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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
