game. We created a sturdy paper prototype that we have used for many in house play tests and all of these have provided amazing results. We learned so much about the gameplay, map size, how many players should play, and so much more. I am personally very excited that Dr. Wagner advised us to take this step because we were able to play test our game without having to create a digital version of it.
I have to admit that after our horrible presentation last week I was very scared for the status of our project. I believe that none of the faculty believed in our project and I hope all of this work that we’ve done will be able to change their minds. I also started doing some simple 3d concept models for more rustic and rural houses located in and outside of the keeps in the environment. These two models are shown below and are based off architecture found in the Lord of the Rings universe. Pros: We finally started prototyping the game and found that with 4 teams the game actually can get really fun! I started making art concepts which I had a lot of fun doing I’ve been watching Ruben work on the networking, including helping him test it, and he almost has the split screen networking working on both machines! This is so exciting!!!! Cons: We really disappointed our advisor and probably the rest of the faculty but I know we will be able to make up for the lost time. The labs still don’t have Unreal Engine 4! This is really starting to anger our team because it is so unfair that we don’t have access to the programs we need. Over the course of the last few weeks I have become more comfortable and enthusiastic about our game idea. The changes we made last time were pretty significant and put me off a little bit, leading to my negative first PPJ. I want to note that I wrote a similar PPJ for my Game Workshop project, Moo Dairy’s Shoppin’, and ended up loving the game and worked very hard on it. A concern I had was that due to my lack of experience and interest with more strategy-heavy games, I would be less participatory in the game design. This turned out to be untrue, and I have been much more active in our meetings. We also created a paper prototype as suggested by the faculty after our pitch. I spent a good amount of time with it, and once we got past adapting our game to the table top format, we developed a better understanding of our game. I think it was somewhat fun, but that is also taking into account that the action oriented gameplay will be fun as well. I created a quick conceptual model for the split hexagon idea, but we are still not sure if we are going to do it. As it stands we are going to have hexagonal islands to match the gameplay, but the downside is that the levels will look fairly bland. A solution to this that we found is to have hexagonal islands but split them into 2-4 smaller ones with varied shapes, and when the island is captured, they will form into a hexagon in order to attach to the team’s island. I am not sure if we have confirmed that it will function properly in game, and it would mean more work for the art team as well. Hopefully this helps bring us to a conclusion. Since I am supposed to rig the Dragon, and we don’t have a model yet, I did a practice run for one. Going off of Riley’s concept art, I did a basic model and IK rig (with no controllers) for the wing alone. I do not have skin between the wings because I did not want to spend too much time putting this together (it would be a lot of weight painting), and because it is possible that we will have a particle effect in it’s place. Overall, the rig went well, here is an animation test: I am less nervous about this undertaking now, and have some notes I can pass onto Riley to make sure the topology of the dragon model does not give me a hard time when I rig it. Here is an example of knee topology that we can use on the wings as well: Pro:
Starting at Week 3, most of the time was spent in our individual programming/art teams, where the programming team focused discussing changes to the game play, trying to figure out exactly how we wanted this game to play, along with adjusting our initial game design based on the Week 2 presentation with the faculty. On the art side it has been mostly been concepting, with creation of character and environmental concept art, as well as some rough models for the greybox. After the disastrous presentation, we had spent a lot of time pulling ourselves together. We still believe we have a good game idea, but lack of sleep and practice is what led to the failure we had for communicating this idea. After meeting with Wagner, we took a step back to nail down the details of the pitch, game idea, and game concept in general. With Wagner’s advice, we developed a paper prototype, to try and test different game mechanics and design choices, and made significant progress on how the respawning and Island movement will work, along with how combat encounters between 2 teams will work We also developed our GDD (see below), which has almost all of the primary design choices for the game, and will help guide the programmers with their work. As for the programming side, there has been some progress, with Networking IPConnection working, as well as more work on the primary game mode, with more progress on capturing islands and monolith building.
-Insert Network IPConnection picture here- https://docs.google.com/document/d/13H5HFZIjrCVwLf61U1Nqzdoz6kGS2KMzmQpwi87XvwU/edit?usp=sharing The last 2 weeks was spent adjusting our game based on our feedback. I reworked the basis for our design and made new dragon concept art to reflect that. The new art incorporates the form of the old art, but starts to dissolve it into trails of energy, as the design concept was that the world was being slowly ripped apart by the introduction of magic. Along with the concept art, I had to manage the rest of the art team in reworking environment and character designs and assigning tasks for them. Additionally i put together a greybox for our environment in order to have footage for the pitch. And holy hell did we get WRECKED during that presentation. It was pretty bad. Like "really, really bad". One of our main criticisms was how we focused too much on the artwork this time around. After this, we pretty much put the art on hold until we can get gameplay figured out. I laser cut a paer prototype for us to use and it works pretty well, but we really need a digital build ASAP
Pros: Looks like we're headed in a good direction for the art Cons: Got our asses handed to us, and have to put the art on hold a bit. These past couple weeks, I created a rough keep model for our greybox since we are not into main art production. Over the past couple weeks, we have really gotten into the fleshing out our mechanics based on faculty feedback. We have gone as far as making a paper prototype and with information from that, we will make a greybox of our mechanics. Once we get the mechanics sorted, we can get onto figuring out art. Pros: We are heading in a good direction and figuring out our mechanics early on will really help us later on. Cons: We haven't gotten to figuring out the art yet so I am itching to start creating models. 4 weeks down, 6 to go!
-Matt During the past few weeks, I took a step back from concepting the environment. A huge critique we got during our second presentation is that we had too much art for a graybox and not enough mechanics. We met as a group to try and figure out what our gameplay will be like and to make sure we are all able to understand our own game.
I did create some general art to keep things moving along so that we would understand how we can be more cohesive with our style. I’ve created some art of enemies, totems, and color concepts as well. The enemies will be smaller than the humans. The totems will reflect our characters’ personality. We are also striving for a more vibrant environment as opposed to a darker one. Pros: We are finally able to push forward to a more developed game that may work. Although our art styles may vary, we are coming up with a game style that is more cohesive in concept. We also are not wasting time on things like the environment concept until we understand and settle on a game scale. I also got a cat. His name is Kopi. He is keeping me sane. Cons: We created a paper prototype but a lot of our game mechanics need to be built on an alpha. Things need to change and based on our mechanics, our art with push in different directions. During the past two weeks not much artwork has been done as our group is focusing more on finalizing the game mechanics and getting the game build ready. Despite this I still decided to spit out more character artwork and improve on the last iteration.
Pros: One of the good things to come out of this week is that now that we’ve decided that our game will be 2v2 team player game. Knowing this we thought of how are we going to make these two teams distinguishable from each other and if that goes well how will we make it possible to add two more teams? Before I’ve been playing mostly with color, but I thought if these characters were going to be on dragons and significantly smaller the players should be able to identify who is on their team easily. I think from the very beginning I focused too much on detail when I should've started simpler and came up with these rough ideas. I also played with particle systems in unreal to create a character design we’re attempting. Whether or not these designs stay in the game, I learned how to make basic particles that can be used for other aspects of our game like player attacks and our environment. Cons: We’ve been a little set back on the art side of the game as we focus more on the coding and gameplay, but I’m not too worried about this. In the meantime I’ve been getting familiarized with ZBrush and staying active within maya. I created base meshes over the summer, so I have a starting off point when our character designs are fleshed out. This week was really productive meeting wise. Ruben, Riley, Robert, Matt, and Ricardo had a meeting with Tony Rowe to discuss game design and mechanics. Some massive changes happened to the game which brought us back to the drawing board. We got rid of the objective system and focused on only one objective game mode. We also took feedback from some of the professors in the first pitch presentation and decided to start investigating networking within Unreal Engine 4. If the testing and demoing turns out to be successful our game will be a networked online game.
Our concept artists also started working on more designs for the small enemies in the game. They also went back and revised past concept art. Positive: We decided on the new direction for the game and a lot of us think it is going in a much stronger direction. The concept art for the new enemies turned out great. Negative: Sadly our adviser was away from campus this week so we were not able to meet with him to discuss all of the changes that were made to the game. |
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