This week in development showed some major changes in several of the projects. The entire programming force was relocated to the Central Team to work on the engine to be used by all teams. Therefore, the teams this week were tasked to develop largely without the help of their programmers, leaving the Technical Artists and Technical Producers to jump in where they could. Even with this hindrance, the teams managed to get more in-game progress to show on the screen.
In an unprecedented move in FIEA history, the Resonance team has decided to abandon the pitched game in favor of the 5th ranked pitch, Sultans of Scratch. The team noticed a lackluster attitude toward the pitched idea and with low morale, progress was sluggish and uninspired. Rather than trudge along dragging their feet and complaining the whole way to produce something that would almost guarantee a cut in February, the team decided to start fresh using the next ranked game pitch which they were much more enthusiastic about. As they had made this decision just a day beforehand, they elected not to present this week.
The cut date has been set to be February 16th and all 4 teams will be presenting from 1-3PM. Dan O’Leary from N-space will be the guest of honor, coming in as an objective party with experience in the field but no prior knowledge of the games, teams, or history of the projects. This will allow an unbiased, professional look at the 4 games and give a better idea of which are viable for production and will survive through to the start of Spring Break.
Drifters
The biggest change in the development of Drifters was the environmental change from subway station to museum. This was motivated both by a lack of emotion evoked from the original location and a desire to strengthen the environment choice to the fiction. By changing to a museum, it would better explain why the artifacts of the Drifters’ past were gathered in one area while still allowing for the crowd in an open space setting.
A few new concepts were introduced, including “drifter vision” which would allow Drifters to see auras related to their powers and see the ability items that would grant them new powers. The ability system was better developed, including a collectible inventory system to allow them to be used as needed and also separation into combative and defensive types.
The team’s schedule has been better developed with the new changes; MS Project is being used for timelines and their sprints are based around 3 major deadlines before the spring break cutoff. Also developed and put into use this week were paper prototypes that mapped out the environment and helped the level design team analyze walking paths for the NPCs. This process allows the team to better determine the rate and flow of how many new bodies the players have available to drift in to.
The in-game demos shown included a redesigned environment better resembling a museum and the model now has a run cycle, idle stance, and when drifting into new bodies, the abandoned model has a stunned reaction animation before continuing on.
Their newly coined catchphrase is “We’re a multi-player Splinter Cell with body switching”
Delirium
First off was the Delirium team’s tech demos going to an in-game setting. They now had a portion of a hallway where a player could walk and the insanity variables could be manipulated to where the hallway would distort and colors saturate and desaturate. Also demonstrated was 3D sound in its basic form surrounding a box.
The design of the level has been streamlined by the creation of the hallway/room structure in chunks rather than one large piece. With several small interlocking pieces much like legos, the levels can easily be built by the design team by piecing different chunks together to create any number of unique floors.
Animation was a big concern this week with two new concepts shown, the animation of the steam technology used for most any moving parts such as door locks and the jointless animation for more fluid moving pieces like the straps on Edward’s jacket. The jointless animation is a code-based animation that doesn’t rely on individual frames, allowing for a more fluid and natural looking movement for pieces like fabric straps or hair.
The personalities for the 3 other forms have been further developed and are now more specific to their abilities and weaknesses, allowing for more of the level design to be closely developed to play to those elements. While combat is still not a major focus, the design team can now build level structure, puzzles and enemy behavior around these new strengths and weaknesses for each personality.
Paper prototypes are being used now to test enemy and environment interaction and how it effects Edward’s sanity. The team created a small calculation program that tracks the insanity levels and notes which personality is currently out to help ease the process of constantly adjusting the variables.
The Chain Game Project
“Traverse the afterlife as a tethered team”
Scheduling has been updated into MS Project with sprints 1 and 2 completely loaded in and the rest ready to be imported. This replaces the old method and will help better track how the scheduling works for the team’s goals. Sprint 2 ended on Wednesday and the team is ramping up for the start of the newly organized sprint 3.
The setting is updated from a cave-like afterlife to a sort of morbid, run-down amusement park where the ‘employees’ are the ride operators and the souls there are the park guests. The rides embody new twists on punishments in the afterlife, such as a roller coaster that constantly runs so the riders eventually succumb to constant vomiting. As the players will be more of “employees” of the park, they will be able to see a lot of the behind the scenes areas like the scaffolding and backstage areas, rather than the normal area the souls see. The basic environment has been created in Maya as a 3D rendered design to help develop the decision on the chain ability as well as the character scale and environment design.
The chain abilities are narrowed down to allow for at least one to get into the final game with room to expand to more if time allows. The five choices the team is down to are skeleton whip, body sled, kick propulsion, over the head hammer, and ceiling/wall anchor. Some are travel-based while others are combat-based. To make their decision, the team is looking at which one represents their game emotions best, which are “morbid and humorous” and also programmatically which ability is most apt to be implemented.
One of the other challenges the team has tackled this week was the notion of “game over” in their world. If they fall off a cliff in to the abyss, what happens? Instead of a traditional “you lose a life, you restart at the checkpoint or beginning of the level” they have been playing with the idea of exact respawn where the players fall back down to the spot where they missed the jump. Several other humorous, morbid “deaths” and “rebirths” have been pitched as well.
Some other things coming up during brainstorming meetings have been the notion of voice chat to allow players in different rooms to have a better cooperative play experience. The chain will be both a help and a hindrance to the players, so communicating to your partner will be key to completing the level.
Now that the setting is decided, the character concepts are also now defined with a short, skeletal being in an oversized hoodie as the reaper intern and a taller, plain sort of girl as the misplaced mortal. The contrast again plays to the theme of the game and they were decided on by majority vote of the team members. Both characters have been sketched out and modeling and rigging have begun on the reaper. A demo of some of the effects that can be done to the reaper model was shown where he can be squished and stretched.
Prototyping has gone beyond computers and paper and effected the team in real life. Two of the team members, Carl and Carlos, spent the day chained to each other in an effort to see how much of a bother it was to be chained to another person. They were able to better understand how impulsive you can be in a day when you automatically go up to move somewhere. The weight of a chain on your wrist was also an odd feeling for them and made everyday things like moving your mouse or eating slightly different. Other traditional prototypes are looking toward lego-built environments, placing dummy assets in flash or Panda3D environments.
"Sultans of Scratch"
This game was pitched with the first instance of FIEA having two dance crews come in and battle before the cohort. At first glance the game looks like a cross between Pokemon and Dance Dance Revolution where futuristic DJs control android dancers to execute devastating dance moves against their opponents. Players can choose their custom DJ avatar and pick from a variety of android dancers each with their own unique style and moves. The animation will focus heavily on motion captured dancers and will almost guarantee several guest actors being brought into FIEA’s studio to record their moves.
Art concepts shown during the pitch were very urban, graffiti style art with the DJs shown in several unique styles from raver to rap. Dancer androids embodied all sorts of styles including punk, hip-hop, and break dancers. The concept environment was set in an urban wasteland style almost junkyard where the DJs have used spare parts to construct their robotic dance crew. This project should give the artists a variety of styles to work with as well as opportunity for several different modeling challenges and character types.
Monday, January 26, 2009
Wednesday, January 21, 2009
Cohort 5 enters pre-production!
Early December FIEA’s 5th Cohort presented 10 game pitches to the students, faculty, staff and guests for consideration for the second semester pre-production projects. Of those 10 games, 4 were chosen to begin pre-production in January and teams were built around them each consisting of at least 2 artists and programmers and 3 producers. As of January 7th, pre-production has begun on what will become FIEA’s next batch of produced game titles. These projects have two more hurdles to overcome before they’re truly put into production, an early February checkpoint where 1-3 games will be dropped and teams reassigned, and the Spring Break final, where the final round of cuts will be made. The games that survive through the break will become the final projects that enter production and will become the focus of Cohort 5’s remaining spring semester and summer semester.
Each week the teams have to report in with their progress status in a pair of open meetings with a presentation to their fellow teams and professors. These status meetings allow the entire cohort to know what’s going on with each game’s pre-production and also lets our professors keep track of how teams are doing and which games are progressing to a viable point of production. Each week we will be covering the updates for the teams right here, so you can see the process of a game from concept to creation!
Drifters
Drifters is a multiplayer networked game for 2-8 players set in a subway station. A “drifter” is an ancient being of energy able to transfer between human hosts. Over time, the more powerful drifters have killed each other off, leaving only the 8 most powerful alive to this day. Your goal as a drifter is to use your ability to transfer into host bodies and defeat the other drifters by killing them when they are in a body too far from another host, rendering them unable to jump bodies and leaving them vulnerable for you to absorb their power.
Currently, the team has produced a working demo of the environment and populated it with a character as well as several AI. The body jumping mechanic is functional and they have some ambient sound in the environment as well. The animations have been captured with FIEA’s in-house motion capture studio and the main male model has been created, rigged, and a base clothing texture applied.
Artistically, the team has developed concept art for how the drifter “aura” will look on the host, as well as concepts for the subway station architecture. Over 30 animations were captured in their MoCap sessions including walk cycles, attack animations, and death states. The color palette for the environment was chosen and visual guides started.
The complete fiction has been fleshed out and a very detailed schedule laid out for the pre-production process. Pipelines have been started and a control scheme developed for both PC keyboard and Xbox 360 controller.
The team is using the SCRUM development method and finished their first sprint today. They are utilizing a post-sprint survey method to evaluate their progress and make changes to their workflow to make sure morale continues to be good and everyone on the team is working to the best of their ability.
Delirium
Delirium is a single-player steampunk horror game set in a Victorian-era insane asylum where you play as Edward, a patient with multiple personality disorder, who is attempting to escape. The various personalities the player adopts as his insanity fluctuates will allow Edward to solve various puzzles and clear obstacles as he progresses through the asylum halls. As his insanity increases, the environment will appear distorted and alter his progression.
Currently, the team presented an in-game demo of their custom shader created to saturate and desaturate the environment, as well as a demo of the object deformation. Camera deformation was also shown, using a dolly-zoom to create an elongated hallway effect. All effects shown were procedure based and able to be controlled within the code to react to the player interactions.
Artistically, the environmental style has been developed in accordance to a style of asylum common in the latter half of the 19th century called Kirkbride. The main character concepts have been sketched out with a gritty sort of visual style to add to the style of the gameplay. Level design is being worked on using paper prototypes.
The gameplay is focusing on more of a puzzle aspect rather than combat, as the use of the personalities is a key focus to the fiction and gameplay mechanic. The target is now to try and teach the player to avoid combat and focus more on the control of their sanity level to bring out certain personalities to pass various scenarios they may encounter.
For their development method, the team is also using SCRUM but using a “burn-down” chart method where they have very detailed graphs of individual progress of teams and their members that mirror the milestones in each sprint.
The Chain Game Project
Identified currently as “the chain game” this game project was created around the main mechanic: a team of players are tethered together with a chain and must overcome obstacles and navigate out of an area. Once the project was green-lit, the team was tasked with coming up with an appropriate fiction to justify the chaining and create an exciting and appropriate environment in which to place the scenario. The original setting was placed in a futuristic sci-fi world and was quickly denounced by the rest of the team as being one of the most stale genres to place such games in. After more brainstorming and concepting, the team settled on an afterlife world where a mortal has accidentally died and been sent to the afterlife in their physical body. An intern reaper is then assigned to be chained to them and help them escape the realm and back to the world of the living.
The art style is looking to be set at a semi-cartoonish, macabre sort of style with a dark yet still colorful palette. Environmentally, the underworld is looking to be a cave-like world with skeletal décor, but not leaning toward heaven or hell as a theme and keeping a more ambiguous, purgatory feel.
The team is the largest of the 4 due to the mechanic’s unique and advanced concept and they are already planning for expansion in the future with a “ramp-up document”. This document is sort of the FAQ manual for the project and will allow for new team members to quickly be brought up to speed on the project. The document, along with their wiki board, also serves as a good at-a-glance portal for current team members to refresh their knowledge of the game’s development.
One of the biggest challenges of the project is the chain physics, being worked on with PhysX. With the chain acting almost as a third player, it had to be dynamically reactive to the movement of the two players as well as the contact it has with anything else in the environment, feats that could potentially cause severe lag issues with frame rates and rendering. So far, the team has in-game a chain segment that reacts independently of an animation cycle and relies on code functionality for movement. As the development continues, they will be decreasing the length and object count to create a reduced but functional version for in-game use.
Resonance
“It’s like Guitar Hero with a gun” is one of the ways Resonance was described when originally pitched. Once in pre-production, the mechanic was altered slightly and the fiction strengthened to begin its early stages of development. Resonance is a first person shooter in which the player uses his weapon to harness sound waves in his environment to charge his gun and use as ammunition. The property of sound resonance is a big factor in the game and the environment will react dynamically with the force of sound waves acting upon certain objects such as glass. The main player’s assault on the Jericho Company is due to their kidnapping of his girlfriend and his hatred of the evil corporation is all he needs as motivation to bring the entire company to its knees.
Early weapon and character concepts showed the design of the sound absorbing gun and charge meters, as well as set the realistic style for the artwork. The environment is a large, corporate office building with a bit of an industrial/military presence.
Sound is obviously a large part of the game, not only as far as soundtrack and ambiance goes, but mainly with the actual combat and level navigation. One mechanic discussed was the enemy use of sound prevention fields that would absorb the sound in the room, rendering the player unable to fight and acting almost as a life system.
Each week the teams have to report in with their progress status in a pair of open meetings with a presentation to their fellow teams and professors. These status meetings allow the entire cohort to know what’s going on with each game’s pre-production and also lets our professors keep track of how teams are doing and which games are progressing to a viable point of production. Each week we will be covering the updates for the teams right here, so you can see the process of a game from concept to creation!
Drifters
Drifters is a multiplayer networked game for 2-8 players set in a subway station. A “drifter” is an ancient being of energy able to transfer between human hosts. Over time, the more powerful drifters have killed each other off, leaving only the 8 most powerful alive to this day. Your goal as a drifter is to use your ability to transfer into host bodies and defeat the other drifters by killing them when they are in a body too far from another host, rendering them unable to jump bodies and leaving them vulnerable for you to absorb their power.
Currently, the team has produced a working demo of the environment and populated it with a character as well as several AI. The body jumping mechanic is functional and they have some ambient sound in the environment as well. The animations have been captured with FIEA’s in-house motion capture studio and the main male model has been created, rigged, and a base clothing texture applied.
Artistically, the team has developed concept art for how the drifter “aura” will look on the host, as well as concepts for the subway station architecture. Over 30 animations were captured in their MoCap sessions including walk cycles, attack animations, and death states. The color palette for the environment was chosen and visual guides started.
The complete fiction has been fleshed out and a very detailed schedule laid out for the pre-production process. Pipelines have been started and a control scheme developed for both PC keyboard and Xbox 360 controller.
The team is using the SCRUM development method and finished their first sprint today. They are utilizing a post-sprint survey method to evaluate their progress and make changes to their workflow to make sure morale continues to be good and everyone on the team is working to the best of their ability.
Delirium
Delirium is a single-player steampunk horror game set in a Victorian-era insane asylum where you play as Edward, a patient with multiple personality disorder, who is attempting to escape. The various personalities the player adopts as his insanity fluctuates will allow Edward to solve various puzzles and clear obstacles as he progresses through the asylum halls. As his insanity increases, the environment will appear distorted and alter his progression.
Currently, the team presented an in-game demo of their custom shader created to saturate and desaturate the environment, as well as a demo of the object deformation. Camera deformation was also shown, using a dolly-zoom to create an elongated hallway effect. All effects shown were procedure based and able to be controlled within the code to react to the player interactions.
Artistically, the environmental style has been developed in accordance to a style of asylum common in the latter half of the 19th century called Kirkbride. The main character concepts have been sketched out with a gritty sort of visual style to add to the style of the gameplay. Level design is being worked on using paper prototypes.
The gameplay is focusing on more of a puzzle aspect rather than combat, as the use of the personalities is a key focus to the fiction and gameplay mechanic. The target is now to try and teach the player to avoid combat and focus more on the control of their sanity level to bring out certain personalities to pass various scenarios they may encounter.
For their development method, the team is also using SCRUM but using a “burn-down” chart method where they have very detailed graphs of individual progress of teams and their members that mirror the milestones in each sprint.
The Chain Game Project
Identified currently as “the chain game” this game project was created around the main mechanic: a team of players are tethered together with a chain and must overcome obstacles and navigate out of an area. Once the project was green-lit, the team was tasked with coming up with an appropriate fiction to justify the chaining and create an exciting and appropriate environment in which to place the scenario. The original setting was placed in a futuristic sci-fi world and was quickly denounced by the rest of the team as being one of the most stale genres to place such games in. After more brainstorming and concepting, the team settled on an afterlife world where a mortal has accidentally died and been sent to the afterlife in their physical body. An intern reaper is then assigned to be chained to them and help them escape the realm and back to the world of the living.
The art style is looking to be set at a semi-cartoonish, macabre sort of style with a dark yet still colorful palette. Environmentally, the underworld is looking to be a cave-like world with skeletal décor, but not leaning toward heaven or hell as a theme and keeping a more ambiguous, purgatory feel.
The team is the largest of the 4 due to the mechanic’s unique and advanced concept and they are already planning for expansion in the future with a “ramp-up document”. This document is sort of the FAQ manual for the project and will allow for new team members to quickly be brought up to speed on the project. The document, along with their wiki board, also serves as a good at-a-glance portal for current team members to refresh their knowledge of the game’s development.
One of the biggest challenges of the project is the chain physics, being worked on with PhysX. With the chain acting almost as a third player, it had to be dynamically reactive to the movement of the two players as well as the contact it has with anything else in the environment, feats that could potentially cause severe lag issues with frame rates and rendering. So far, the team has in-game a chain segment that reacts independently of an animation cycle and relies on code functionality for movement. As the development continues, they will be decreasing the length and object count to create a reduced but functional version for in-game use.
Resonance
“It’s like Guitar Hero with a gun” is one of the ways Resonance was described when originally pitched. Once in pre-production, the mechanic was altered slightly and the fiction strengthened to begin its early stages of development. Resonance is a first person shooter in which the player uses his weapon to harness sound waves in his environment to charge his gun and use as ammunition. The property of sound resonance is a big factor in the game and the environment will react dynamically with the force of sound waves acting upon certain objects such as glass. The main player’s assault on the Jericho Company is due to their kidnapping of his girlfriend and his hatred of the evil corporation is all he needs as motivation to bring the entire company to its knees.
Early weapon and character concepts showed the design of the sound absorbing gun and charge meters, as well as set the realistic style for the artwork. The environment is a large, corporate office building with a bit of an industrial/military presence.
Sound is obviously a large part of the game, not only as far as soundtrack and ambiance goes, but mainly with the actual combat and level navigation. One mechanic discussed was the enemy use of sound prevention fields that would absorb the sound in the room, rendering the player unable to fight and acting almost as a life system.
Thursday, January 8, 2009
Happy Holidays at FIEA!
While a lot of FIEA may seem like all work and no play (and far be that from the truth, most of the time our work IS play), that doesn't mean we don't take time to enjoy things like the holidays.
A FIEA tradition each cohort is privy to is the annual Halloween party at director Ben Noel's house. FIEA students past and present are invited to take part in this spooky celebration that features food, costume and pumpkin contests, and a live DJ. This year probably saw a turnout of around 60-80 people and will continue to grow with each new cohort. We may have to switch venues soon!
Thanksgiving was next on the agenda and while most FIEAns had the luxury of spending it with family, those who weren't able to gathered at Jon's house for a FIEA Feast! With a bring-your-own dish potluck dinner and plenty of video games to go around, it was a great way to spend the holiday and still pass out from a turkey coma.
The winter holidays lit up the main hall of the FIEA building with our very own Christmas tree:
Our final Rapid Prototype class of the semester was an awards ceremony complete with Santa Ron and his big bag of toys for the award winners. After watching the Cohort 4 internship presentations, those who opted in on the Secret Santa gift exchange gathered 'round the tree to see what kind of loot they got:
Of course, holidays aren't the only reason FIEA students gather to celebrate. Post-Prototype rounds are often celebrated by a trip downtown to unwind after a Monday final presentation. New TV show premiers, opening nights of movies, and game release parties are all common occurrences in the FIEA "entertainment" room. There's never an excuse needed to grab a few friends and hang out for a bit when you need a break from work, and there's no exception at FIEA!
A FIEA tradition each cohort is privy to is the annual Halloween party at director Ben Noel's house. FIEA students past and present are invited to take part in this spooky celebration that features food, costume and pumpkin contests, and a live DJ. This year probably saw a turnout of around 60-80 people and will continue to grow with each new cohort. We may have to switch venues soon!
Thanksgiving was next on the agenda and while most FIEAns had the luxury of spending it with family, those who weren't able to gathered at Jon's house for a FIEA Feast! With a bring-your-own dish potluck dinner and plenty of video games to go around, it was a great way to spend the holiday and still pass out from a turkey coma.
The winter holidays lit up the main hall of the FIEA building with our very own Christmas tree:
Our final Rapid Prototype class of the semester was an awards ceremony complete with Santa Ron and his big bag of toys for the award winners. After watching the Cohort 4 internship presentations, those who opted in on the Secret Santa gift exchange gathered 'round the tree to see what kind of loot they got:
Of course, holidays aren't the only reason FIEA students gather to celebrate. Post-Prototype rounds are often celebrated by a trip downtown to unwind after a Monday final presentation. New TV show premiers, opening nights of movies, and game release parties are all common occurrences in the FIEA "entertainment" room. There's never an excuse needed to grab a few friends and hang out for a bit when you need a break from work, and there's no exception at FIEA!
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