Tuesday, June 23, 2009

2 week countdown!

It's content insertion and polish time for both games! With 2 weeks left, there's no room left to add new features, it's time to really hammer down what's there, add the last minute shinys, and smooth out the wrinkles to make it into Alpha/Beta/Gold Master stages. Blogger's video system didn't like the several clips we had to share this week, so YouTube it is!


The first glaring change in the game was the addition of Lenore, the fourth and final Drifter. Once in game, the next large change was the huge increase in the variety of the NPC models. Through two gameplay sessions it was difficult to see a duplicated combination of parts, thanks to the magic of the Voltron rig and the design team's creations. Another addition to the gameplay was the drift radius highlight: when a player is near a driftable NPC, that NPC will have a faint blue glow on them...especially useful when you near a body that doesn't glow, giving it away that they inhabit a Drifter without having to switch to Drifter Vision.

Lenore, the 4th Drifter


After looking through the questionnaires from the focus group, listening to the Q&A tape, and starting to watch the player footage, a number of suggestions for improvement were brought to light. One of the major things the test players found was that attacking was a bit slow with the extended animation times, and when killed, the time to respawn in a body was also a bit too long. Also, when a player is killed while not in Drifter Vision, there's very little in the way of feedback to tell that has happened. The team has brought these issues up to the designers, who have formed a task force to adjust these parts of the game and eliminate the confusion and lag.

Some polish details in progress include baking in the lighting within Maya rather than the 80-some lights placed in scene designer. The artifacts are almost finished being re-rendered and placed in the museum, along with a few ambiance pieces such as benches and banners to add some color to the interior. The exhibit audio which used to project in a sphere from the podium, will now project in a conical 3D shape instead, originating from the new speaker boxes on the new podiums. The audio team is also working on adding a distortion filter to make the voice sound more speaker-like rather than the clear sound it has now.

All the models are being weight painted so the animations for their walks, tells, and environmental cues all flow more naturally. The attack/fail animations are also being retouched to help with the feedback timing and transitions between animation. While the Drifter models are complete, some slight detail work is being done to further push their individualism and iconic look, as well as the addition of particle effects unique to each Drifter. The finalization of the environment with the lighting and exhibit/prop placements will allow the cinematic team to get that in and render out the entire cinematic movie for inclusion in the game.

The website has also gotten a bunch of new content, including a new introduction video with the 4 updated Drifters and gameplay footage, art pieces, and of course, a mirror of these blog entries.

And now, your moment of Drifters play footage zen:





This week was a lot of gameplay tweaking and feature additions for the Sultans game. New art releases aren't scheduled until next week, but we managed to snag plenty of in-game footage to illustrate the new additions to gameplay and the user interfaces!

The team leads sat down and analyzed the polish backlog tasks, categorizing them by type and then by priority. This allowed the team to tackle the issues that were most critical and shift focus on the more elaborate and involved issues. Some of the small things that were adjusted were the look of the DJ notes, which now have colored flames spinning around them as they drop. The motion blur for pass the spotlight is now applied to the dancer:




And the end-game score sheet is now in place to show each crew how well they did:




Last week the transition from crew-to-crew was a sweeping camera pan, but that's no longer the case. The transition will now allow the current DJ to be shown at their table and then cuts to the current dancer performing a few of their moves before cutting over to the other side of the stage where the new DJ is shown at their table, then their dancer warms up and gameplay for the second crew begins.




Both environments has the textured and animated instances of 5 unique crowd models running during the game and the female dancer is now playable with her complete dance move, fail states, and idle animations all functional.




The menu now allows players to select a difficulty on their song by spinning the record that pops out of the sleeve at the top.




And, some full gameplay footage:


Drifters Team: BEARD-OFF! Week 4

There's been rumors of unnecessary trimming amongst the competitors...does anyone look specifically well-groomed to you?