Cohort 5 completes their 5th round of prototypes

Cohort 5 has completed and presented their final round of prototype games. This round was a polished build on a previously designed game with a 3-week time frame, rather than 2 as usual. It was both a help and a challenge to work with existing game components, as we did have a starting frame of reference, but also had to deal with the nuances of using someone else's raw files. Luckily, our programmer was also the programmer of the original game, so he knew his own code, but our artists were tasked with the challenge of working with someone else's models and animations.

Our final build featured 4 objectives: talk to the roof mouse and obtain the acorn bomb, find the informant mouse in the warehouse, take back the nut diamond from Big Ratsy's safe, and escape the building. Overall the game evolved more story without getting cluttered and boring and enhanced gameplay. While the original was story and sneaking, the polished version included a bit more of a combat mechanic with the acorn bomb.

With Darrell's help we managed to get the buttons on the splash screen updated and transparent, so that whole screen was a total revamp and I think looks awesome.

I did a 2nd version of the credits which was a bit more cleaned up and uniform, as well as the new credits for voice acting. I managed to steal Carl for 15 minutes to record the new mice dialogue tracks that I wrote and then exported those out after deciding if we wanted a nervous informant or a French one.

Ryan's work on the intro movie did a great job of getting the story across without boring the player. This was a change we made after the first iteration where the story was told in a longer format and was too much text to deal with. He also picked up on an oversight with the end screens where they didn't fit with the rest of the game, so he gave those the newspaper treatment as well.

Kait and Katie did a great job updating the animations, even with how difficult the originals were to work with. The updates to the textures, as well as a few extra ambiance pieces like the posters really helped add to the Film Noir feel. Their additional renders of Big Ratsy, his office, and the mice were also well suited to fit the environment.

Overall, our only issues we discussed as being "needs improvement" were that we needed to be a bit more organized and have clearer goals set. Play testing more would have been a good idea as well, as the enemy placement needed some tweaking to give more of a controlled challenge.

As for positives, it went over really well, we caught all the major bugs before presentation so it didn't crash, the redone animations worked very well, and the expansion of the story and additional game mechanics expanded the game without cluttering it.

My final contributions:
- Redesigned the splash screen and buttons
- Wrote the fake newspaper text
- Created a credits reel
- Altered the safe texture to desaturate the red text
- Wrote the mice's dialogue
- Recorded the mice's vocals, mixed and exported

Overall, I'd say we polished this one pretty well. I could see presenting this as a single level of a game with multiple 'cases' that Squirle has to go on during his quest to finally put Big Ratsy behind bars. We had discussed wanting a boss battle, and I'd see a final showdown between BR and Squirle as just that.

More progress on the final RPP round

This week was a heavy crunch week for producers, as we were finishing up our Design for Media projects (development documents for existing games). I was down to the wire editing my group's document, but we got it in on time, so that's one down and one to go. Now I can focus completely on round 5 which is due Monday...

After our second interim we had throwing implemented, as well as a "boss lair" complete with boss and the objective (nut diamond) hidden within a safe. After some assessment of our progress, time, and objectives with the game, we decided to finalize the plan as thus:

The player will begin on the roof and talk to a mouse informant who tells them his buddy is downstairs with the code to Big Ratsy's safe, where the Nut Diamond is being held. The player can pick up an acorn item to throw at the rats within the air vents and warehouse to stun them and get to Big Ratsy's office. Once they find the other mouse in the warehouse, they can go into the office and unlock the safe, grabbing the Nut Diamond and setting the alarms off. If they can make it to the exit doors without getting caught, they win.

We're recording some new dialogue for the mice and removing some of the old dialogue, as this was a 'story' game previously and was a bit heavy on the extraneous dialogue.

Recently I cleaned up the splash screen at the start of the game:


That involved creating some background images such as the crumpled newspaper:


I also did a preliminary credits reel using images mainly from the first iteration of the game:


I'm working on a second final version for the end build using the updated screenshots as well as adding vocal credits if we decide to have the mouse dialogue audible. We're also looking at the level design to see if we want to change up some of the barrier items inside to add a little variety and also to make sure it's balanced with the new acorn mechanic.