Making of a Student Game: Week 3

Week3: 1/23->1/30

This week had a mix of highs and lows.  The artist who was working on the Enemies was hospitalized and unable to work all week.  He is fine and was out by the end of the week, but unable to get any work done.

On a lighter note, we found out that the requirements for greenlight were basically the same as the issues brought up in our critique.  We had no issues getting greenlight and moving forward with our project.  To do this we needed to show that we had put some more thought into our narrative and how the game would actually flow.  Our vertical slice was based very much on mechanics and we hadn't put the time into narrative last semester.  As I have shown in one of our last posts we put thought into that once we got back.  Since then it has been written out more and it has been tied into the design of the first three levels.

We also had to show how we would populate the levels.   We have to show that the ship looked like it was, at one point, a working ship.  At the same time this can mean a few things.  Are we going to go Star Trek or Firefly with our ships interior?  Keith's concept art that he has been making about all of the assets and Eric's start on creating them allowed us to move past this.

The critique pointed out how we were not really reaching our goal of making sure the player would think about their environment and use it correctly.  This was something that we knew at the end of last semester and we have worked on that a lot.  Our design team has done a great job at ensuring that we made this happen.  They have done a lot to ensure that this is in our levels and our lead designer has put up the tutorials on how to make the basics of these.  You can see some of this starting to get iterated through in the video below. 

Audio and scope were the other issues.  These we have handled by working with our audio guy and thinking about what we would really need to do and what we didn't.  How could we streamline stuff.  We handled these issues and explained all of this to the professor.

We then spent the weekend working on our game.  We spent about 8 hours or so on it on both Saturday and Sunday.  This allowed us to make larges amounts of progress.

On the programming side we struggled with an issue all of Saturday.  It wasn't until Sunday that we were able to fix it.  However by finding the solution to the issue our weapon is very close to being functional in both the secondary and primary weapon mode.  I did have the time to make some minor changes in the AI to get them to act slightly differently, but most of my time was spent working with Chris on his issue.  When we figured out the solution he was able to make the fix in an hour.  While I was struggling on Saturday, our lead designer got his hands dirty with some unrealscript.  He went in and messed around with attaching lights and changing around some values in the AI to make them more to his liking as well as some other miscellaneous tasks.  I love having a designer who knows how to do this.

The Art team continued working on assets.  While our enemy guy was still out, our lead artist started making way on the gun.  The gun we have been using is the default UDK one.  The other artist made the assets that you will see in the video below.  The doors, walls, floors and roof were done by him last week end.

The level designers took the time to make their levels more interesting and added in various different touches and they are starting to really come through, as much as they can with the amount of meshes they have.  I had Bryan, our lead designer, make a video of a run through for me (Thanks Bryan).  This is where the whiteboxes are right now.  They are slowly moving away from BSP (the blue checkers) and adding in the assets they can.  We have started adding in bots in different parts as well.  The clip below was pretty loud on my computer so you may want to turn down your speakers if you have them on.



Through this you can see a few different things.  The first thing you notice is the text greeting a tester.  We have builds that go out every week that we then have tested by a bunch of Freshmen and Sophomore Game Dev students.  We have a Senior who is assigned to our team who tells them what we are looking for and instructs them on anything we need from them and vice versa.  He is essentially the liaison between our team and the QA testers.  They report different bugs to us on everything from level design to programming bugs.  The bug reporting is handled through a project management software.

The video shows some of our main mechanics early on.  Our two weapon fire modes of the push back gun and the attraction bullets, which works similar to the pipe bombs in Left 4 Dead.  The bullets really draw out an issue in how the AI are currently working and will probably be my next task.  Right now they will path find to where you are and then move there.  They don't check to see if you have move until they get there.  I'll need to do something about this.

Looking at this video I'm liking the progress.  All three levels were done since the start of this semester.  All of the art is new as well.  The AI is being subclassed from the base AI I made last semester.  The weapon was easy to make since we could base it off of the classes that are already in UDK.  While we may be done with three weeks about half of that was design and brainstorming.