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.
