Birthdays!

Back when Cohort 5 was formed, our admissions advisor, Shawnna, asked for everyone's birthdays. Periodically we'd get an e-mail from her reminding everyone of a FIEAn's special day. Sometimes there'd be after-class parties, signs on desks, and other birthday shenanigans.

Today was our birthday herold's special day and Cohort 5 took her place as the bringer of birthday wishes with not one, but two cakes and a plate of cupcakes!

The birthday brigade assembles

Hugs all around!

The cakes were moved to the break room for all to share.

The birthday girl and her loot

Portal cake! The suggestion was made to sing "Still Alive" rather than the traditional "Happy Birthday" but vetoed.

Moving Day!

A state of equilibrium has been reached within the halls of the FIEA cohort area. The teams have been finalized and everyone has found their home for the remainder of the Cohort 5 era. With team restructuring also comes seating rearrangement and that has been the focus of the team leads for the past few days. With 49 FIEAns working in the front space, we were already nearly at full desk capacity. Unequal team size, coupled with the walkway separating the two desk areas, created the need for Cohort 5 to spill over in to the space formerly used by Cohort 4. After many days of seating charts and discussions with the FIEA faculty, the slightly larger Drifters team has gotten the green light to move their entire operation into the next room and set up shop.

This week started with a flurry of boxes, chairs, action figures, cardboard cutouts, Nerf weapons, mini-fridges, and equipment being shuffled from desk to desk. Chaos was organized, both with desk toys and team member "cells" created. Meanwhile, Sultans of Scratch also got to regroup and organize their newly expanded team into their respective "cells" as well.

At the start of Cohort 5's first semester, students were seated according to track - art, programming, production - so they could assist each other and get to know their fellow track mates better. When the teams were formed for pre-production, everyone moved to sit with their teams, but the track groups seemed to stick together still, although in smaller concentrations. Now, the number of teams has decreased but the partial separation of tracks is still in place. While this may seem counter-productive to isolate the tracks, each team has taken steps to designate a producer to act as a liaison between the art team and programming team and the production team, to keep everyone on the same page.

The Day of Reckoning

February 16th was a landmark date in Cohort 5’s history, full of surprise, triumph, and a bit of disappointment. Dan O’Leary of N-space was on deck to act as Executive Producer as our four game teams put forth their best effort to pitch the games they had been working on for the past 6 weeks. The FIEA Bridge was nearly at full capacity as the cohort, faculty, previous FIEAns and other special guests got to experience nearly 2 months’ worth of development on 4 unique projects.

Each team was allowed 25 minutes of presentation and question/answer time, during which they would have to convince Dan that their game was not only viable to create within the next 6 months, but that it was also worth the effort to keep it as a finished portfolio piece for FIEA and the cohort students as well. The teams showed amazing progress for the short amount of time they had been in pre-production, each one being able to show an in-game technical demo. Many unique prototyping styles were showcased, as well as different development and organizational methodologies. With no two games alike, Dan was faced with a difficult set of pros and cons to each one and had many options to weigh when considering his final decisions.

The presentations began at 1PM and concluded around 2:40, with most of the teams going out to unwind after a long weekend of preparation for this event. By 3:40, the call went out to all teams to return to The Bridge by 4:30 for the announcement. In that hour-long period, Dan met with the FIEA faculty and discussed each game individually, consulting the professors as to their knowledge of the teams’ capabilities and resources. Based upon what he saw in the presentations, as well as the input on the viability of each project as it related to the teams’ talents, the decisions were made.

One of the major surprises made at the announcement was the decision to cut two games, rather than the predicted single cut. The faculty decided that rather than allow one game to survive 3 more weeks and then get cut at Spring Break, they would rather see the energy spent on 2 games that would be seen through to the end of production. The next announcement was the official word as to which two games would see life through the end of the Summer 2009 semester…

Drifters & Sultans of Scratch

It is with a heavy heart that we bid farewell to the recently titled “Hell Bound” (formerly “The Chain Game Project”) and Delirium. But as they say, when one door shuts, another opens, and the teams of Drifters and SoS are now doubled in size with fresh talent, more resources, and the comfort of knowing they no longer have to fear being cut. The producers and programmers from Hell Bound and Delirium have been reorganized into Drifters and SoS, with the artists to be assigned soon. Teams were encouraged to take the rest of the day off and take advantage of a little team socialization time before starting a new chapter in their game development with a bigger team.

There are no status reports this week, as Monday’s presentations were sort of an early progress report, and the teams are encouraged to take this week to analyze their new structure and put their newly acquired talent to good use. Tuesday will now be Drifter’s status report, while Sultans of Scratch will be reporting on Thursday, each team getting more time to present if need be. Look forward to more exciting, in-depth news about these two games as the weeks go by. Don’t be surprised if next week the teams announce some major changes and additions to their original plans!

Pre-production week 5

The PhysX conundrum has been solved and the teams are over their first major hurdle with the Earth Engine! With less than a week left until Dan Day, the focus has been mainly on getting to their presentation milestone and having everything ready to show. Many of the teams have also begun showing off assets and ideas to other teams or groups, trying to get outside opinions on various parts of their game. Some focus groups, mock play tests, and experiments were run to get feedback and analysis on important issues such as gameplay mechanics and player behavior.

Also coming soon will be video! We will be releasing small segments of the status reports and footage from various team meetings, or just general work days around FIEA. Expect behind the scenes interviews, candid looks into the inner workings of a team, and general antics around the cohort space. We’ll try not to tie up too much of your time!

Drifters
Starting off the focus game trend, they held a Q&A session and got general opinions on how the environment looked and would be for gameplay, how the blending in of drifters and NPCs was working, the Drifter abilities, and how the feeling of paranoia was in the game so far and how it could be improved. They also did some prototype testing using current games such as Halo3, Counter-strike, and Age of Empires2. Within Halo3, they created a custom map designed to look like the museum of the Drifters game, complete with powerups that acted like some of the artifact abilities. They had 2-3 players as the Drifters and the other 5 players acting as NPCs with set walk paths. With Age of Empires, they had the ability to set actual AI and had 5 NPCs with 3 Drifter players trying to attack without giving away they were an actual player and get attacked themselves.

This week they’re working on expanding on level design based on the focus group input, with the potential to add hallways, basement areas, and corridors. To help with this, more paper prototypes are being developed and used for testing the new additions and layouts proposed. The Drifter designs are being reiterated upon based on the focus group findings, solidifying their fiction and justification a bit more as well.

In the art department, a second body type was modeled and textured to create another NPC variation in the game. This model is already rigged and working with the current animation set, plus a few new cycles to distinguish it from the original model. In game, the lighting has been fixed up and better shadowing is now visible. The drifter mesh is set on the main player and the drift function is working on the static NPCs. Texturing on the environment has started and collision now works on the major geometry as well as the characters.

To show off next Monday, the team is working on a staffing plan for potential team growth and how they’ll put their new talent to its best, most efficient use. They’re also getting in more collision, a working upstairs level, texturing the rest of the environment and more character textures for variation. Combat mechanics are also in the works, but more importantly is networking so multiple Drifter players can be shown in the environment and create the challenge of the game.

Delirium
The design team reanalyzed their plan and worked on best balancing the 3 personalities with their strengths and weaknesses in regards to the three main obstacles of the game: environment factors, enemies, and navigation of the level. Each personality now has a strength, a weakness, and a neutral reaction for each of those obstacles, making it sometimes necessary for the player to force switching personalities or wait for it to happen for them to pass a certain part of the level.

One of the more unique attempts at prototyping their game, the team developed a live action role play version of the game and tested it out on their unsuspecting team lead, John. He was put forth in the building with the lead designer playing the role of Mr. Buttons and telling him things such as personality switches, puzzle information, and AI alerts. To represent the different personalities, things like sunglasses and headphones were used to change the environment perception. Other students acted as nurses and doctors and various areas were set with puzzles that could only be overcome by a certain personality. Through playing, John said he definitely felt the frantic pace they were going for, as well as the help and hindrance each personality brought to the game.

The art progression has a fully modeled Mr. Buttons complete and normal mapped:




Edward now has 2 run and 2 idle animations, each set unique to a certain personality to show further distinction between the various stages. In engine they have a fully laid out level with the elevator in place. Collision is functional on the geometry and lighting works throughout the area. Two of the environment effects that were functional before porting into Earth are now back, the desaturation of the screen and the camera distortion zoom effect are now able to be toggled while playing in game. The elevator is in the process of being UV'd so texturing can begin.



Sultans of Scratch
The name conundrum has been solved and yes, “Sultans” is now plural. Other finalized decisions include the environment which has been set as a new-age club sort of venue with a stage and flashy lighting effects similar to the videos of last week. This choice was made to keep the urban, modern feel without distracting the player too much from the actual gameplay.

A sample of the new test venue and dancer cues

The new UI design keeps the bottom table with 2 turntables and the fader and introduces the familiar “dance arrows” behind the dancer avatar. The scratch mechanic for the DJ was previewed and works similar to how most rhythm games have a scrolling pattern they have to match as it hits a certain point. Sound waves scroll across the record and the DJ has to scratch up and down to follow them as they hit the edge. During play, they have the power to increase and decrease difficulty for the dancer. As the team works better together, the dancer can improve and move up in difficulty, earning more points and boosting their combo meter.

A flash prototype was shown with the dancer arrows functional with the DDR pad controller and the DJ scratching functional on the keyboard. The difficulty controls and combo multipliers were also shown and the score increase could be seen. An important change to the gameplay is that only one team will be playing on the screen at a time. Competing teams will switch off controls, so only one set of turntable and dancer has to be shown on screen at once, reducing the cramping of the previous layouts.

The visual style has been polished further with a new iteration of their main character concept fully colored. A toon shader is being used in game to add the non-realistic feel to the art and also help with the surreal club atmosphere. A mocap shoot is scheduled next week with Nelson, their previous breakdancer, coming back for another session with new moves choreographed.

On the musical front, custom tracks are being mastered specifically for the game. This negates the need for copyright research and licensing, as well as allows the team to be able to adjust the master tracks to correlate with improper scratch moves and such.

The team has also been polling various sources outside of FIEA such as dance clubs and DDR fans to find out their opinions on rhythm games, dance competitions and their character style. This information will be included in the Dan Day presentation to reflect their progress toward the popular trends and style of dance-offs.

The Chain Game
One of the major programming hurdles The Chain Game faced from day one was the actual chain itself. Getting an independently reactive chain in-game without having to control it link-by-link or breaking the engine was a serious task that the team has gotten one step closer to solving. This week was the debut of an in-engine chain stretched between the two players, not to mention the fact that they now have both players in-game and independently controlled with jumping. As of right now the chain is infinitely stretching and not really hindering the players, but it reacts to movement and doesn’t kill the framerate, so it’s definitely a step in the right direction.

More progress on the art front is Sophie’s finished texture with a better designed face and more dramatic contrast on her clothing. The environment textures are being updated to allow for it all to blend better and look more uniform. New jumping animations were created for both characters: Melvin jumps and runs a little bit at landing while Sophie jumps and stops. The difference was created to see which transition would work better. Sophie’s jump animation will be blended with the next animation (idle, run, walk, etc.) while Melvin’s will transfer into run and then blend into the next animation. Whichever looks best will be the standard for both characters.

To further explore some of the design facets of the game, a “rip-o-matic” video collage was created using clips from the movies Clueless and Legally Blonde to give the designers and artists a better idea of the Sophie character. One of the more unique design exploration exercises the team has been working on is the analysis of cooperative gameplay on a platformer-style game. To study this, two players were asked to play the first level of Mario 64 using only one controller. One player acted on the analog stick and Z button, moving Mario, while the other handled the right side buttons including attacking, jumping and camera control. At various times, the players switched places and resumed control of the other side. Most of the time each side did their own thing and very little communication was done between the two players, almost as if it were supposed to be intuitive. These observations and continued tests will help shape how the two characters react and certain moves work.

Pre-production week 4

With a month of pre-production behind them, FIEA’s four games are starting to take a more solid shape and really show their true colors. The Earth engine has proven to be a bit of a burden to the teams with the task of porting the previous assets into the engine. Another big setback only recently fixed was the integration of PhysX into the engine as two of the games are heavily dependent on it.

Delirium
With a dedicated scheduler on their team, Delirium is working on looking at their past three weeks and getting a better grasp on their team capabilities to better project their timelines and milestones for their next sprint. Sprint three is mid-way and as of now, it looks like it’s going to end even closer to their target goals as the previous two sprints. One of the new styles of deliverable management has been to tailor the workloads and tasks specifically to certain team members, playing to their strengths and abilities to get the best possible outcome at the end of the sprint.

For the first cut, their target goals have been set to having a dynamically reactive environment that plays with the presence of 2 distinct personalities that Edward has – the Psycho and the Schizo. These personalities will be functional with 2 walk and idle states, environmental effects unique to each personality, and unique soundscapes. The character Mr. Buttons will also be completed and attached to Edward, and the previously shown Elevator will be functional as an end transition to the level. The team has also been developing a flash prototype so they can better illustrate level design quickly and efficiently while still getting the game feel across. A rip-o-matic video presentation will be finished, as well as a demo of their scene designer process with lighting and collision.

The personalities have been revised to the final three types: the Psycho (formerly Feral), the Schizo, and the OCD. The former two will be present for Dan Day, with the third added soon after for the final game. The Psycho is a berserker-style combatant, unpredictable and vicious, who sees the world in a desaturated way, tinted slightly red. The environment will dynamically adjust to his presence within Edward’s mind and cause the surroundings to blur on anything inanimate, but keep in focus on enemies for better attacking capabilities. The Schizo is the paranoid personality that thinks everything is working against him. The environmental reflection of this disorder will be making everything appear more sinister such as longer shadows, darker lighting. One of the unique new ideas concepted for the paranoia is the ambient sounds of the hospital being depicted as text on screen. The OCD personality is obsessive over collecting objects, numbers, and patterns, and will therefore be focused on these for his environmental changes. Objects that are collectable/usable will be highlighted brighter within the screen and anything intricate or patterned will cause a sort of tunnel vision and distract the personality, causing Edward’s walking to slow. The environment will also appear dirtier to play up the compulsive cleanliness common with OCD, sometimes causing the player to not be able to go through certain doors for fear of germs.

Artistically, the new Mr. Buttons model is nearing completion to come closer to the new concept sketches of a ragged and restitched stuffed toy.



Edward’s finalized model now has a preliminary Mr. Buttons attached to his shoulder, creating a very iconic silhouette.



New concepts for the base level hallway are out with a “sane mode” style and the team is working on creating copies for each of the personality-unique views as well.



New animation demos this week included the steam-powered door opening and the elevator raising and lowering, both with sound effects added.

Programmatically, the level design is being done modular so producers/designers can easily create levels without having to do much coding. A preliminary module test shown in-engine had a movable avatar with a lit and shadowed hallway and functional steam doors, plus the opening menu screen was functional with sound and music.
For the end of their current sprint, the team is looking to complete their flash prototype, finalize the personalities and their nuances, work on further integration into the Earth engine, and develop a shader pipeline for the eventual environmental shaders they’ll be working with.

Drifters
Starting off their fourth sprint, the Drifters team is focusing on the name of the game – The Drifters. While past reports have mentioned more work on environments, abilities, and fiction, the Drifter characters themselves have taken a backseat to all that, and starting with this sprint that’s about to change. Some other areas of focus for their current sprint are on the primary game mode, sound, animation frame rate and polygon efficiency, and creating that overall “paranoid” feeling.
In preparation for a fuller demo build, the team has been working on modular design for their level building, as well as preparing a tool to create bounding boxes automatically on objects when collision detection is implemented. More behind the scenes work includes a review of their past 3 sprints to create a solid working plan for display on Dan Day and the creation of a more individualized task list for each area, which is viewable now on their wiki page.

New developments in the game mode have changed it from a “hunt and kill” to a “capture the kill” game, similar to Capture the Flag. Drifters will make a kill and then have to return to a central location, an ornate throne in the upper middle of the map, to receive credit for that kill. Multiple kills can be made and turned in at once, but any kills not turned in will be forfeit if the Drifter is killed before returning to the throne. The artifacts will represent the Drifters’ lives and also grant their drifting abilities. While testing this new game mode, the paper prototype of the map worked very well in helping to see how gameplay would flow.

Animations are being cleaned up and tested within the game, with 2 absorb, 3 idle, 1 run, 2 unposessed, and 3 walk animations currently captured. The team is working on a second mocap shoot for more varied body type movements (female, heavy-set, gaunt, short, etc.). The in-game environment has increased in detail and intricacy and the NPCs in the engine now have varied idle and walk animations. The Drifter aura is now visible in-engine as well and some particle effects are being tested. During these tests, frame rates and polygon counts have been a serious issue that the team is working to combat. The high level of detail on the environment coupled with multiple moving characters leads to a heavy frame rate decrease and issues with shadow smoothness, things that the team is currently working on.

Chain Game Project
The team met all their milestones for the end of their third sprint except getting jumping to work in-game and developing the level progression. The delay may stem from the focus of last week’s work having shifted to a more analytical look at the game, rather than pushing development further. Time was spent with focus group testing, mainly of the female FIEAns, to try and better define the female character’s personality and look. Six of the female FIEA residents participated in an hour and a half long panel where they were shown concept art, character profiles, model renders and animation tests of the two characters and asked to give feedback. The results were mostly positive, with a lot of exposition on the female character and how she can best be improved. All of the research and Q&A sessions resulted in the newly named “Sophie” character – a spoiled, slightly ditzy, sometimes offensive daddy’s girl. The level design has also been expanded to look beyond the first level “carnival entrance/promenade” with ideas such as a twisted petting zoo or a frozen hell.

Updates to the art include updated textures for Sophie and a finalized texture for Melvin, with Sophie’s texture being ‘accessorized’ further. The first secondary character, codenamed “Mr. Tall” has been modeled and base textured while the environment has a complete texture set on it. Both main characters have new run/walk animations, added an idle animation, and they both have “strut” walks for when trying to appear confident. Sophie has a freak out animation while Melvin has a trip animation.


Sophie's new model and preliminary texture


"Mr. Tall" modeled and textured

The demo shown in engine showed Sophie interacting with the environment and some basic collision detection. Music was working along with lighting, and she could transition from an idle state into walk or run and switch between the two.
Next up for the team is a development plan from the designers for the post-cut timeline, along with sound and environment puzzle development. Artists are working on modeling props to populate the levels, finishing Sophie’s texture to a final state and researching particle effects. The animation team is working on the jump animation as well as getting a Maya render of the punt kick move to show on the 16th, and a walk cycle for Mr. Tall. Last but not least, the programmers will get the jumping functional with the new animation as well as a player manager to get two players in at once. Also on their plate is the all important chain having PhysX applied to it and getting it functional in the engine.





The new environment model, complete with textures


Sultan(s) of Scratch
A lot of new scheduling and tasking changes went on this week with a new animation schedule put forth with the help of Central to get a set number of animations turned out per milestone. Because SoS relies heavily on a huge number of dance animations, they’ve worked on prioritizing getting those handled quickly and efficiently. A new mocap shoot has been scheduled with the previous dancer and an animation tree created to show the flow between various difficulty levels of dance moves. The team has also adopted a new task and milestone system more individually geared toward each team member to increase productivity and better tailor workloads.

The main UI screen has been changed to be a single DJ table with two turntables and a fader between.



Each DJ player will scratch on the table, and the fader will be used to switch between players – giving a more authentic feel and saving space on the screen. The dancer’s UI is being developed as well with the team trying to stay away from the common “DDR Notes” style of input as seen in most music games.

The art style has been better defined with the debate settled on the exaggeration of proportions to have a semi-realistic but still slightly cartoonish look to the characters. Two of the characters were redrawn and colored to show concepts of the colors and style with each character having his or her own color palette unique to them.




Variety is a big factor, with many styles and nationalities to be represented through the characters.




Environment sketches have shown various locations for the dance-offs including clubs, warehouses, subway stations, and outdoor stages.

The team also showed off a silhouette animation test with two character models, one with normal proportions and the other with slightly exaggerated features such as the hat, hands and feet.

The comparison was used to demonstrate the difference in styles and show why they decided it was best to go with exaggerations.

Within engine, the team had the exaggerated model silhouette dancing with a player on a DDR pad entering button combos to execute different dance moves. Another player had a 360 controller to do scratches on the DJ system that could fast forward and rewind the playing music. While these controllers are fine for temporary demos, the team is still actively working on custom peripherals. They met with Dr. LaViola from the UCF Engineering department and got ideas for prototyping as well as putting word out to engineering graduate students who may lend a hand in developing these as an independent study, or senior students looking for summer work.

Pre-production week 3

February 16th has been dubbed “Dan Day” or “D-day” for the teams, as they’ve got about 3 weeks left to prepare their games to present to Dan O’Leary of N-Space. This week saw a lot of shifting of schedules and milestones, as well as the creation of feature lists that each team is pushing to have ready to show by the presentation date.

The FIEA-born “Earth Engine” was released on Monday to the teams – the product of our Central Team as well as all the programmers. Earth was developed using Gamebryo and is forming the foundation from which all the projects will be built. This move was done to allow teams to easily reform when games are cut so programmers don’t have to switch gears to a new engine. Expect more big things in the coming week as our teams get their work ported into Earth!

Drifters
With the announcement of the first game cut date, the Drifters team has rearranged their milestones and schedule to create a target build to show during their presentation. The team hopes to have their environment textured and the ambient lighting functional, as well as the NPC diversity apparent. They expect to have their Drifters in-game with at least stealth skills and a basic attack functional to show the gameplay mechanics. A new programmer was also added to the team, so the backlog documents were updated to reflect this extra help.

The environment has been updated with some more variation in the components to make it a bit easier to navigate. A new entryway was modeled to allow for ambient lighting to play a bit more into the atmosphere. The 3D sound has been implemented and the sound team is working with various new background tracks to create the paranoia feel they’re looking for. Dialogue scripting has also started.

The fiction is nearly complete, although the team was wary of discussing too much until it was solidified. They did mention that each artifact on display in the museum would tie to a certain Drifter somehow and the story would be revealed to the player via “audio tour” mechanics – a NPC may be equipped with a museum audio tour device that when a Drifter entered their body, they would pass an exhibit artifact and be able to hear the story behind it. Each artifact will be tied to an appropriate Drifter ability that can be acquired, for example a sword would be tied to a combat-related ability while a musical instrument would be tied to some kind of audio-related ability. One ability is already available in-game, the skip-drift ability which allows a Drifter to appear to drift into the nearest body, but actually skip one person over and throw off any pursuers.


A concept of the Drifter aura

The Drifters themselves are being further developed with 4 personalities already shown, each with a unique Drifter form, name, stats and play style. The character model has been clothed and basic textured with a few different walk cycles inserted for variation in NPC behavior. The art team is working on making the character models modular so the torsos and legs can be interchangeable to allow for several more combinations rather than having to create whole models for each variation.
Currently the team’s main focus is getting their work ported into Earth, starting with the AI pathfinding. Once everything they’ve done is in Earth and functional, they’ll be working toward their “Dan Day” milestones and preparing their presentation.


The main male model with various clothing textures

Delirium
Delirium’s 2nd sprint ended this week and the 3rd is beginning with a new team member added to help control scheduling and process all the burn-down charts and timeframe analysis. Their milestones were better defined with a goal of 2 functional personalities and a fully populated level design ready to roll at the Spring Break cutoff.

During reflection on their two main game mechanics – changing personalities and dynamically altered environments – they realized that the two were too distanced from each other and needed to be combined for more effective gameplay. Their solution was to have the environment alter based upon which personality was dominant at the time, such as the Feral personality only seeing in black and white. Another way the team has decided to tie the personality mechanic to the gameplay was in the creation of the puzzles within the levels. Players are rewarded for not giving in to the personality’s condition completely and only using it to the point of necessity. For example, a player with the OCD trait dominant comes in a room with several objects to collect, but only needs a certain number, if they collect too many it allows the nurses time to attack, but if they collect only the amount needed they can escape in time.

While developing the various conditions of the personalities, several reference movies were brought up to analyze the common views the media imposes upon the mental disorders. Another tool the team is using to develop much of their level design is a flash-based level creator. This grid-style creator was originally developed for a semester 1 project, Scridoodle, and has been reconfigured to help design levels and object placement for Delirium.

The team was able to show off more concept art of the characters, especially of the designs of the nurse and doctor enemies, as well as more versions of Edward’s personalities and a new concept design for Mr. Buttons. Edward’s original design has been fully modeled and textured and a new model of the steampunk elevators that lead from level to level has also been developed.


The elevator model


Edward's model


Mr. Buttons' new concept art

Their first foray into the Earth engine was a demo of the 3D sound. A base room with several corridors and sound trigger objects was shown where as the camera approached the trigger objects, the sounds they were tied to would get louder, and then fade as the camera backed off. This feature will be critical in creating the mood of the game, as well as increasing the realism of Edward’s disorders.

Sultan of Scratch
Our first real glimpse into the newly started “Sultan of Scratch” game came this week with “more progress in a week than we would have seen for 3 weeks on the prior project” according to our Production professor, Rick Hall. The team is using the Spiral development method, rather than any version of SCRUM like the other teams have been doing. Their reasoning is that SCRUM creates features as milestones, while Spiral works toward one large goal at all times.

Their goal with this game is to create a cooperative team-style party game with elements of rhythm/dancing/music games mixed with turn based battle mechanics. Up to 4 players will compete as two “dance crews” with a DJ and a dancer on each team that go back and forth in a dance-off style battle. The DJ controls the music and performs scratches with “scratch nodes” that can create extra challenges while the dancer performs dance moves along with the beat of the music to pull off combo moves for extra points. The live play of the game makes for User Dynamically Driven Difficulty – a DJ can only be as skilled as their dancer and vice-versa. The better a crew works together, the better they are as players.

There are many unique features this team is working with, including a heavy dependence on the graphic user interface. A few early screen concepts are toying with the placement of the DJ turntables, the dancer avatars, and other necessary screen elements. Another unique issue the team is working on is the custom peripherals they wish to include in the game experience. For the dancer, a dance pad made popular with the DDR games is their goal, while the DJ controller would be a custom peripheral complete with an actual turntable-style analog control. A meeting with the UCF Engineering department has been scheduled to discuss prototyping and development of such a controller.


Early concept of the UI

The original pitch of this game included mocap data from a local dance crew and has been reused for the pre-production phase with another mocap shoot scheduled with the dancers again. Their in-Earth tech demo shown this week was able to use this early dance data along with turntable graphic prototypes to do some basic switches between dance moves.


A screenshot of their in-Earth demo

Their art style is in development with comparisons to Jet Set Radio using stylized character designs, a bit exaggerated in proportion but still semi-realistic. The use of bright, flashy colors to compliment the dance scene feel along with the art style has led to talks of creating a custom shader. This shader would have distant body parts have a thinner outline while parts closer to the camera would have a thicker line, creating a bolder feel to the character art.

As music and sound are going to play a big part in the game, original music tracks and artists are being researched and worked on early in production. The sound/scratch system is going to be a big part of their game and early handling of its control is crucial to development.

Goals for “Dan Day” include a finalized art style to produce a fully modeled, rigged and textured main character with the current mocap data animated. Controller integration, at least with the DDR pad and a 360 controller, will be functional and a base environment modeled and functional in game.

The Chain Game Project
Sprint three is in progress and the team has focused this week on narrowing down their target goals for the “Dan Day” presentation. The chain ability of “punt kick” has been decided as the major chain mechanism for their in-game presentation – one character will punt the other to an otherwise unreachable area and then use the chain to pull the kicker over with them. Since this ability has been decided, the environment design now plays to this capability to create a challenging yet still traversable level.

In accordance to this progress, the environment has been shown as completely modeled out and texturing has started. The theme park design is embodied with the characters first seeing the “hell” that is the stereotype of current fiction – fire, brimstone and a cave-like appearance. After going through the “employees only” doorway, they experience the real environment, which is a backstage area complete with scaffolding, secret entrances, and other things typical of a theme park backstage area.



Concept designs for the front and back views of Hell

The two characters have been better defined with personality traits, near finalized visual designs, some basic animations and models, and partial texturing. The afterlife intern, codenamed “Melvin”, is an underappreciated, short reaper intern who’s the constant target of ridicule from his co-workers. He tries to succeed in his job, but more often than not finds failure in his attempts to shine. This failure and ridicule leads him to bottle up his emotions and let them explode at once, but even that doesn’t seem to show much impact on his peers. “The Girl” is spoiled, impatient and disinterested, very self-centered and controlling. There’s a mutual understanding between the two that Melvin has to get The Girl out of hell safely, and she knows he’s bound to that duty, but she also respects that he’s the only thing keeping her safe from being treated like the other souls.



Original sketches of "Melvin" and "The Girl"

With the character personalities better worked out, the concept sketches could be turned into reality. Melvin has a completely modeled, textured and rigged model up and running with a run/walk/stop cycle almost completely functional. The Girl has a basic model done that has a run/walk/stop cycle as well, but not as complete as Melvin.

The goals for their “Dan Day” presentation include having both characters fully modeled and functional with the chain connecting them and basic movement applied to it. They’ll be able to run around and perform the punt kick in a textured environment populated with a few of the secondary characters that were also concepted out. The design team is working on asset lists for the extra items, sounds and other assets needed to complete this first level.

One of the unique issues this team has started working on fixing is their lack of female input for The Girl character. With the only completely male team, they found they had a lack of female perspective for a game that had a predominant female lead. Therefore, the team set up a focus group comprised of all the female FIEAns and ran through their concept sketches, models, and character profiles for the main characters and took note of what we (the girls) had to say about matters. They’re reviewing what they learned from the meeting to better work on The Girl and make sure her personality fits with her story, her visual look is on target with her personality, and everything works together to make the character playable.