Wednesday, November 26, 2008

Team 4 - Arcane Furor

Hey all,
The fifth and final round of rapid prototyping for the semester is upon us. This round our goal is to polish a game we created in a previous round. Our team from round three enjoyed working together and created an all around fun game in Arcane Furor so we reformed our team. We had a lot of design ideas were weren’t able to get into the game on the first go around along with various challenges we simply did not have time to fix.

Our programmers jumped strait in and refactored the code. This fixed a big memory issue we had during round three that restricted us from adding some additional features. The programmers have also added in the ability to select the number of players. They have also added in game states including menu, game, and pause states allowing us to add in GUI system which is one of our main goals for this round.

Our artist has also done some fixing of his own. He has expanded the number of character models from one to four and the models are currently being tweaked to have more contrast with each other. He is also working to create two additional levels. Each level will incorporate its own unique feature such as level deterioration.

Our producers have done their share of work as well. We did initial design work to find what features would add to our current game and were within our scope. This round is about polish so we are making some minor additions while still focusing on making the game look and play at its best. Tom has already upgraded all the particle effects associated with the various spells. I am in charge of organizing the team including scheduling meetings, recording meeting minutes and maintaining team communication. I have been working primarily on the GUI including designing the menu structure and functionality and developing the assets for the GUI. I have also done some minor coding including adding additional controller functionality and creating additional build configurations.

Things I have done:
Designed menu structure and functionality
Minor code changes (additional controller functionality, added build configurations)
Created team schedule
Recorded meeting minutes

Until next time,
Reid