"Vertical Slice" is a term we've been kicking around for quite a few weeks now and finally on Thursday, March 26th Cohort 5 was able to see just what that meant for Drifters and Sultans of Scratch. Development documents, printed and bound in a tangible format, were handed to Rick to become the plan of action for the next 4 months of game production. The game demos shown were a representative view of how the completed game will look, feel and play like...literally a 'slice' of the final game experience.
The teams had 6 deliverables: Gameplay Target, Visual Target, Risk Analysis, Pipelines, Design Document, and the game demo.
Sultans of Scratch
The SoS team described their gameplay target as "A rhythm game with non-discrete instructions for input; freedom to input random combo moves." Their visual target was stated as "urban, aggressive and stylized" - a statement they had stuck with since early on in the pre-production of their game. The pipelines are in place for art with a ramp-up document written to help document the export process and file structure. Design has the full design document, plus the programmers have been working on a tool to simplify adding action notes and developing combos, so the design team can make changes to song note data without having to consult the programming team on the actual code changes. The programmers are working heavily with XML and developing tools to streamline processes like the note additions.
As for risk analysis, the design team stated the difficulty of the freestyle system was an issue they were paying close attention to and their current safety designs to combat that was the face that combos are not required, any series of buttons will execute positive results on notes, and also a tutorial feature to allow players to practice learning the combos. Art's major risk was the cleanup time on the large number of animations the game will need for the various dance moves and idle states. Their solution was the addition of Neal, the cohort's resident expert on mocap, to their team as a full time animator. Programming's risk was the custom peripheral as their current build relies on keyboard and mouse controls to play right now and they are unable to test the peripheral controls until it is built. The team is working closely with the UCF Engineering department to establish an early milestone for a functional prototype to be created so it can be implemented and heavily tested. They are also creating a backup plan to control the DJ tables with an Xbox 360 controller in the event the peripheral cannot be realized within the next 4 months.
The demo shown on screen showed a basic menu structure that branched to several choices such as song and character selection, difficulty levels, and other features to be implemented. The environment was fully textured as was Mr. YinYang and they were both fully functional, with lighting and complete rigged animation. The dancer combo system shown was working with certain combinations of button presses on the numbers of notes would execute specific dance moves.
The DJ mechanic saw a final change before being committed to the design document: the turntables now have 4 distinct moves - rotation clockwise, counter clockwise, fader switch left, and fader switch right. The final plan for the game emphasizes the DJ/dancer relationship again with either player performing poorly causing missing notes, lower scores and such. Teamwork is heavily rewarded, though, with good performance creating more 3- and 4-note streams for the dancer to perform combos on, almost like a skill increase for awesome performances. Some of the visual awards being implemented include spotlight effects, the DJ being able to add special particle effects to the dancer, and crowd participation (the crowd shouting for dance moves that if executed will earn more combo points).
With one character and stage modeled the art team is working on additional characters and potential environments, as well as props and other visual treats to give the game the most authentic club feeling they can. The programmers were able to meet with the Engineering department recently and got to discuss the peripheral design and functionality. Design team is working on music tracks, note streams, and preparing for a focus group test for various visual and gameplay element analysis later on this month. A lot of positive movement coming along, and their momentum is still building!
Drifters
The Drifters gameplay target is described as a "stealth based hunt with tactical gameplay elements where the player is both the predator and the prey with enemy players hiding in plain sight." Their goal is to instill a feeling of paranoia and unpredictability, especially through the environmental lighting and audio. Their demographic is neither hardcore gamers nor casual ones, although they do focus on the online gamer as a target audience due to the networked nature of their game.
The visual target for the Drifters is to create iconic silhouettes with the detail of the drifter form coming from their particular back story. The drifter aura will be a striking, glowing contrast to the rest of the body and environment, centered around the head and upper body. The museum environment is based off the London Museum of Natural History with a very sophisticated, elegant style. The fictional setup is that it is opening night of the museum, leading the crowd present to be dressed in more formal attire and act in a controlled manner, making it easier to blend in with a tranquil crowd. This traditional presentation of a museum scenario populated with ethereal beings creates a blend of the expected with the paranormal to create a compelling story and environment for the game to take place. The goal with drifter vision is to create the feeling of viewing another plane of existence unique to the Drifters. When active, the screen de-saturates except for the drifter auras, creating a sharp contrast between the normal environment features and the glowing, vibrant drifter auras and abilities.
Some of the safety plans they've built into their development plan include extensive QA testing using multiple machine setups, system analysis, and the use of DevTrack for eventual bug reporting and fixes. The programming team set early deadlines for networking and have hit all their milestones so far, allowing extensive stress tests and implementation to take place now so their main mechanic can be preserved. The art team has taken care with their designs to keep their poly count low and load times minimal, considering the depth of detail on their environment as well as the scale of the space and crowd.
The demo shown was played with 4 separate laptops each running the game in a LAN setting, allowing 4 Drifters to intermingle with a crowd of about 30 NPCs. Load screens were implemented to allow for everything to set up and run smoothly during gameplay. When switching into drifter vision, all characters were shown to glow white with NPCs staying that way and fellow Drifters slowly starting to re-saturate with detail, eventually giving them away to the player. The environment was completely base textured with the final texturing at about 50% completion at that point of development.
The team stated that their basic game cycle was a process of scanning the environment and getting a lay of the land, drifting into a body, switching to drifter vision to get an ability, finding and stalking a target, using the ability to make a kill, drifting again, and blending back in to the crowd to start the cycle anew. Of course, the game is open enough to allow for any sort of player strategy to emerge, as some more aggressive players will want to make multiple kills with little drifting, while others will want to play a bit more stealthily and use their abilities to their maximum potential. Drifters is shaping up to be a very open-ended sandbox of play, with no clear advantage to playing strategically or spur of the moment, allowing for a great expansion of player types. Their progress has been steady and shows to continue to bigger and better things within the next months!
Monday, March 30, 2009
Friday, March 20, 2009
Pre-production week 9
This is it! The final week of pre-production before the vertical slice presentations are made and the teams transition into production. This week was spent revising, reviewing, analyzing, testing, and iterating on the major points of the games – there were major changes made, upgrades, and in some cases total character switches. The teams are confident in their choices and move on to get everything implemented for a playable demo that will capture the feel and playability of their title to the point where production can be greenlit and we’ll start to see some major assets coming down the line!
Drifters
When the new team members were integrated into their roles, they were given documentation on all aspects of the game, and one major point of confusion was the actual game mode, “capture the kill”. After much discussion, iterations and analysis, the mode has been adjusted to create a more simplified and easy to grasp concept. While the new game mode is still point-based depending on kills, making a kill will now earn you another ability slot while being killed will cause you to lose one (you always have one static slot). After the 10-minute play period, players enter a sudden death mode as the museum closes and the NPCs filter out, leaving only the Drifters behind to enter a melee battle for maximum points. This creates the chance for 2 potential winners – most kills during the match, and most kills overall. This simplified combat system, with 1-hit kills, lets the player focus more on stealth and strategy rather than just “running and gunning”.
To follow with their overhauled game mode, the drifter abilities were also looked at with a new light. The focus is to have the abilities be more of a lure or trapping mechanic, rather than a damage-style advantage. One ability they demonstrated was to have a Drifter able to place a normal-looking object within the environment that would have a radius of effect, trapping any other Drifters that entered it for a period of time and rendering them immobile. In normal vision, the object (a chair, banister post, etc.) would appear normal, but in Drifter Vision it would have a faint glow to it, hinting that it was a trap.
Drifter Vision is also undergoing scrutiny to make sure it is balanced and effective as a major mechanic of gameplay. The tells given off in non-Drifter Vision have been de-emphasized to allow for better stealth operation. Players in DV will be able to see kills being made by others as particle effects surrounding the killer, while in non-DV they’d just see one person lunging at another. The de-possession of a body is also a new mechanic being looked at. A Drifter who possesses a NPC who was recently possessed by another Drifter will begin showing tells more quickly than if they had possessed a more dormant NPC. While this hints to other Drifters that there’s now a Drifter in that body, it hints to the Drifter who just entered it that there is another Drifter nearby who just jumped bodies.
The programmers are working steadily toward their goal of networked play and are on a good track with message passing functional out of engine in another test bed and ready to be implemented in engine for further testing. Their secondary priority is activating the Drifter Vision during gameplay. The artists are working on making two full-body Drifter meshes for the Drifter Vision states, as well as more textures to create a more diverse crowd. The next mocap shoot is scheduled for today to create more walk cycles, idle animations, and individual quirks of various NPC classes, which will also help in the diversity of the crowd behavior. The current build of the game shows a variation of 3 walk cycles on various combinations of textured NPCs, all running full screen at 60FPS.
As the vertical slice comes together, so does the documentation for production. Once things make it into the end of pre-production, they are set into the production documentation that will become the team’s guide that drives the entirety of production. For next Thursday, the team will have their programming guide, final design document, and art style guides ready to be committed to the final gold master state of the game. The team has posted their 4-month calendar of production with milestones for various deliverables, alpha and beta stages, and other important dates so everything can be kept on track for the remainder of Spring semester and Summer!
Sultans of Scratch
The major change on the Sultan’s side was the analysis and redesign of the GUI. Several options were mocked up and tested with each version having its pros and cons. Some designs allowed for ease of note reading, but blocked the views of the dancer, while others were quite the opposite. The challenge was to find a compromise that allowed the notes to be easily seen while not cluttering things up too much and allowing the players to enjoy the visuals of the dancer and their moves as well as the environment. The team finally settled on a design where the turntables were at the bottom of the screen with the DJ notes streaming top to bottom and hitting on the records to be scratched. The dancer’s notes would stream up the middle with everything stopping at a mid-way point so the dancer could still be seen performing their moves. Camera movement with the GUI is also a point of note, as some of the dance moves get a little wild and need to be followed with the camera. While the turntables will stay anchored at the position on the bottom of the screen, the main visuals of the game will be followed by the camera.
Lots of the current art pieces have also gone through some changes. The current turntable design was also improved, adding more flair to the inside of the case including some nice flashy LEDs.
The new character concepts from last week were improved upon, one so much that he was not only given a full profile, but then deemed the new main character of the game, replacing Mr. Hat as the ‘mascot’ character.
“Mr. Ying-Yang” has now been modeled and rigged and even without normal mapping, UVs, or texturing, he performs much better than Mr. Hat did. His body structure is a bit closer to Nelson (the break dancer who provided the mocap data) and therefore works more fluidly with the animations. Mr. Hat’s less-realistic proportions caused deformity issues during some of the more complex moves, and therefore Mr. YY has replaced him for the vertical slice.
The team plans to have all their schedules and pipelines for the 3 teams in place for Thursday, as well as a finished development plan written in draft form by the 23rd and finalized then. They are also doing another mocap shoot to generate various behaviors and movements for the crowd that will be surrounding the dancer’s stage.
Drifters
When the new team members were integrated into their roles, they were given documentation on all aspects of the game, and one major point of confusion was the actual game mode, “capture the kill”. After much discussion, iterations and analysis, the mode has been adjusted to create a more simplified and easy to grasp concept. While the new game mode is still point-based depending on kills, making a kill will now earn you another ability slot while being killed will cause you to lose one (you always have one static slot). After the 10-minute play period, players enter a sudden death mode as the museum closes and the NPCs filter out, leaving only the Drifters behind to enter a melee battle for maximum points. This creates the chance for 2 potential winners – most kills during the match, and most kills overall. This simplified combat system, with 1-hit kills, lets the player focus more on stealth and strategy rather than just “running and gunning”.
To follow with their overhauled game mode, the drifter abilities were also looked at with a new light. The focus is to have the abilities be more of a lure or trapping mechanic, rather than a damage-style advantage. One ability they demonstrated was to have a Drifter able to place a normal-looking object within the environment that would have a radius of effect, trapping any other Drifters that entered it for a period of time and rendering them immobile. In normal vision, the object (a chair, banister post, etc.) would appear normal, but in Drifter Vision it would have a faint glow to it, hinting that it was a trap.
Drifter Vision is also undergoing scrutiny to make sure it is balanced and effective as a major mechanic of gameplay. The tells given off in non-Drifter Vision have been de-emphasized to allow for better stealth operation. Players in DV will be able to see kills being made by others as particle effects surrounding the killer, while in non-DV they’d just see one person lunging at another. The de-possession of a body is also a new mechanic being looked at. A Drifter who possesses a NPC who was recently possessed by another Drifter will begin showing tells more quickly than if they had possessed a more dormant NPC. While this hints to other Drifters that there’s now a Drifter in that body, it hints to the Drifter who just entered it that there is another Drifter nearby who just jumped bodies.
The programmers are working steadily toward their goal of networked play and are on a good track with message passing functional out of engine in another test bed and ready to be implemented in engine for further testing. Their secondary priority is activating the Drifter Vision during gameplay. The artists are working on making two full-body Drifter meshes for the Drifter Vision states, as well as more textures to create a more diverse crowd. The next mocap shoot is scheduled for today to create more walk cycles, idle animations, and individual quirks of various NPC classes, which will also help in the diversity of the crowd behavior. The current build of the game shows a variation of 3 walk cycles on various combinations of textured NPCs, all running full screen at 60FPS.
As the vertical slice comes together, so does the documentation for production. Once things make it into the end of pre-production, they are set into the production documentation that will become the team’s guide that drives the entirety of production. For next Thursday, the team will have their programming guide, final design document, and art style guides ready to be committed to the final gold master state of the game. The team has posted their 4-month calendar of production with milestones for various deliverables, alpha and beta stages, and other important dates so everything can be kept on track for the remainder of Spring semester and Summer!
The 4-month plan
Sultans of Scratch
The major change on the Sultan’s side was the analysis and redesign of the GUI. Several options were mocked up and tested with each version having its pros and cons. Some designs allowed for ease of note reading, but blocked the views of the dancer, while others were quite the opposite. The challenge was to find a compromise that allowed the notes to be easily seen while not cluttering things up too much and allowing the players to enjoy the visuals of the dancer and their moves as well as the environment. The team finally settled on a design where the turntables were at the bottom of the screen with the DJ notes streaming top to bottom and hitting on the records to be scratched. The dancer’s notes would stream up the middle with everything stopping at a mid-way point so the dancer could still be seen performing their moves. Camera movement with the GUI is also a point of note, as some of the dance moves get a little wild and need to be followed with the camera. While the turntables will stay anchored at the position on the bottom of the screen, the main visuals of the game will be followed by the camera.
Scene design concepts
The note streams in place
Lots of the current art pieces have also gone through some changes. The current turntable design was also improved, adding more flair to the inside of the case including some nice flashy LEDs.
The improved turntable design
The new character concepts from last week were improved upon, one so much that he was not only given a full profile, but then deemed the new main character of the game, replacing Mr. Hat as the ‘mascot’ character.
Some of the character designs, improved and detailed
Mr. Ying-Yang's full character profile
Mr. Ying-Yang's various action poses with graffiti sprays
“Mr. Ying-Yang” has now been modeled and rigged and even without normal mapping, UVs, or texturing, he performs much better than Mr. Hat did. His body structure is a bit closer to Nelson (the break dancer who provided the mocap data) and therefore works more fluidly with the animations. Mr. Hat’s less-realistic proportions caused deformity issues during some of the more complex moves, and therefore Mr. YY has replaced him for the vertical slice.
Mr. Ying-Yang's design sketch
The team plans to have all their schedules and pipelines for the 3 teams in place for Thursday, as well as a finished development plan written in draft form by the 23rd and finalized then. They are also doing another mocap shoot to generate various behaviors and movements for the crowd that will be surrounding the dancer’s stage.
Thursday, March 5, 2009
Pre-production week 8
This week was the first week for the teams to really crank out some great progress now that restructuring is complete and they’ve had time to get back in the groove with their newly expanded teams.
Drifters
Drifters status report this week began with heavy emphasis on the design process. The design team has worked on hammering down several aspects of the game to end the ambiguity of some mechanics and allow for solid development to take place on them. The first major plan laid out was the makeup of the crowd wandering the museum floor. They’ve set a solid number of 48 NPCs to be present, 20 in pairs and 28 walking alone, with each category broken down into the various classes. The classes themselves have been broken down into their features as well as their strengths/weaknesses.
The Drifters have also undergone a change, with 4 new types added to the original 4, each with their own inherent ability, plus a slot to pick up a secondary ability during gameplay. The Driver Vision mechanic has gone through a new iteration, with this version allowing players using it to see auras and Drifter-related things that normal human vision cannot and also is the only way to pick up a secondary ability. The possession mechanic has been tested and adjusted, altering the radius of where a Drifter can jump to as well as the time it takes to drift and the frequency at which the drift ability can be used.
Last week, the team was challenged to provide proof of concept for the claim that players could effectively hide within a crowd of NPC and not be detected by other human players. With this being one of the major components of gameplay strategy, it was critical that this claim was proven to be true. To show the skeptics that it can be done both in previously created games, and in their own game, the team presented two demos to the audience.
First up was an 8-player Bomberman match, where the human player set all of the players to AI except one that he controlled himself. Two play rounds later, no one in the audience was able to tell which color the human played as.
The real proof came within the Drifters game itself, where our professor, Ron Weaver, was given an Xbox 360 controller mapped to control the main screen camera. The first test was run with Anthony DiMento, the team’s design liaison, playing one model walking around the museum floor with several other models on AI paths. Ron couldn’t tell which one Anthony was, but just to prove that anyone could manage to do it, Anthony handed his controls off to a member of the Sultans team to see how well they could mimic the AI. In a room full of 30-some gamers, not one could correctly identify which model on screen was controlled by the human and which were AI. These two demos were more than enough to satisfy the criticism of the concept.
Artistic formats have been further defined and improved upon, with the 3-piece model construction mechanic in place and defined. One of the big challenges was to keep high quality models with a low polygon count so the engine wouldn’t drop the frame rate with all those assets on screen. The current model had an average of over 7000 polys, and has been redesigned to trim down to 6000. The team has also taken into account the combinations of the 3-piece system, and created thresholds for each piece so the combined total would never peak above their current average. A new female model was shown off, as well as an elderly head design for her body, and is in the process of being textured.
The mocap team has been hard at work adjusting the previously recorded animations and has already scheduled another shoot to provide unique animation sets for each class of NPC.
The environmental design team has been tasked with a new project of designing the exterior of the museum for use in the opening cinematic. The partial model was shown, along with some texturing, and set in a demo setting to show scale and design. Inside the museum, the textures are nearly finished and set pieces such as guard ropes and stands are being completed for placement by the design team.
For the end of pre-production, the vertical slice the team hopes to showcase will include 2 playable Drifters, networking for each player to be able to play on a separate machine, the finished museum interior, at least 5 character models walking within the museum, and the basic Drifter Vision implemented. The programming team currently boasts a “Do Not Disturb” sign as they vigorously work on the networking framework. Currently, they already have basic message passing working in a test game, and hope to port it into the Drifters game by the end of Spring Break.
Sultans of Scratch
After analyzing their current game mechanic, and gathering input from faculty, Dan O'Leary, and the whole team, Sultans has a new twist on an old standard. To allow for freestyle dancing, the dancer's note streams are beat-driven rather than button driven, allowing them to successfully connect with a note no matter which arrow they push. This means any 3-note combo can be performed during a 3-beat stream, allowing dancers to do any sort of move they want as they play. The notes/beats are also inter-dependent between the DJ and dancer. If the DJ fails to scratch on a beat, the dancer will fail to receive that note to dance to.
To continue with major updates, the DJ interface has been improved with each turntable divided into 3 colored parts where the user must switch the fader to connect with the correct revolving colors. This system was prototyped with actual turntables to determine feasibility and the results were good enough to make it in game. The falling stream of notes that's become a standard in dancing games has also been changed to a scrolling combo line that gives the dancer more opportunity to work out their combos.
Scoring was also improved and better defined, with the dancer gaining points by delivering their moves on time with the notes, as well as doing unique combos instead of using the same moves over and over. The more variety of combos, the more points are scored; points are gained on repeated combos but on a much lower scale. Rewards for the winning pair are being discussed with some ideas being the winner chooses the loser's costume (anything from Godzilla suits to nerd outfits) or the crowd ignoring the performers and going back to their own dancing. Bonuses for awesome performances are also being discussed, with the suggestion of an extra boss level in the works. The crowd is also a new addition to discussions, with them present on the very lower part of the screen, enjoying a good performance. But if the performers start doing poorly, the crowd will slowly advance up on the screen, blocking it from view as they resume their own dancing and ignore the performers, ultimately generating a game over due to the obscuring of the screen. A single-player is also in development with the player controlling either the DJ or dancer on one side, and the computer controlling the other side of their crew, plus the crew on the other side of the screen.
In the programming side, a user-interface flowchart was created to show the layout and connectivity of all the menus the player will have to interact with. The toon shader has been completed and implemented in game, and the flash prototype now reflects the new mechanics as well as allows for scoring incremintation.
Artistically there's been a lot of progress. Another mocap shoot is scheduled for March 20th for crowd animations, dance transitions, and errors. The formerly captured animations have gone through cleanups, separated into groups of moves, and have been set to a seamless transitional state for smooth chaining between moves and idle states. A vinyl shader is in the works for the turntables, as well as a reflective shader for the environment, which has basic textures and has lighting all in engine.
New characters are in the process of being concept sketched, thanks to the addition of their new concept artist, Donald.
The first character, named "Mr. Hat" has been modeled and is in the process of being textured and UV'd, while a turntable has also been modeled, animated, lit and textured.
The "gun case" turntable
Particle effects have come in the form of a graffiti-style spray generated from the dancers' feet as they perform combos - a visual representation of a successful move.
This week's report has seen perhaps the 2nd biggest amount of changes to the Sultans game since they moved from their original Resonance idea. However, each change has been researched and discussed, and already shows progress down their new path. Spring break is approaching, giving both teams a well deserved rest before they make their final push to end pre-production with a healthy looking vertical slice that will give the FIEA faculty and friends a chance to see what's in store for the end of summer when these two games make their Gold Master debut!
Drifters
Drifters status report this week began with heavy emphasis on the design process. The design team has worked on hammering down several aspects of the game to end the ambiguity of some mechanics and allow for solid development to take place on them. The first major plan laid out was the makeup of the crowd wandering the museum floor. They’ve set a solid number of 48 NPCs to be present, 20 in pairs and 28 walking alone, with each category broken down into the various classes. The classes themselves have been broken down into their features as well as their strengths/weaknesses.
The Drifters have also undergone a change, with 4 new types added to the original 4, each with their own inherent ability, plus a slot to pick up a secondary ability during gameplay. The Driver Vision mechanic has gone through a new iteration, with this version allowing players using it to see auras and Drifter-related things that normal human vision cannot and also is the only way to pick up a secondary ability. The possession mechanic has been tested and adjusted, altering the radius of where a Drifter can jump to as well as the time it takes to drift and the frequency at which the drift ability can be used.
Last week, the team was challenged to provide proof of concept for the claim that players could effectively hide within a crowd of NPC and not be detected by other human players. With this being one of the major components of gameplay strategy, it was critical that this claim was proven to be true. To show the skeptics that it can be done both in previously created games, and in their own game, the team presented two demos to the audience.
First up was an 8-player Bomberman match, where the human player set all of the players to AI except one that he controlled himself. Two play rounds later, no one in the audience was able to tell which color the human played as.
The real proof came within the Drifters game itself, where our professor, Ron Weaver, was given an Xbox 360 controller mapped to control the main screen camera. The first test was run with Anthony DiMento, the team’s design liaison, playing one model walking around the museum floor with several other models on AI paths. Ron couldn’t tell which one Anthony was, but just to prove that anyone could manage to do it, Anthony handed his controls off to a member of the Sultans team to see how well they could mimic the AI. In a room full of 30-some gamers, not one could correctly identify which model on screen was controlled by the human and which were AI. These two demos were more than enough to satisfy the criticism of the concept.
Artistic formats have been further defined and improved upon, with the 3-piece model construction mechanic in place and defined. One of the big challenges was to keep high quality models with a low polygon count so the engine wouldn’t drop the frame rate with all those assets on screen. The current model had an average of over 7000 polys, and has been redesigned to trim down to 6000. The team has also taken into account the combinations of the 3-piece system, and created thresholds for each piece so the combined total would never peak above their current average. A new female model was shown off, as well as an elderly head design for her body, and is in the process of being textured.
The mocap team has been hard at work adjusting the previously recorded animations and has already scheduled another shoot to provide unique animation sets for each class of NPC.
The environmental design team has been tasked with a new project of designing the exterior of the museum for use in the opening cinematic. The partial model was shown, along with some texturing, and set in a demo setting to show scale and design. Inside the museum, the textures are nearly finished and set pieces such as guard ropes and stands are being completed for placement by the design team.
For the end of pre-production, the vertical slice the team hopes to showcase will include 2 playable Drifters, networking for each player to be able to play on a separate machine, the finished museum interior, at least 5 character models walking within the museum, and the basic Drifter Vision implemented. The programming team currently boasts a “Do Not Disturb” sign as they vigorously work on the networking framework. Currently, they already have basic message passing working in a test game, and hope to port it into the Drifters game by the end of Spring Break.
"Stop! Programmers are not to be disturbed from 1:30 - 6:00 Mon-Fri. You can leave messages with their secretary & he will make sure they get it. Effective until: Networking is implemented."
Sultans of Scratch
After analyzing their current game mechanic, and gathering input from faculty, Dan O'Leary, and the whole team, Sultans has a new twist on an old standard. To allow for freestyle dancing, the dancer's note streams are beat-driven rather than button driven, allowing them to successfully connect with a note no matter which arrow they push. This means any 3-note combo can be performed during a 3-beat stream, allowing dancers to do any sort of move they want as they play. The notes/beats are also inter-dependent between the DJ and dancer. If the DJ fails to scratch on a beat, the dancer will fail to receive that note to dance to.
To continue with major updates, the DJ interface has been improved with each turntable divided into 3 colored parts where the user must switch the fader to connect with the correct revolving colors. This system was prototyped with actual turntables to determine feasibility and the results were good enough to make it in game. The falling stream of notes that's become a standard in dancing games has also been changed to a scrolling combo line that gives the dancer more opportunity to work out their combos.
Scoring was also improved and better defined, with the dancer gaining points by delivering their moves on time with the notes, as well as doing unique combos instead of using the same moves over and over. The more variety of combos, the more points are scored; points are gained on repeated combos but on a much lower scale. Rewards for the winning pair are being discussed with some ideas being the winner chooses the loser's costume (anything from Godzilla suits to nerd outfits) or the crowd ignoring the performers and going back to their own dancing. Bonuses for awesome performances are also being discussed, with the suggestion of an extra boss level in the works. The crowd is also a new addition to discussions, with them present on the very lower part of the screen, enjoying a good performance. But if the performers start doing poorly, the crowd will slowly advance up on the screen, blocking it from view as they resume their own dancing and ignore the performers, ultimately generating a game over due to the obscuring of the screen. A single-player is also in development with the player controlling either the DJ or dancer on one side, and the computer controlling the other side of their crew, plus the crew on the other side of the screen.
In the programming side, a user-interface flowchart was created to show the layout and connectivity of all the menus the player will have to interact with. The toon shader has been completed and implemented in game, and the flash prototype now reflects the new mechanics as well as allows for scoring incremintation.
Artistically there's been a lot of progress. Another mocap shoot is scheduled for March 20th for crowd animations, dance transitions, and errors. The formerly captured animations have gone through cleanups, separated into groups of moves, and have been set to a seamless transitional state for smooth chaining between moves and idle states. A vinyl shader is in the works for the turntables, as well as a reflective shader for the environment, which has basic textures and has lighting all in engine.
New characters are in the process of being concept sketched, thanks to the addition of their new concept artist, Donald.
The first character, named "Mr. Hat" has been modeled and is in the process of being textured and UV'd, while a turntable has also been modeled, animated, lit and textured.
The "gun case" turntable
The table with textures and lighting
Particle effects have come in the form of a graffiti-style spray generated from the dancers' feet as they perform combos - a visual representation of a successful move.
This week's report has seen perhaps the 2nd biggest amount of changes to the Sultans game since they moved from their original Resonance idea. However, each change has been researched and discussed, and already shows progress down their new path. Spring break is approaching, giving both teams a well deserved rest before they make their final push to end pre-production with a healthy looking vertical slice that will give the FIEA faculty and friends a chance to see what's in store for the end of summer when these two games make their Gold Master debut!
Wednesday, March 4, 2009
Pre-production week 7
Did we skip a week? Sort of...the "Day Of Reckoning" post was technically Week 6 of pre-production, but no status reports took place that week since teams were still being restructured. For week 7 it was also an odd week with the restructure, teams doubled in size, seating arrangements were shuffled around, and chaos eventually became calm. Read on for more on the new teams!
Drifters
Drifters ended up as the larger of the two teams by a slight margin, and the newly added programmers, artists and producers decided a whole new team structure was due. Art, Design and Programming each have their own team with a lead, and then the leads from those three teams, along with leads of other categories such as Quality Assurance and Sound Engineering, all form a central team. With the increase in team size making it impossible to relocate to either side of the Cohort 5 space, the Drifters team fought for their freedom and won the battle to move operations over to the previously barren Cohort 4 space. The larger workspace pods allow for 4-6 team members to sit together and work, creating a programming, art, and design pod, as well as a central pod, with the liaison producers sitting near their respective teams.
With these newly formed teams, the SCRUM meetings have also changed slightly. Each team now meets for their normal 15-minute daily SCRUM in their own assigned war room. After these meetings, the leads all go to the central SCRUM meeting to make sure all parts of the development are on the same page. The increase in manpower and streamlining of communication allows for the scheduled tasks to be completed in advance of previously projected dates. With critical components expected to be completed earlier than scheduled, the team is now open to more polish time or the inclusion of optional features that were marked as "if we have time" additions. Additional worktime comes from stretching the pre-production schedule to March 24th, meaning the development plan can be solidified more soundly and allowing the production phase to be started in a more directed and concrete state.
More designers means more design ideas, and the team is looking to integrate these new ideas into more features for later consideration. They're also creating a class system for the NPCs to diversify movement and interaction, as well as create distinct advantages and disadvantages for drifting to certain bodies. The new artists are able to up the speed of production of more models, including starting the work on female models. The model format has been broken into a 3-part system with head, torso, and legs created in separate pieces that can be switched around to create more combinations without making whole new models. The expanded programming team is now working on researching the networking technology needed to get the full multiplayer experience done, but in the meantime they've gotten pickup interaction on the Drifters picking up artifacts, so they're still progressing quite well in the midst of research and testing.
Sultans of Scratch
Just like Drifters, Sultans also spent the week with growing pains of their own. Relocation for them involved taking over the entire left side of the Cohort 5 space where the original team was located among Delirium and Chain Game. They're continuing the spiral development cycle and cycle 1 is scheduled to end March 5th. Their main goal is the flash prototype to be finalized and nail down their mechanics in a visual and tangible format. The 2nd cycle is over on March 26th where they hops to have complete mechanics solidified and the custom shader working in-engine.
One of the major ideas proposed was the idea of freestyle dancing, rather than scripted moves with arrow triggers as was previously shown. The new design team is working with this idea in terms of gameplay, while the art team is now working on environment designs that forgo the arrow fields for a different venue look. With all these new ideas coming in, a designated whiteboard in their cohort space has been put up for all outside suggestions for dancer styles, looks, and music ideas.
New assets have still been coming in this week in the midst of the restructure chaos. The latest mocap shoot gave rise to 81 new animations of dance moves and idle states from their breakdancer, Nelson. An animation model is being attached to the rig data to allow for better cleanup of the animations, which need to transition smoothly from one move to another to allow for a true freestyle dance experience. The original music tracks from the DJ have also come in with 3 of the 5 being the favorites of the team and making the cut as the definite tracks to be included.
Drifters
Drifters ended up as the larger of the two teams by a slight margin, and the newly added programmers, artists and producers decided a whole new team structure was due. Art, Design and Programming each have their own team with a lead, and then the leads from those three teams, along with leads of other categories such as Quality Assurance and Sound Engineering, all form a central team. With the increase in team size making it impossible to relocate to either side of the Cohort 5 space, the Drifters team fought for their freedom and won the battle to move operations over to the previously barren Cohort 4 space. The larger workspace pods allow for 4-6 team members to sit together and work, creating a programming, art, and design pod, as well as a central pod, with the liaison producers sitting near their respective teams.
With these newly formed teams, the SCRUM meetings have also changed slightly. Each team now meets for their normal 15-minute daily SCRUM in their own assigned war room. After these meetings, the leads all go to the central SCRUM meeting to make sure all parts of the development are on the same page. The increase in manpower and streamlining of communication allows for the scheduled tasks to be completed in advance of previously projected dates. With critical components expected to be completed earlier than scheduled, the team is now open to more polish time or the inclusion of optional features that were marked as "if we have time" additions. Additional worktime comes from stretching the pre-production schedule to March 24th, meaning the development plan can be solidified more soundly and allowing the production phase to be started in a more directed and concrete state.
More designers means more design ideas, and the team is looking to integrate these new ideas into more features for later consideration. They're also creating a class system for the NPCs to diversify movement and interaction, as well as create distinct advantages and disadvantages for drifting to certain bodies. The new artists are able to up the speed of production of more models, including starting the work on female models. The model format has been broken into a 3-part system with head, torso, and legs created in separate pieces that can be switched around to create more combinations without making whole new models. The expanded programming team is now working on researching the networking technology needed to get the full multiplayer experience done, but in the meantime they've gotten pickup interaction on the Drifters picking up artifacts, so they're still progressing quite well in the midst of research and testing.
Sultans of Scratch
Just like Drifters, Sultans also spent the week with growing pains of their own. Relocation for them involved taking over the entire left side of the Cohort 5 space where the original team was located among Delirium and Chain Game. They're continuing the spiral development cycle and cycle 1 is scheduled to end March 5th. Their main goal is the flash prototype to be finalized and nail down their mechanics in a visual and tangible format. The 2nd cycle is over on March 26th where they hops to have complete mechanics solidified and the custom shader working in-engine.
One of the major ideas proposed was the idea of freestyle dancing, rather than scripted moves with arrow triggers as was previously shown. The new design team is working with this idea in terms of gameplay, while the art team is now working on environment designs that forgo the arrow fields for a different venue look. With all these new ideas coming in, a designated whiteboard in their cohort space has been put up for all outside suggestions for dancer styles, looks, and music ideas.
New assets have still been coming in this week in the midst of the restructure chaos. The latest mocap shoot gave rise to 81 new animations of dance moves and idle states from their breakdancer, Nelson. An animation model is being attached to the rig data to allow for better cleanup of the animations, which need to transition smoothly from one move to another to allow for a true freestyle dance experience. The original music tracks from the DJ have also come in with 3 of the 5 being the favorites of the team and making the cut as the definite tracks to be included.
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