FIEA Blog

Fluid Simulation for Video Games, part 3

2009-10-07T20:32:00.002-04:00

Third in a series (of 7) became available this week:

http://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/fluid-simulation-for-video-games-part-3/

Final Game Presentation Videos

2009-08-24T10:45:00.003-04:00

Whew! It's been a busy 3 weeks for FIEA between the celebration of 2 more amazing games to add to our repertoire, SIGGRAPH, and then our well-deserved 2-week semester break.

The final presentations went extremely well - The Bridge was packed well beyond capacity (don't tell the fire marshal!) with every chair filled and the stairs crowded with standing guests. Members of the media, distinguished representatives from local game companies, and friends and family of FIEA were all there to witness the first full presentation of Drifters and Sultans of Scratch.

Drifters began the event with a display of their "Devices of Death" museum exhibits on the front stage. Team lead Steve Durst kicked things off with the opening cinematic and then launched into an explanation of the game and an overview of their game's life, from the original pitched concept to surviving the cut and all the way through production. After the crowd was well acquainted with the world of Drifters, the three monitors on the stage flickered to life as a 4-way match went live on the big screen. After two rounds, Steve paused to allow the credits to roll and began the question and answer portion. A standing ovation closed out the presentation and Sultans of Scratch began to set the stage for their turn.

After a brief intermission, the neon lights and hip-hop sounds of the Sultans opening cinematic brought the crowd into the world of the DJ dance battle game. The team came out in a flash of blue lights sporting custom basketball jerseys with the SoS logo on the front and their team nickname on the back. Team lead Tom Galdi took the stage to present the life and times of the Sultans of Scratch game, touching on the original switch of IPs from Resonance to SoS, surviving the cut, and their glory of being the first DJ game completed before "DJ Hero" or "Scratch: The Ultimate DJ" could hit the retail shelves. Once the crowd was pumped, the dance pads and turntables were broken out and the dance-off began! When the teams were thoroughly tired out, Tom let them take a break for the question and answer session. Another standing ovation for the SoS team and then closing remarks by FIEA faculty ended the Cohort 5 presentations with a final round of applause for all the amazing work.

If these words weren't enough, check out the videos!

Drifters:
Part 1 - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l5q7E-L0Cig
Part 2 - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ycfoe02j5n4
Part 3 - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kjqPFHxmZYc
Part 4 - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NfooQ5pRbeY

Sultans of Scratch:

Part 1 - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i4eL5cIw20s
Part 2 - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=irqsXmGqlwo
Part 3 - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LuSSFM9LmNo
Part 4 - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OZ9RRGWtlnw
Part 5 - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZvB-usaiXo4

Fluid Simulation for Video Games, part 2: Fluid Simulation Techniques

2009-08-02T21:33:00.003-04:00

The second in a series of articles I wrote for Intel:

http://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/fluid-simulation-for-video-games-part-2/

...and related videos:

Atomic vortex ring
Cannonball through smoke
Dragons, bunnies and magic

Make sure to watch them in HD!

The third article will include the source code for a complete real-time fluid simulation with two-way fluid-body interaction.

Future articles will refine and speed up that simulation.

Teaser Trailers!

2009-07-29T16:03:00.012-04:00

In less than 6 hours the Final Presentations will take place. Can't wait? Can't make it? Whet your appetite for Drifters and Sultans of Scratch with these shiny game trailers!

Final Game Presentation Event

2009-07-27T10:53:00.003-04:00

With the Siggraph materials completed and shipped off to the bayou, the teams are focused back on their last bits of polish for the big event!

After months of reading about the incredible development of these two unique games, FIEA is proud to announce the first complete look at the Cohort 5 games. This is your chance to get a first-hand look at the stealth multiplayer game, Drifters, and the hip-hop dance crew and DJ game, Sultans of Scratch.

Space is limited, so to RSVP please send an e-mail to rsvp@fiea.ucf.edu or call 407-823-2121 for more information.

The presentations will take place from 4 - 6PM at the Center for Emerging Media at 500 W. Livingston Street in downtown Orlando. For directions, click here.

Of course, if you can't make it in person, we'll have a full report complete with video highlights right here on the blog!

Fluid Simulation for Video Games, part 1: Introduction to Fluid Dynamics

2009-07-16T12:23:00.007-04:00

The first in a series of articles I wrote for Intel:

http://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/fluid-simulation-for-video-games-part-1/

...and some delicious videos:

Atomic vortex ring
Cannonball through smoke
Dragons, bunnies and magic

Make sure to watch them in HD!

FIEA's a hot spot for visitors this week!

2009-07-14T12:57:00.004-04:00

The cohort is in a constant state of flux right now as the games are being polished and bugs are being fixed, but more importantly a slew of special guests have been making their way through the FIEA halls. Just this week representatives from 360ed, Bethesda Softworks, Monster Media, and EA Tiburon are coming through for interviews with 2K Boston also attending virtually through webcam for their interviews. Added to that is the normal facility tours that take place ever so often for new and prospective students, and also a very prestigious visit from the Florida Governor, Charlie Crist...FIEA is certainly the place to be this week!

While the companies attending the events this week are mainly interested in personal interviews with our students, they've also been touring around the cohort space and taking place in game demos of Drifters and Sultans of Scratch. This not only lets them see the games that their interviewees are touting on their resume, but also shows them what kind of amazing work our program churns out in just a few months!

During his visit to our area, Governor Crist visited the FIEA campus as well as EA Tiburon to see how game development is flourishing in the Central Florida area. Both teams had the opportunity to demonstrate their games for the Governor and he also toured the cohort space to see where the next generation of game developers were honing their skills. He believed both Sultans and Drifters were very creative and he was impressed with the talent that is coming out of Florida today.

Drifters Team: BEARD-OFF FINALE!

2009-07-02T17:02:00.011-04:00

The day has come. After months of neglectful cultivation and itching to shave (literally), the results of the unshaven have been revealed!

Each contestant went up and told the story of their beard experience. Some were mistaken for homeless while walking around the FIEA area, many had tales of angry girlfriends and scolding mothers, while some bemoaned the fact that they just couldn't seem to grow a decent facial landscape. However, there were some stories of happiness among them, such as the welcome reunion of man and facial hair after years in the army where being clean shaven was a must. Once the stories were over, the judges surveyed the vast plains of hair...

And now, the winners of the 2009 Cohort 5 Drifters Team Beard-Off!

The "Billy Mays Memorial Award"

The "Colonel Sanders Award"

The "Ron Jeremy Award"

The "Chameleon Award"

The "Patch Adams Award"

Once all the awards were awarded, those who were interested headed to the bathroom for some "Man-Scaping" and put a creative twist to the end of their beards. As each contestant headed back in...

The judges did one more analysis...

and announced...

The "Man Scape Award"

Congratulations to our beard growers and the entire Drifters team for their hard work! It's a great end to a great production run, and now the whole team is revving up for the final polish and testing.

It's Beta Time!

2009-07-02T17:00:00.008-04:00

This week marks the end of production for both games as they push on to alpha/beta stage. Only minor assets are being loaded in when needed to fix bugs, and the majority of the work for the rest of this month is testing, testing and testing. The only new things being developed now are the game manuals and box art, as well as finishing touches on the websites.

The museum environment got a much deserved facelift with a new lighting setup, making it easier to see and to cast shadows with the characters. The lighting is now baked in to the geometry, allowing the dynamic lights to be focused on characters so they now have shadows as they wander through the museum floors. The Sovereign has been seated on her throne and is being rigged for animations. She currently provides commentary on the match, commending or berating her Drifters on their performance against each other. Other sound additions include the announcement of the selected Drifter's name on the player select screen, more random comments from the NPCs as they stop at various exhibits, and the Drifters have more sounds including taunts, victory comments, and attack sounds.

The Drifter Vision no longer snaps from glowing character to Drifter form, rather a new light burst transition activates to reveal the Drifter form, letting players know they're now visible as a Drifter. While attacking, there's better response time, so a missed strike no longer makes you as vulnerable to your target. To better assist the player in learning to make better use of Drifter Vision and attacking, the video tutorial which was in progress is being updated with the latest assets and controls.

On the technical side, DevTrack is being used to track the bugs that come up during playtesting. As a bug is identified, a log is created by the player that tells when it occurred, under what conditions, and what the steps are to reproduce it. The bug is assigned a category, and then the QA lead reviews the report, determines who should handle the bug, and assigns it to a team member to work on it. The team is also busy testing on multiple machine setups, including 3 versions of Windows (XP, Vista and 7 beta), various video card configurations, and multiple processor speeds. The goal is to optimize it so the game can run on virtually any current generation machine capable of playing games like Half-Life2.

To kick off their last normal status report, the Sultans team revealed their final peripheral, a Turntable Lite if you will...

It's about 1/3 of the previous peripheral, isn't it adorable?!

The game is down to the addition of a few minor art assets in the menu screen and the DJ models in the crew transition modes. The new peripheral integrated perfectly in with the control scheme, so the game is playable with either the DDR pad and turntable, or the keyboard and mouse schemes. Now that the environments are finalized for lighting, the cinematic crew is placing the final assets for the final cinematic clips.

The last bits of the menu are coming together to complete the experience and this week some background music sets the mood for the record shop. The announcer can now be heard on the selection screens and once inside, he'll direct you to choose your crew, your turntable, venue, and song. Menu overlays are being placed and the animations on character select are being polished as well with each pair having a unique interaction animation set.

In-game the digital screen on the turntable finally gets its moment to shine and now displays the multiplier for the current crew, as well as the difference between the scores of your crew and the opposing crew. This lets you know at a glance whether you need to step up your game or if you're dominating the round. The crowds are fully placed, textured, randomized, and animated to create a real dance club experience, completed with animated props like the warehouse's traffic light speakers or the club's neon glow furniture. At the end of the level, a new chalkboard-style score screen shows off the winner and loser of the round:

Probably the biggest reveal of this report was the tutorial option, which guides players through the various controls of the game, plus introduces the combo system and how to activate "Pass the Spotlight". There's still some adjusting to do so the steps flow easier, and talk of splitting it into a normal and advanced tutorial set, but so far it's a great feature!

These next two weeks, Cohort 5 will be conducting interviews with many companies within the video game, simulation and digital media industries. With so many interviews and companies to coordinate among the 49 students, the teams will not be holding their weekly status reports. The final game presentations will take place on July 30th and that will most likely be the final development blog post for Cohort 5. We'll try to dig up some beta stage info for you in the meantime!

Drifters Team: BEARD-OFF! Final Week

2009-06-29T11:21:00.005-04:00

No photo yet, because tomorrow (Thursday) ends the Beard-off!

Here's the latest update to the contest:

Hey All,

Just wanted to pass along the official Beard Off Update. The Beard Off will end on Thursday July 2nd so that everyone can be clean shaven by Monday when industry interviews start. Beard Off ceremonies will take place in the bridge directly following the Sultan’s presentation. I also encourage participants to bring in clippers, shaving cream, and razors, to shave some fun into this mess following the festivities. Rick, Shawnna, and Donald have agreed to be the three judges for the competition and will be deciding the winners of the following categories:

The Billy Mays Memorial Award (formerly the Grizzly Adams) – Grizzliest beard in honor of the greatest pitch man ever
The Patch Adams Award – Given to the participant with the saddest and patchiest beard
The Colonel Sanders Award – Given to the participant who looks most like this guy

The Ron Jeremy Award – Given to the participant who most resembles a 70’s adult film star
The Chameleon Award – Given to the participant who you cant tell is a participant
The Man Scaping Award – For whoever shaves the most creative design into their beard after the initial judging

Each Beard Off participant will briefly tell the story of their beard and their five week journey.

If anyone can think of additional awards, please reply to this thread and we will add them to the list.

We’ll buy some pizza and soda and prizes will be awarded to the winner.

Thanks,
AD

2 week countdown!

2009-06-23T16:37:00.014-04:00

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

2009-06-23T15:05:00.001-04:00

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

3 Week Countdown!

2009-06-16T16:48:00.017-04:00

Both teams are now nearing alpha stage for their timelines and that means extensive testing can begin. Currently, daily sessions are taking place with each game as the teams get to experience the fruits of their labor and look for their next improvement task. We were able to sneak a camera in to the status reports to show you some in-game footage - exclusive here!

Play testing is now a daily event in the Drifters half of the cohort space. Crowds can be seen gathered in whichever hex is hosting a game at the time and cheers of victory and defeat can be heard throughout the halls. However, the team knows that testing your own game is easy, so they've brought in some fresh testers, unrelated to FIEA and unfamilliar with the game. This way they can get an unbiased look at the gameplay and have a fresh set of eyes look things over. Last Friday they had a group in to cold test the game: they were given a brief presentation on what the game is and how to play and then let loose on two 5-minute and two 10-minute matches. After, they participated in a written and verbal Q&A session, and were provided with free pizza as a thanks for their participation. The team is currently analyzing the video and questionnaire data to make more improvements to the gameplay and balance.

The Drifters team testing their game along with some of the Sultans team

As with last week's promise, the team delivered on optimization of the game in many ways. Their two major changes were the conversion of all .tga textures to .dds files and also the size reduction and sharing of the environmental texture maps. Both of these changes produced a cutdown of 50% of the video memory used, a huge improvement! Many of the exhibit models are also being redone to drop their poly count and add to the reduction.

New exhibit pieces, now with lower poly counts

Graphically, small improvements are being made as most of the assets are complete and are undergoing a bit of polish. The bathroom area is now completely textured and the team is working on a new display case so they're uniform in appearance. Small details like the audio tour guide speakers on each exhibit are being added in as well as just small cosmetic touches to add to the realism of the environment.

The textured bathroom

Two new models were also released this week: the Sovereign and Gideon, the third Drifter. The Sovereign is completely modeled and textured and awaiting placement on her throne. Her audio files are getting their final adjustments and her haunting voice will be heard during the match, updating the Drifters on their progress and egging on their competition.

The Sovereign's profile and throne

Gideon has been added into the in-game play with his own image on the character select, complete with his unique stats.

The final renders of Sid, Luther and Gideon

A lot of bug fixes took place this week as well, with all the NPCs now correctly pathed and spawning, resulting in no more walking into walls. There are currently 50 unique paths each with behavior nodes where a NPC will stop and interact with an exhibit before continuing on. The team hopes to get another 30 paths in so they can potentially increase the number of NPCs in the environment as well once all the final assets are in and play testing can focus on value adjustment.

Since the NPCs will randomly stop to examine the various parts of the museum, the team implemented a keyboard command to let players do the same. By pressing the Q button the player's current body will stop and lean in and examine whatever they are near, or if they are in the open, they will play another context-sensitive animation such as checking their watch. Another control option added this week is the free-view camera which can be a useful strategy if your player is stopped at an exhibit. You can perform your environmental animation and while that is taking place, quickly hold down the F key and use your mouse to take a 360 degree look around you, identifying any suspicious behavior that may be taking place behind your head.

A player approaches an exhibit and uses their environmental action command to interact with it, making them appear to act like a NPC

On screen you can now see statistics as to who is in the lead, how you stand compared to their number of kills, and a report in the bottom left updates constantly with the latest "Player 1 killed Player 2" announcement. These can be brought up at any time during game play with a tap of the shift key. Another addition to the user interface is the inclusion of loading screens which show the keyboard controls while the match loads. A player tutorial video is also in progress to explain the finer points of gameplay, including blending in with the crowd and drifting strategies.

Loading and tutorial screens, as well as the on-screen current score update, which can be toggled on and off

Drifter Vision has also gotten a huge update, mainly in how the transition to and from corporeal vision works. Now instead of a jerky switch to glowing NPCs, the glows on other bodies slowly fades up, as does your own. Your Drifter form fades in after the waiting period and soon other Drifters are also visible. When drifting in Drifter Vision, a bright flash of light disorients you for a moment as you switch, leaving you slightly vulnerable for a second as you adjust to your new location. When switching back to corporeal vision, the glow on the other bodies slowly fades to a shell and disappears completely.

Updated Drifter Vision

Next up on the plate is further testing, additions of the final art assets, and biggest of all is the final Drifter reveal, Lenore. For now, we leave you with a little in-game footage!

The presentation this week started off with more of a show-and-tell approach, because Sultans is down to adding assets in-game and tweaking the mechanics to find that playability sweet spot. The 3D menu we've been seeing concepts and renders of is now a reality with fluid camera movements between each area. The player begins by selecting their crew, then flying over to the turntable rack, and finally to the record bin to select a song and difficulty. The second crew sets up their characters and turntable and the match begins! Right now, the Sexy Clown/Dino Guy models are in place and animated with textures to follow and the other 2 crews coming soon. The three turntables are in place with the rotating rack, and several song album covers are in place and will be selectable.

The gameplay has gotten another update with the 2-player crew vs. crew mechanics working, complete with the crew switch during the song. Each crew has its own area of the level where their individual multiplier status, score, and note streams appear. The DJ notes now stream top to bottom directly on to the turntable records, rather than in the center console. This allowed the notes to be larger and more directed toward where the DJ has to look for scratching rather than all jumbled in the center. As for adjustments to the peripheral interaction, the fader is now a required part of the controller, as the DJ must switch the bar to the side they're scratching on to activate it, making the experience more realistic.

When the crew members reach a high synergy level (constantly hitting the white notes) new environmental effects are visible with the turntable records getting flame effects, spotlight activation, and floating money particle effects. The crowd members, including the currently textured and in place mohawk guy, also react to the performance by jumping around more or less. The crowd is also in place in the fully functional Warehouse environment, which is also selectable alongside the Club environment. New songs are now marked with notes and ready to play, and loading screens have been added between the menu and the start of the round.

Early render of the Warehouse with crowd

The dancers and DJs are all textured and ready to go, with new fail animations for constantly missed notes. The mocap data from the female dancer is being cleaned up, meaning soon Tiger Girl will have her own set of unique moves.

Fully textured models of "Felicia", "Damian", and "Dino Guy" - the DJs

But all of this is just words...you need to see it to experience the true Sultans of Scratch!

Drifters Team: BEARD-OFF! Week 3

2009-06-16T16:45:00.002-04:00

Another week, another few centimeters of hair!

The beards are progressing just as smoothly as the game's final stages of development!

Drifters Team: BEARD-OFF! Week 2

2009-06-09T17:17:00.001-04:00

This is the current roster of contenders:

As you can see, the stubble is coming along just as nicely as the game!

4 Week Countdown!

2009-06-09T16:27:00.008-04:00

There's been lots of excitement around the cohort this week. From the hype of the Orlando Magic games taking place across the street to rumors of confirmed interview companies all the way to extensive (and competitive) play testing, quiet moments within the cohort space are becoming few and far between.

The museum environment is looking more and more realistic by the week, with nearly all the exhibits and aesthetic pieces making it into the current build. Next week they plan on having all the placements finalized so full work on the final lighting and shadows can be completed. Currently 8 new lights have been added to effect the characters: 1 directional light and 7 point lights to help with shadows.

One of the biggest additions this week is the 3D sound effects within the game build. 3d sound is basically a technique used to create a more realistic sound within a game: as a player gets closer to the item creating the sound, the sound gets louder, as they back away, it gets softer, just as it does in real life. Aside from the already impressive custom music score, many of the exhibits have been augmented with an audio tour guide voice over that explains the story behind each artifact on display, telling its history and how it was used as an 'instrument of death'. This is how it works in normal corporeal vision; switch into Drifter Vision and walk past the same display to hear the sounds that occurred when the item was used to kill its unfortunate victim (or victims, as with the heavily used guillotine).

The second biggest addition is the new Drifter forms for Luther and Sid. They now work correctly in-game (no more double model) and they're reacting properly with players being able to select a specific Drifter over another and have that one show properly in form. The character select screen shows slots for all 4 Drifters and when a specific Drifter is selected it will also show their bio and unique stats. Not all Drifters are created equal: they have 3 categories of stealth, drift time, and strength that will effect how they perform in the environment.

The cinematic team is ready to begin production, as their camera and shot layouts are finalized and a basic mockup of the storyboards has been rendered with stand-in models and a basic untextured environment. They're working on getting the finalized assets into the cinematic builder and then it's full steam ahead.

Testing is starting to be the next big thing with the game, with strike teams created for various sections to consider when looking at gameplay. One of the biggest focuses is optimizing the game to run as seamlessly as possible. A few of the ideas they're working with is the reduction of the character texture size (each piece of each NPC is a separate texture) to free up video memory, and also optimizing collision checking by dividing the areas into zones, having the characters only check collision on the zone they're in rather than the entire environment.

A few of the bugs that have been worked out since last week are the same time attack that would cause the game to crash when players attacked each other at the same time. The Drifter form was fixed and glow shaders work with the alpha on the environment during Drifter Vision. Load screens have been added between match start and the actual game load, so there's no more confusion if the game build froze or not.

Within the game, taunts are now active and also done in 3D sound, so a player can activate a vocal taunt near a group of NPCs and quickly move away so it resonates from decoys and not their own body: a great tactic for throwing off a pursuer! The game menu was updated again with animations, transitions and sound effects. More updates to the NPCs paths have been made, so they now stop at exhibits, examine them, and continue on, which is a behavior pattern a player can easily emulate to blend in while stalking targets.

The next steps for the team are to continue testing and tweaking the game play to get the smoothest, best version possible ready for Alpha stage testing. The last exhibits will be placed and sound added and the final texture sets for the 3 NPC Voltron rigs will be finalized and put into the randomization cycle. New animations from the last mocap shoot are almost cleaned and ready to be added for the final animation sets to finish off the pathing. The 3rd drifter model is being textured, everything is getting a cleanup and quality check, and the final image of the game is definitely coming through!

Last week's mocap session should be the final one and created a whole new set of dance moves with a female dancer, giving Tiger Girl her own personal move set with a more feminine feel. Data was also created for more unique idle states, giving each dancer a total of three unique idles, as well as more crowd actions and new data for the 3D menu navigation. After this session, the final animation lists are now finished and finalized.

Lots of texture updates this week with the warehouse environment and record store menu environment having been completely textured and ready to roll.

The textured and partially lit Warehouse stage

Various angles of the record store menu environment

The sexy clown is even hotter now with his textures added, and two new crowd members are modeled and ready to be textured.

Admit it, he's even sexier with the tie.

Concept sketches for 2 more crowd members and their 3D modeled counterparts awaiting textures.

In-game they've got a new scoreboard running along the top of the dancer's stage that not only has an incrementing score but also the timer for when the round is over. While the game is playing, the announcer will now pop in with comments to cheer on good performances or encourage failing performers to step it up. One of the most positively received turntable concepts, the gears turntable, has been modeled, textured and animated to become the second turntable style available in the game.

Perhaps one of the biggest changes in the game demo this week was the addition of camera pans to transition from one crew to the other. The first crew is performing at a light board stage with a DJ booth. After they perform for a set time limit, their session pauses and the camera sweeps behind the light board to reveal another DJ booth and a stage set back by the bar, where the 2nd DJ/dancer crew can begin their performance. Once their time limit is up, another camera pan back sends the gameplay to the original crew to finish out their performance.

Production Week 9

2009-06-03T14:09:00.016-04:00

Nine down, five to go in the countdown to the end of production. Testing is gearing up, assets are being finalized, animations are being cleaned up, and beards are growing as the teams ramp-up to industry speed.

The Drifters opened this week with a look into their current organization and task management systems. They're using a modified SCRUM along with planning poker and tasking with "user stories". User Stories are short descriptions of various types of user experiences that could take place within the game (i.e. "I want to kill someone while in drifter vision"). Each Story is assigned a level of importance from 1-3 and the top priority Stories are assigned a Strike Team who break it down into the tasks needed to accomplish it. These tasks are assigned to individual members who work on them until all components are complete and the Story can happen. Tucker, the scheduling and analysis master of the team, has calculated that the team accomplished an extra 23.5 hours of work this week with a total of 154.5 more man hours this sprint.

The organizational board

The Voltron rigs for the Maria and Howard NPC types are active in engine and nearly every geometry variation is working on each rig. The Agnes NPC is also nearly complete and almost ready to be placed within game as well. Currently, 40 NPCs are being placed within the game, each with their own unique path and randomized texture configuration. Shadows in-game are slowly being implemented in, as they had been turned off for testing purposes to keep the frame rate up to snuff.

New shots of the more polished museum interior

With the main part of the museum almost finalized, work on the back part of the museum, which is slated to be a bathroom area, is getting underway. The team decided this lesser-seen part of the environment should be something serious like a bathroom area to keep with the realism of the game.

Modeled layouts of the bathroom area

The central focus of the museum floor - an ornate fountain - has been base modeled, positioned in the environment, and is ready to be textured.

The fountain model

On the cinematic side, basic play blasts of some of the camera paths for the various scenes have been created for testing and reference. The paths have been finalized and the voice work is all ready to roll once the scenes are assembled. Some of the camera and animation work for the cinematic is also serving double duty as the menu screens get a wonderful motion upgrade. A preview video was shown of how the new menu will act, hovering outside the museum before the game starts, then rushing into the blinding realm of the Drifters beyond the doors.

During the initial game demo, 2 players were in-game to show playability with the ability to enter drifter vision, make a kill, respawn, and have a game status with kills/deaths and current score. Prior to starting the game, a player can choose to host or join an existing game, give themselves a unique player name, as well as choose their drifter. A player who hosts the game can set game parameters such as the game name, number of players, time limit, and number of kills to win. Improvements on the drifter vision were shown with the glow effect in place with the environment and on the NPCs, as well as a new 10-second waiting period in which the drifter has to stay in drifter vision for that cool-down period before switching out. The tells system is also actively working, with the player's currently controlled body having a coughing action that increases over time as they possess the body.

After the 2-player success, the team was challenged to try out 4 simultaneous players just to see if it would work - and it did! With four players being the target goal for the end game, it was a great success for the team to see their goal already met so far.

Sultans had a lot of new content to show off this week including environments, props, characters, and shiny new peripheral prototypes. Heading full steam into the new Warehouse stage, a slew of new industrial props are being concepted, modeled and textured. One of the big focuses is on speakers, as they're not native to the environment like they were in the club, so some great creative approaches have been taken to keeping with the urban feel.

Models of some of the new props and speakers

The new environment's textures are coming along as well, with light maps and graffiti sprays on the warehouse walls.

The warehouse interior with basic textures

The 3d Menu concepts have been modeled out and assembly of the interior of the record shop has begun, including props and placement of the menu elements.

Original menu concepts

The exterior of the menu shop and interior construction

The rack where you can select your turntable

The new DJs and characters mentioned last week have got further life pumped in to them as they enter the realm of 3D. Godzilla and Damien are modeled and now all the characters can be textured and ready to roll in-game. They've gone a long way from paper concept to 3D and they look great!

Godzilla's concept sketch and 3D render

The DJ concept art and Damien's final model

Within the game, some of the low-poly crowd models have been placed and animated in scene with a potential of 16 identical models in without performance issues. The target goal is to have 5 unique crowd models each with texture variations to create a diverse crowd each time the game is loaded. Along with the crowd's normal animation, their actions will increase as they get more pumped up when the players perform well; the tiered performance system at work!

Textured crowd models

The initial club stage has a new view which places the DJ more at floor level of the dancer and includes a progress bar for the Synergy Notes to fill up and activate the "Pass the Spotlight" feature. Basic announcer vocals are functioning on a randomized basis, giving players encouragement or criticism as they compete.

A tutorial mode is also being developed to give new players an overview of how the controls work, the combo system, rewards (crowd hype, pass the spotlight, and scoring) and overall game play. The messages that appear during the tutorial have been written in an easy to edit XML script, perfect for anyone on the team to pick up and change instantly.

A few things coming up in the next few days include a female dancer mocap shoot which will not only produce new moves for Tiger Girl, but also help with making more idle dance states so the same action isn't repeated as often. A 3rd stage is on the timeline for implementation and so far the team is confident they're on schedule to begin developing on it shortly to make a total of three unique environments for players to choose from. The second peripheral prototype is currently being held by the UCF Engineers as they further develop on it, but it looks great so far!

The 2nd peripheral prototype

The final iteration is slated to be a modified actual electronic turntable which is much smaller, lighter and durable.

A preview of what the final turntable should look like

The team's urban photoshoot for their website

Drifters Team: BEARD-OFF!

2009-06-01T16:10:00.003-04:00

Further proof that FIEA is never all work and no play, even in the home stretch our teams find ways to keep themselves motivated. Team Drifters has made an official Beard-Off competition:

For those men and women interested. On Tuesday, June 2nd, we will be starting the first annual Team Drifter’s Beard Off. For the last 4 weeks of production, those who choose to participate will be growing our playoff beards to keep us warm on those late nights as the game nears its completion. Don’t worry we will be shaving before industry interviews. So here are the rules:

1. You must have a clean shave on Tuesday the 2nd (if you have some facial hair you don’t want to lose, trim it down as short as possible)
2. During the 4 weeks you may only shave your neck to keep things clean
3. Shaving or any trimming during the 4 weeks results in disqualification
4. There will be multiple awards and fantastic prizes for the winners of numerous different categories including The Grizzly Adams Award and The Patch Adams Memorial Trophy, so anyone can participate
5. If ladies want to play, creativity is welcome
6. At the end of the competition, shave the most creative facial hair for bonus prizes (ex. Fu man chu, handle bars, etc.)
7. If the faculty thinks they can hang, let’s see it

A special celebrity judge is rumored to have signed on to the event. We'll keep you updated on the weekly growth!

UPDATE: Tuesday, June 2nd - The Shaven!

Production Week 8

2009-05-28T15:32:00.009-04:00

No, it's not a time warp. The teams enjoyed a partial break between summer classes during the week of April 27th up to May 18th. But just as the game development industry never rests, neither does Cohort 5, and those weeks were spent making major improvements, additions and changes to the games. This week marked the return of status reports and with that we continue our series of updates with some major content. The clock is ticking with only 5 weeks left before the games need to be 95% finished to be used during interviews for internship positions. July 6th will begin the interviews, so both teams are working toward that as a deadline for a playable, bugless release.

The first major addition to the game has been the exhibits, with over 30 pieces added to create the "Instruments of Death" collection that's currently on display. The interior has been slightly redesigned with a new bridge crossing from one side to the other in the upper level, new textures, and better lighting. To create the proper lighting the environment had to be split into 12 separate pieces, each uniquely lit with over 80 individual lights to bypass Gamebryo's lighting limits. The resulting effect is stunning and not ambiently lit like most environments. The lighting is also being reconfigured within the Maya models, as it needs to be lit properly for use in the cinematic as well.

New interior shots of the remodeled museum, fully lit and textured

With the Voltron rig ready to assemble, the artists have been working on many texture variations on the geometry used to create 3 unique NPC body shapes - Agnes, Maria and Howard. With 4 pieces to each rig and multiple versions of each piece, there's a huge number of combinations that can be created by the design team using the Character Builder tool. Currently, the design team loads the tool, flips through the various pieces until they build a model that looks correct, and can save it as a unique NPC.

Pieces for use in the Voltron rig and the Character Builder tool

Then, using their Path Builder tool, they can assign that NPC a unique path within the environment, including pauses and animations, essentially creating non-repetitive, natural looking crowd interactions to further add to the need to blend in with the museum-goers in order to avoid detection as a Drifter. To better create all this content, "strike teams" have been created to handle pathing batches so no one person is burdened with doing all the work.

The Path Creator tool with pathing diagrams

A new user interface has been created for the main screens using an exterior shot of the museum. No longer a static image, the new UI is animated and has effects as the user interacts with various menus and choices.

The new menu screen

The four Drifters are shown on the character select screen and they are starting to get personalities of their own through new animations and designs. The team's most recent mocap session produced over 40 new animations for combat, some unique to each Drifter and some generic.

John provided some great combat moves for the mocap shoot

The Drifter models have also changed, no longer a skeletal-armor style, but now they resemble more of a full body suit.

The new look of the Drifter form

Drifter Vision has also received an overhaul with a new temporary glow map serving as a base for the final product. Instead of just desaturating the environment, the altered perception resembles glowing runes on the walls and objects, with the glowing accentuated on Drifter-related items within the sight of the player. The Drifter form of their character is also shown, and their animation for walking changes slightly to a stalking motion.

The new Drifter Vision concept

In regards to the previously mentioned cinematic, the shot lists are done, layouts and camera placement is in progress, and the script recorded. As soon as the environment is ready and everything finalized, production can begin with a mid-June target set for completion. A final voice acting session is wrapping up this week, with most of the already recorded dialogue in the cleanup stage.

In the non-visual realm of things, the programmers have been hard at work refactoring their code to produce version 2.0 of the game's build. Many of their changes allow for smoother networking and easier integration between the values created from the producer tools and the game engine. In testing, users are now able to input a player name for the multiplayer, join or host a game, and wait in the lobby to see other players. The tools are all working with XML, allowing live changes to be made during gameplay. An internal script was also written to control the number of NPCs and their starting placement at the initial load of the game. Another major addition to the control of the NPCs was the inclusion of a behavorial steering script which will detect when 2 NPCs are going to collide and adjust their paths to avoid each other.

With the programmers hard at work finishing their internal overhaul of their code base, the artists churning out great designs for the characters and museum exhibits, and the producers developing the audio and NPC behavior, Drifters is shaping up to be a highly immersive game experience.

Showcasing spiffy painted peripherals fully functional with the game controls, the Sultans team delivered a great post-break presentation. Promotion-wise, their website is ready to go live on Friday with a final team photo shoot scheduled for that afternoon. Over the break they were busy with weekly scheduled play tests every Friday, during which their workroom was filled with the sounds of hip-hop and thumping feet.

Tons of new artistic content was shown off, including more concepts for environment props like speakers, a new dancer/dj combo, and DJs for the 2 current dancers. The new dancer, the "sexy clown" is partially modeled and being textured while his DJ counterpart, "Godzilla Man" is concepted and ready to be brought to life in Maya. The current dancers now have DJs of their own, the Tiger girl having a similar-looking girl, her sister, as her music maker, while the original dancer has a DJ that enjoys his sense of asian-inspired style. One thing the team had been debating on and decided to go ahead with was the mocapping of a female dancer for the 2nd dancer model, and they've scheduled that shoot to complete their animation pool.

Speaker concepts

The "Sexy Clown" concept sketch and model

Leopard Girl's model

One of the major updates to the environment has been with the layout of the user interface elements. The dancer notes are now light bars streaming down screens on either side of the dancer, while the DJ notes appear on a panel between the on-screen turntables. Everything has been re-laid out and scaled so the dancer is proportionate, and even the turntable on-screen reacts on a 1:1 ratio with the turntable controller's movements.

Two new environment-related game elements have also been introduced, the "environmental response" and the "pass-the-spotlight" which both activate based on the success or failure of the players. The environmental response focuses on the club's elements to reward good player performance; the speakers will animate and thump with the music, the central spotlights will activate and put on a light show. Pass-the-spotlight is implemented on the back end and soon to become available in-game; a major spotlight will pass from DJ to dancer as they cooperate by hitting the white "synergy notes" in time with each other.

Some other things in the works on the visual side would be the concept and base construction of a 2nd environment, a warehouse. One of the most requested environment types during the focus groups, the warehouse has been sketched out in various designs and a basic model constructed in Maya, getting ready for preliminary textures.

Warehouse concept sketches

Modeled warehouse environment

The main game menus, static at the moment, are planning on being transformed to an interactive 3D menu system designed to look like a record shop. Users will select their music track by flipping through a record box, and character selection will be done by picking a pair from the customers in the shop. Low-polygon models for the crowd members are being modeled, textured and tested within the game. Currently, 23 models can be placed within the scene before any lag is apparent, so there's going to be quite a crowd to impress in-game!

The programmers have been putting in a lot of work on the back end of things, prepping systems to be implemented within the next few weeks, updating current tools, and working on the functionality of the controllers. Both input controls work completely within the game, although keyboard controls can also be used. The tools for note placement have been updated for ease of use so the songs can now easily be prepped for in-game play.

About Drifters

2009-05-12T17:46:00.003-04:00

1. Introduction

Drifters is a third-person multiplayer hunt game in which you take the role of an ethereal being. You are tasked with eliminating other Drifters in your environment, and will do so by possessing and drifting between Non-Player-Characters (NPCs), engaging in close-quarter combat, but more importantly using survival and scouting tactics in order to win and be the last one standing!

Drifters combines popular multiplayer technology with innovative game design, a unique environment and characters, as well as high production value (using the Gamebryo engine) to deliver a distinctive game experience that may be enjoyed time and again!

2. Basic Information

Genre: Third-person Multiplayer Hunt Game
Number of Players: 2-8
Release Date: August 07, 2009
System Requirements: To Be Determined

3. Game Synopsis

3.1. Story

Drifters is about ethereal beings that possess the ability to pass between different human hosts. These beings have lived amongst us undetected for thousands of years. Much like a human, they remember very little about their early years and how they came to be. What they do know is that their life form consists of a concentrated energy that binds them all together. This energy can never be destroyed, but one Drifter is able to absorb another’s energy, abilities and powers by eliminating their target's host. Natural selection and this lust for power have diminished their numbers from the hundreds to four very powerful Drifters. They are drawn to the people of influence and power. Possessing and controlling such peoples’ decisions and fates have made their actions the stuff of legend.

Recently they can feel their power being siphoned away. Their ability to stay inside a human being has become so weak that they can only stay in one body for a few minutes before the host begins to suffer physical ailments. The four Drifters are drawn to the place they feel their energy collecting and find themselves at the grand opening of a museum, all in the same place for the first time. Crowds of people pass through, looking at exhibits and artifacts, providing plenty of places for a Drifter to hide. The Drifters all find this place oddly familiar and many recognize pieces on display as items owned or created by humans they possessed over the years. They sense the energy that drew them there scattered throughout the artifacts while another, less familiar force seals their exit. Each one recognizes that the only way out of this is to eliminate the rest of their brethren to regain their lost power. What they don’t realize is that there is someone pulling their strings, and everything is going according to plan…

3.2. Core Mechanic

Drifters is a third-person, networked, multiplayer hunt game. The tone is dark and gritty, with a constant sense of paranoia. Players will select one of four playable Drifter characters, each one with different stats that affect their drift radius, how long they can hide their true form, and Drifter Vision. Once gameplay begins, players will be placed into random NPCs in a crowded environment. The goal of the game is to hunt for player-controlled characters displaying tells that they are different than A.I.. At the same time, players must be conscious of tells they are giving off to any observing players and do their best to blend in.

We anticipate that player-controlled movements will stand out from A.I. paths if the player is not careful. Animations such as a twitch when you possess a body, or a person shaking their head, regaining their bearings when you leave their body will also help hunters locate their prey. Furthermore, we want to use the Drifter true form often to create a memorable replica and personality for each character. The longer a player stays in one body, the less powerful he becomes. Drift radius will begin decreasing after a certain time period to a much smaller radius. Once the radius is at its lowest point, a Drifter’s silhouette will begin to glow after a certain amount of time. It will also appear if a player is jumping from body to body too often and during kill sequences. Ideally, players would be struck with a sense of panic when they see themselves exposed out in the open, contributing to the overall tone of the game.

Making use of the power-ups within the environment will be crucial to aiding your ability to hunt, defend against, and trick other players. These power-ups exist as concentrated masses of energy scattered throughout the museum’s artifacts. Players will be able to pick up any ability they see in the environment even though each artifact will correspond to a particular Drifter and each one of the abilities will correspond to the artifact in which it resides. These energy masses go unnoticed by the naked eye and can only be seen and acquired while using Drifter Vision. Using this Drifter Vision, players will be able to see things on a different plane, allowing them to scout the location for power-ups or to avoid traps set by opponents. However, Drifter Vision may also come at a cost when used thoughtlessly, as certain tells may be given off.

Abilities will be placed sparingly throughout the environment so that there is an even greater risk trying to obtain them. A player may choose to scout out artifacts they know contain power-ups waiting for others to reveal themselves, creating a sense of paranoia when trying to collect these valuable abilities. Upon starting the game, each player will have an empty ability slot. Defeating an opponent will give you an additional ability slot (up to a pre-determined maximum).

The combat in Drifters is planned to be relatively simplistic with only two main forms of attack. Stealth kills will be the quickest means of eliminating a foe, but comes with a risk. Killing an enemy while there is an NPC in their drift radius will force their energy and control into that NPC. Attacking an NPC who is not possessed will have no affect other than leaving the NPC confused and the surrounding crowd panicked. The second combat option is the grab-and-execute. Grabbing a player from behind will scatter the crowd and ensure that your victim will not drift into an NPC. The risk lies in the ruckus drawing unwanted attention to you.

4. Drifter Characters

4.1. SID

Likened to a human psychopath, Sid takes glee in causing pain, both physical and mental. If he possesses a host, he will walk the human in front of a moving bus to experience the last moments. If his host is caught for murder and put on death row, he would jump out of the body and into the executioner just before the walk on the last mile to witness the anguish. If he arranged a suicide pact, he would jump into each and every individual to make sure they had their share of the Kool-Aid. Sid is as close to the definition of evil as can be conceived by man.

4.2. LUTHER

The Wiseman. Luther's existence is driven by the pursuit and preservation of knowledge. He is likened to a renaissance man, exploring all scientific and artistic fields. To that end, he is drawn to the museum for the opportunity to meet with the Sovereign and learn the secrets of the Drifter realm.

4.3. GIDEON

The Judge. For Gideon the 'Drifter Code' is life and law. His unique interpretation of it has condemned his fellow Drifters to his judgment. This makes Gideon one of the few Drifters without ties to the others, his name is one whispered and feared; his visage means death to those that see it. Ironically, it is this lack of contact with his fellow Drifter that has led him to devote his life to the Sovereign, and his belief that all who do not do the same are guilty. Gideon is likened to a puritan judge; all crimes against his beliefs, from stealing a loaf of bread to murder lead to the same result, the noose.

4.4. LENORE

The Puppet Master. “Behind every great man is a great woman.” In many instances Lenore has been that woman. Lenore is one of the few Drifters who has not succumbed to the vices of the mortal realm, and in fact uses them to her advantage. Taking the role of advisers, wives, and consorts, Lenore cultivates and reaps many of the benefits of power while not suffering the consequences. Lenore's cloak and dagger tactics, while making her one of the most long-lived of her kind, also make her ill suited to a head on confrontation.

Programming 2 final project

2009-05-05T12:20:00.013-04:00

FIEA programming graduate students spend 2 semesters making a game engine. In the first semester, they create the architectural infrastructure, including an event system, networking, a language and a virtual machine. (They add graphics, physics, AI and animation in the second semester.) At the end of the first semester, they have to make a simple multiplayer networked text-based game, just to exercise the engine. This video shows what cohort 5 made in Spring of 2009:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d9o2oG8Dlgs

Production Week 3

2009-04-27T12:20:00.009-04:00

The fruits of our programmers' labor is apparent this week with a slew of new tools now available to the designers of both teams. This opens up a whole new ease of design for the teams, so expect to see some great improvements to environment design, input controls, and other placement-related mechanics. Both teams have also hit the web, rolling out preliminary designs of their sites with plans to go live within the next few weeks. This week also ended the status reports for Spring, as the week of the 27th is final exam week for UCF, and class assignments are wrapping up for FIEA as well. The next few weeks we'll be focusing on unique aspects of each game and then May 18 classes resume with the first summer status report!

Drifters
The cinematic team has finalized their script and started storyboarding. During this process, camera track pathing is being taken into consideration and the team will begin working on this development shortly.

Storyboard treatments

Audio has been hard at work developing the soundtrack for the game to best fit the paranoid atmosphere that is their target feeling of their environment. The voice actors are all approved and cast in their various roles with recording to commence on the 2nd week of May. A fully ranged cast of 11 and a large script of dialogue snippets for in-game actions, as well as the narration and population of the cinematic will make for a rich audio experience once everything is cleaned, mixed and implemented in-game.

The programming tools made available to the design team are a path management editor, a gameplay value tweaker, and a character attribute editor. The path management editor makes it simple to add pathways for the NPCs to travel, allowing for branching pathways and interconnected paths that create more of a variety and less chance of a player observing a 'track' that many other characters are walking on. The gameplay value tweaker will allow the adjustment of numeric values such as the drift radius or attack range, allowing for faster testing of the game mechanics during play tests. One of the most impressive tools is the character attribute editor which allows for the assembly of body part combinations for the Voltron rig. The tool allows a designer to manually piece together a 3-part combination and save it as a single NPC scheme, allowing them to make hundreds of unique NPC variants, class them as a certain action type, and then later use that setup with the pathing tool to create a completely unique NPC action.

The Character Path Management tool

Aside from playing with their new tools, the design team has been working on iterations of the kill system for the Drifters. They've decided on a 2-move plan where one will be a simple killing move common to all players and the other will be a flashier style unique to the personality of the Drifter they've chosen. Discussion is taking place on if this flashy move will effect any other aspects of play, such as a higher point value for its use to offset the extra time it takes to use the move. Development on the user interface is also underway with the lobby system in place and functional, allowing new players to connect and see who is hosting a game. The title screen also has a more polished look and video backgrounds are being toyed with to give the menu screens more life.

The background screen for the new title screen and sample of the lobby system dialogue box

Sultans of Scratch
The website design was previewed this week with an emphasis on an urban advertising design scheme to keep with the style of the game. Using locations around the Downtown Orlando area, the team is doing a photo shoot to gather material for the backgrounds and graphics of the site, as well as a headshot shoot for their dev team to allow for forming of a team roster.

The mocap and animation team has been working on another shoot to capture data for interim animations as well as the crowd behavior. With the release of Tiger Girl's model, they were also able to map her rig to the breakdancer animations and get her dancing in game as well.

The design team has 2 tools available to them now to facilitate the creation of action notes on a song and also to create the combos for DJ and dancer. One of the special points of the combo tool is that it works with the newly developed audio library to attach scratch sounds and announcer sound bites to various combination inputs and also errors. The library holds over 150 sound bites right now with more to be added, so there's going to be a ton of variety in the custom command sounds! The action note tool allows the loading of a song track where it can be played and scrubbed as needed while the designer adds notes where appropriate. The realtime play of the song will let the notes be added during natural beats and not have to be inserted on an estimated basis. The combo tool allows the designers to create a new combo by assigning the button presses needed to execute and the dance move it performs, or for the DJ the button presses and accompanying scratch sound. The tool can preview all the dancer animations and scratch sounds easily, making it simple to play around with various configurations.

Lots of modeling has been going on this week as well. The prop concepts were reviewed and the team picked their favorite designs to be turned into rendered pieces for the environment.

Three of the prop pieces modeled out

Low polygon models of some crowd members have also been created so once the crowd mocap data is captured and cleaned, work can begin on rigging them and getting a live crowd jumping to the music.

Some of the crowd models

Some other extraneous characters like bouncers and waitresses are also being concepted and a character portrait has been created for Tiger Girl, much like the one Mr. Yin-yang has that's serving as the current title screen.

One of the biggest changes to the game design lately has been the club environment. Taking the advice of Rick, the team added more curves and personality to the club's interior to give it a more organic feel.

Before (left) and after (right) views of the bar and DJ areas.

Production Week 2

2009-04-16T15:12:00.008-04:00

You would think that with the programmers being buried under end of semester final projects and the artists swamped with work on their portfolio pieces, work on the games would grind to a halt. Not cohort 5! Our teams have managed to keep their personal classwork and game tasks in balance, allowing for them to focus on keeping their grades up in their track-specific classes, but also still show some great progress within their game's development.

Drifters
One of the major targets the team was challenged to reach for last week was to implement the combat and ability to make a kill within the game - and it was done! The programming team has also created a tool to place graphical spawn points for the NPCs so they don't spawn randomly into exhibits. Coincidentally, the programmers next project within their non-game curriculum is to build a tool for the game they're tasked on, something the team is taking full advantage of by creating a list of appropriate tools that the game could benefit from so the programmers can decide on which tool to work on.

Design has been hard at work in various areas, the environment has been populated with the artifact displays so characters have obstacles to navigate around.

The main platform of the museum with artifacts on display

Sound has also been hard at work, having 9 of their 11 callbacks for voice talent being scheduled and cast with the other 2 being finalized by the end of the week. The team met for a DevTrack overview and the accounts and assignment system are active and functional for QA testing to begin at any time. Website infrastructure is also up and running with a basic layout and content shell in place, login active for all team members, and the ability to add content active.

Website structure with dev team profiles

The cinematic team has met several times to script the opening scenes in preparation for storyboard treatment - a great collaboration between the design and art teams. The concept of the drifter form, while previously appearing as a skeletal shell or armor over the main body, is being reiterated to a more flowing, ethereal design by way of a glow shader with particle effects - one of the art team's current tasks.

The new concept for the Drifter form

More touch ups were done on the museum interior with the floor texture updated, lighting retouched, and the introduction of a great melding of programming and art: the "Voltron" rig. This 3-piece NPC creation system allows the artists to produce any number of torso, head and leg pieces and the programmers to randomly assemble them on an animated rig to create nearly endless amounts of visual combinations. The animators have also finished cleaning up the mocap data and have it ready to attach to the Voltron rig.

Sultans of Scratch
With the character decision made and 2 playable models decided, the team can switch focus on development of the club environment and camera systems as well as other essential pieces such as the DJ table, environment props, and particle effects. A tool was created by the programming team to allow the design team to easily program note streams for each song, shaving off a considerable amount of time and reiteration in the gameplay testing. The team got their hands on the first prototype of their DJ turntable controller, thanks to the UCF Engineering department, and spent the weekend integrating their input system into the current code.

The team gets their hands on the peripheral for the first time

Lots of work is going down with the artists including 3 turntable concepts being modeled, as well as the Tiger Girl character's full 3D model with textures.

Tiger Girl, fully rendered in Maya

The spinner and fish turntables fully modeled

The in-game environment is being expanded with a concept drawn and a basic model created and lit with textures being worked on.

A better render concept of the stage area

Concept sketching is also in progress for club furniture and stage elements and once designs are approved they'll move into being modeled and textured. Particle effects are also further developed with a short concept video produced to give an idea of how the graffiti-esque trails will work.

Some tests have been run with the camera system, creating mock fly-throughs around the expanded environment. These sort of movements will create transitional clips to use between dancers, songs, or gameplay events.

The final parts of the mocap data have been cleaned, named and assigned to combo sets - all ready to go in game. The animation blending system is rough but working and being adjusted through rigorous testing.

FIEA SE Trip

2009-04-15T17:02:00.003-04:00

Wednesday April 8, 2009

Technical Director Tom Carbone and I started on a small recruiting trip through North Carolina in search of programmers. Yesterday we visited East Carolina University; today we are in Chapel Hill; tonight we are at Duke and tomorrow at Clemson.

ECU yesterday was a great experience. We touched down in the tiny Pitt-Greenville airport and alas, one piece of my luggage was lost. Bad start.

But we took our rental car and found some food at the Cookout, a burger/hot dog/milk shake kind of place.

We headed through the small town of Greenville and quickly found campus. It is a beautiful southern campus with magnolia trees and dark red brick buildings everywhere. We went to the Career Center and talked with some advisors there about the school and our program. I told the associate director I would send her some information.

We headed to the CS department and met Qin, a professor there who was organizing the talk for 7 that night. She was friendly and introduced us to several of her colleagues and the department chair.

They were warm and welcoming. We ate dinner before the talk at the Japan Inn, a good Japanese restaurant. We also ate with a CS student who had just defended his senior project named Chris. He was tired but happy he had finished.

The talk went well and lasted about 2 hours. We had 35 or so in the audience and both faculty and students asked a lot of questions.

We left ECU about 9 and went back to the airport to find my luggage. Turns out someone else h had taken my luggage. After contacting them, we drove into a nearby neighborhood and picked up the bag. I was very happy to have my clothes for the trip.

We got into the hotel late last night and today we talk at UNC at 2 p.m. and at Duke at 6 p.m. Should be a great day.

Will update again soon, travel permitting.

Todd

Thursday April 9, 2009

Today was a doubleheader of two of NC’s most famous basketball schools, UNC and Duke. After a late night into Chapel Hill, we woke bleary eyed at a Hampton Inn. Tom and I answered email and made phone calls first thing before heading to campus. We came in on a very crowded South Street.

The campus is absolutely beautiful with old, brick buildings and beautiful green lawns and open spaces everywhere. The Weather was so beautiful and the campus was crowded and active. We quickly learned that a major problem on campus is parking. There was nowhere to park. We circled in one public lot and then decided to eat some burritos at a place called Carbabritos. It had a funky, hippy interior and a great menu. We both had fish burritos. Very tasty.

We finally found a parking spot on the Raleigh Street. Tom did an illegal u-turn and pulled off an amazing parallel parking job just to get the spot. Then we had to beg for some change from some unfortunate passersby. Even with all of our efforts, we would barely have enough time on the meter to finish the talk. We walked across the stately campus with all the trees in bloom. Incredible. We finally found the Brooks building after walking through the north quad. Donna met us and took her into her class of 7 or so.

The presentation went well and the kids asked some great questions. Afterwards we stopped at the bookstore and marveled at all of the championship gear. I got some shorts and Tom bought a shirt.

We left and started to head to Duke. I had forgotten an important folder on campus so we had to circle back but then left without finding it.

We quickly drove to Duke. We parked and headed to the building. Tom’s original contact was sick so we were greeted by Susan, who is a professor in the CS department. We finally found the department and headed in. There were only three people in the room with 10 minutes until the talk. Then the room filled up. It was an ACM talk and was nicely run and attended.

The talk went great. Everyone asked questions and they brought in pizza. Lots of student seemed interested in FIEA and the game industry. We both were talking to students for 20 minutes afterwards and we met another faculty member who teaches game classes there. We left Duke and ate at Mcallister’s Deli. Good food.

Now we’re driving 2 hours to Charlotte, where we’re staying the night. Then up in the morning and another two hours until Clemson. Can’t wait to get there.

Saturday April 11, 2009

We drove through pouring rain to Clemson. Clemson is a bit out the way but a beautiful campus. We met our contact Brian at the student union. He took us with the department head Don and Brian’s wife Jackie to the country club for lunch. A nice buffet was served and we talked about all the connections we had in our work. After lunch we were given a tour of Clemson’t Digital Production Arts by Steven, a student who had started at Full Sail. He knew about us and UCF.

The program really does a nice job teaching technical artists and has had some success putting students onto some very well known films. We saw a demo reel and talked to a faculty member about the difficulty of teaching artists and programmers. Our mutual challenges sounded very familiar.

We then got to meet with 4 or 5 students and talked to them about the industry. They asked some great questions. Then at 3:30 the talk started and about 30 people watched it in a crowded seminar room. The students and faculty were very sharp and asked some excellent questions. I think all got a lot out of the talk. Or at least I hope so. Clemson had really treated us nice and I appreciate their hospitality.

We drove to Greenville where I would stay with some friends and Tom would stay with family in the area. A long flight the next day and we were home. It was a great trip.

Production Week 1

2009-04-08T12:38:00.008-04:00

Last week we took a break from status reports as the Drifters team had just presented the Thursday prior, and Sultans team had a pseudo presentation on Tuesday with the Engineering department in regards to their peripheral. Therefore, the teams took the week to consider the information from their vertical slice presentation and organize their final plans to transition into production. Therefore, this week begins our first update on the actual full production of the games. From here on out, the content delivered during the status meetings is all geared toward the final product. Expect to see more major updates and amazing work coming out within the next 3 months!

Drifters
Two weeks ago the Drifters team held voice talent auditions here at the FIEA conference rooms. Dozens of voice actors were provided with sample scripts to read in order to find narrators, Drifters, and crowd voices for the final game. After a review of all the candidates, callbacks were made and now the casting is being determined. Scripts for cinematics and the voice clips for in-game use are being written, reviewed, and should be finalized by the end of April to begin recording.

The cinematic team has been hard at work and are at the last revision of their script. Once the script is approved, it'll get a storyboard treatment to allow the art team to begin visually rendering the assets needed for completion. A schedule has been developed to keep production running on track, as the cinematic is a large part of setting the tone of the game and establishing the fiction.

Exterior shots of the museum, yes that first one is an actual in-game render!

The design team has also been working on the crowd behavior, namely the makeup of the population and the exhibit placement. The goal is to create a realistic-looking museum environment that has a good population of NPCs for drifting into, while not seeming overly crowded and impede movement. The preliminary layout of the museum is simple and straightforward, allowing for potential expansion with other wings and rooms if the initial design proves to be too simplistic.

To help the design team with the population of the museum main floor, the programming team has been working on some tools to allow an easier placement of objects within the game. NPC pathing tools, as well as scene design tools allow producers to place assets with little to no scripting necessary. Integration of the Python language is also being researched, as it will open more scripting options to the programming team. Alongside the tools being developed, network play is still in the cards and being worked on. Drifting now works across the network, with one player being able to successfully drift into a NPC and then another player in Drifter Vision able to see the effects of that move. The lobby for joining a networked game is next on the development list and being started currently in this sprint.

As previously mentioned, the NPC diversity issue is still being solved with the segmentation of body parts to allow for a mix-and-match system, creating hundreds of combinations. Currently, the bodies are broken up into 4 parts: hair cap, head, upper body, and legs. This structure can be further broken down into 4 hair caps, and the other parts having 3 types of geometric structures each with 2 unique textures - and that's just for a male NPC. This almost guarantees that with the target number of NPCs set to appear on screen set at about 80 and with a blend of male and female models, there's a near impossible chance that the same 4-piece combination will appear on screen twice. A tri-rig system is on the programmers' list of features to begin working on to allow for the randomization of the pieces and combination into a fully functional model.

"Maria" "Agnes" and "Mitch" - some of the new models

With the fictional switch from a normal museum day to the opening night reception of the museum, the lighting has had to undergo some changes to a more dimly lit, dramatic scheme. The rays of light that used to shine brightly from the ceiling are now toned down and tinted slightly silver-blue to simulate moonlight streaming in from above. Orange-yellow sconces on the wall show off a warm glow, while the rest of the interior has an intimate, darkened tone - helping establish that dark feeling of paranoia within the crowd.

The museum interior with some of the basic lighting adjusted for night time

Sultans of Scratch
The Sultans team is showing great progress with new characters, designs, and the arrival of their first peripheral prototype looming on the horizon. They've established an April 26th milestone for a lot of the major gameplay elements to come together in a solid, playable version of the game.

A meeting with their DJ on April 6th allowed the design team to lay out the scratch sounds for the music tracks, meaning note additions can start taking place and create a rhythmic gameplay rather than just random testing notes. The UCF engineering team that the SoS developers have partnered with has announced the first iteration of the custom DJ table controller peripheral will be available to the team on April 11th. Once the team has their hands on it, they'll be able to assign the drivers and have the table controls respond in kind to the proper input commands within the game, giving a much more finished feel to the gameplay.

Artistically the team has been giving their concept artist plenty to do with a female character needing development. After creating concept sketches for over 20 different female styles, the female FIEAns were asked to come by and pick their top three. A consensus was met and the new female lead dancer has been fully sketched and ready to render in Maya.

The unnamed as of yet female dancer

More artistic progress includes a new iteration on the particle effects where they resemble more of an ink swish or streak rather than a spray cloud. Many new turntable concepts have been developed as well to give the user more options on what style of table they'd like to scratch on.

Different trail styles

Various turntable designs

The in-game assets have been cleaned up with a simple turntable layout and note stream areas overlaying the stage. The shader is in place and looking awesome on Mr. Yin-Yang who can perform several seamless dance moves chained together, as the animations have been progressing well through the cleanup stages. Another notable addition was the change to the menu screen, which hits their target of urban and stylized very well.

New start menu

The End of Pre-Production!

2009-03-30T11:41:00.004-04:00

"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!

Pre-production week 9

2009-03-20T12:21:00.008-04:00

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!

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.

Pre-production week 8

2009-03-05T13:07:00.012-05:00

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.

"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!

Pre-production week 7

2009-03-04T15:53:00.002-05:00

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.

Birthdays!

2009-02-25T13:10:00.008-05:00

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!

2009-02-23T13:31:00.003-05:00

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

2009-02-17T12:18:00.002-05:00

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

2009-02-12T17:30:00.003-05:00

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

2009-02-11T15:20:00.014-05:00

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

2009-02-02T16:07:00.007-05:00

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.

Pre-production week 2

2009-01-26T12:35:00.002-05:00

This week in development showed some major changes in several of the projects. The entire programming force was relocated to the Central Team to work on the engine to be used by all teams. Therefore, the teams this week were tasked to develop largely without the help of their programmers, leaving the Technical Artists and Technical Producers to jump in where they could. Even with this hindrance, the teams managed to get more in-game progress to show on the screen.

In an unprecedented move in FIEA history, the Resonance team has decided to abandon the pitched game in favor of the 5th ranked pitch, Sultans of Scratch. The team noticed a lackluster attitude toward the pitched idea and with low morale, progress was sluggish and uninspired. Rather than trudge along dragging their feet and complaining the whole way to produce something that would almost guarantee a cut in February, the team decided to start fresh using the next ranked game pitch which they were much more enthusiastic about. As they had made this decision just a day beforehand, they elected not to present this week.

The cut date has been set to be February 16th and all 4 teams will be presenting from 1-3PM. Dan O’Leary from N-space will be the guest of honor, coming in as an objective party with experience in the field but no prior knowledge of the games, teams, or history of the projects. This will allow an unbiased, professional look at the 4 games and give a better idea of which are viable for production and will survive through to the start of Spring Break.

Drifters
The biggest change in the development of Drifters was the environmental change from subway station to museum. This was motivated both by a lack of emotion evoked from the original location and a desire to strengthen the environment choice to the fiction. By changing to a museum, it would better explain why the artifacts of the Drifters’ past were gathered in one area while still allowing for the crowd in an open space setting.

A few new concepts were introduced, including “drifter vision” which would allow Drifters to see auras related to their powers and see the ability items that would grant them new powers. The ability system was better developed, including a collectible inventory system to allow them to be used as needed and also separation into combative and defensive types.

The team’s schedule has been better developed with the new changes; MS Project is being used for timelines and their sprints are based around 3 major deadlines before the spring break cutoff. Also developed and put into use this week were paper prototypes that mapped out the environment and helped the level design team analyze walking paths for the NPCs. This process allows the team to better determine the rate and flow of how many new bodies the players have available to drift in to.

The in-game demos shown included a redesigned environment better resembling a museum and the model now has a run cycle, idle stance, and when drifting into new bodies, the abandoned model has a stunned reaction animation before continuing on.

Their newly coined catchphrase is “We’re a multi-player Splinter Cell with body switching”

Delirium
First off was the Delirium team’s tech demos going to an in-game setting. They now had a portion of a hallway where a player could walk and the insanity variables could be manipulated to where the hallway would distort and colors saturate and desaturate. Also demonstrated was 3D sound in its basic form surrounding a box.

The design of the level has been streamlined by the creation of the hallway/room structure in chunks rather than one large piece. With several small interlocking pieces much like legos, the levels can easily be built by the design team by piecing different chunks together to create any number of unique floors.

Animation was a big concern this week with two new concepts shown, the animation of the steam technology used for most any moving parts such as door locks and the jointless animation for more fluid moving pieces like the straps on Edward’s jacket. The jointless animation is a code-based animation that doesn’t rely on individual frames, allowing for a more fluid and natural looking movement for pieces like fabric straps or hair.

The personalities for the 3 other forms have been further developed and are now more specific to their abilities and weaknesses, allowing for more of the level design to be closely developed to play to those elements. While combat is still not a major focus, the design team can now build level structure, puzzles and enemy behavior around these new strengths and weaknesses for each personality.

Paper prototypes are being used now to test enemy and environment interaction and how it effects Edward’s sanity. The team created a small calculation program that tracks the insanity levels and notes which personality is currently out to help ease the process of constantly adjusting the variables.

The Chain Game Project
“Traverse the afterlife as a tethered team”

Scheduling has been updated into MS Project with sprints 1 and 2 completely loaded in and the rest ready to be imported. This replaces the old method and will help better track how the scheduling works for the team’s goals. Sprint 2 ended on Wednesday and the team is ramping up for the start of the newly organized sprint 3.

The setting is updated from a cave-like afterlife to a sort of morbid, run-down amusement park where the ‘employees’ are the ride operators and the souls there are the park guests. The rides embody new twists on punishments in the afterlife, such as a roller coaster that constantly runs so the riders eventually succumb to constant vomiting. As the players will be more of “employees” of the park, they will be able to see a lot of the behind the scenes areas like the scaffolding and backstage areas, rather than the normal area the souls see. The basic environment has been created in Maya as a 3D rendered design to help develop the decision on the chain ability as well as the character scale and environment design.

The chain abilities are narrowed down to allow for at least one to get into the final game with room to expand to more if time allows. The five choices the team is down to are skeleton whip, body sled, kick propulsion, over the head hammer, and ceiling/wall anchor. Some are travel-based while others are combat-based. To make their decision, the team is looking at which one represents their game emotions best, which are “morbid and humorous” and also programmatically which ability is most apt to be implemented.

One of the other challenges the team has tackled this week was the notion of “game over” in their world. If they fall off a cliff in to the abyss, what happens? Instead of a traditional “you lose a life, you restart at the checkpoint or beginning of the level” they have been playing with the idea of exact respawn where the players fall back down to the spot where they missed the jump. Several other humorous, morbid “deaths” and “rebirths” have been pitched as well.

Some other things coming up during brainstorming meetings have been the notion of voice chat to allow players in different rooms to have a better cooperative play experience. The chain will be both a help and a hindrance to the players, so communicating to your partner will be key to completing the level.

Now that the setting is decided, the character concepts are also now defined with a short, skeletal being in an oversized hoodie as the reaper intern and a taller, plain sort of girl as the misplaced mortal. The contrast again plays to the theme of the game and they were decided on by majority vote of the team members. Both characters have been sketched out and modeling and rigging have begun on the reaper. A demo of some of the effects that can be done to the reaper model was shown where he can be squished and stretched.

Prototyping has gone beyond computers and paper and effected the team in real life. Two of the team members, Carl and Carlos, spent the day chained to each other in an effort to see how much of a bother it was to be chained to another person. They were able to better understand how impulsive you can be in a day when you automatically go up to move somewhere. The weight of a chain on your wrist was also an odd feeling for them and made everyday things like moving your mouse or eating slightly different. Other traditional prototypes are looking toward lego-built environments, placing dummy assets in flash or Panda3D environments.

"Sultans of Scratch"
This game was pitched with the first instance of FIEA having two dance crews come in and battle before the cohort. At first glance the game looks like a cross between Pokemon and Dance Dance Revolution where futuristic DJs control android dancers to execute devastating dance moves against their opponents. Players can choose their custom DJ avatar and pick from a variety of android dancers each with their own unique style and moves. The animation will focus heavily on motion captured dancers and will almost guarantee several guest actors being brought into FIEA’s studio to record their moves.

Art concepts shown during the pitch were very urban, graffiti style art with the DJs shown in several unique styles from raver to rap. Dancer androids embodied all sorts of styles including punk, hip-hop, and break dancers. The concept environment was set in an urban wasteland style almost junkyard where the DJs have used spare parts to construct their robotic dance crew. This project should give the artists a variety of styles to work with as well as opportunity for several different modeling challenges and character types.

Cohort 5 enters pre-production!

2009-01-21T11:51:00.007-05:00

Early December FIEA’s 5th Cohort presented 10 game pitches to the students, faculty, staff and guests for consideration for the second semester pre-production projects. Of those 10 games, 4 were chosen to begin pre-production in January and teams were built around them each consisting of at least 2 artists and programmers and 3 producers. As of January 7th, pre-production has begun on what will become FIEA’s next batch of produced game titles. These projects have two more hurdles to overcome before they’re truly put into production, an early February checkpoint where 1-3 games will be dropped and teams reassigned, and the Spring Break final, where the final round of cuts will be made. The games that survive through the break will become the final projects that enter production and will become the focus of Cohort 5’s remaining spring semester and summer semester.

Each week the teams have to report in with their progress status in a pair of open meetings with a presentation to their fellow teams and professors. These status meetings allow the entire cohort to know what’s going on with each game’s pre-production and also lets our professors keep track of how teams are doing and which games are progressing to a viable point of production. Each week we will be covering the updates for the teams right here, so you can see the process of a game from concept to creation!

Drifters
Drifters is a multiplayer networked game for 2-8 players set in a subway station. A “drifter” is an ancient being of energy able to transfer between human hosts. Over time, the more powerful drifters have killed each other off, leaving only the 8 most powerful alive to this day. Your goal as a drifter is to use your ability to transfer into host bodies and defeat the other drifters by killing them when they are in a body too far from another host, rendering them unable to jump bodies and leaving them vulnerable for you to absorb their power.

Currently, the team has produced a working demo of the environment and populated it with a character as well as several AI. The body jumping mechanic is functional and they have some ambient sound in the environment as well. The animations have been captured with FIEA’s in-house motion capture studio and the main male model has been created, rigged, and a base clothing texture applied.

Artistically, the team has developed concept art for how the drifter “aura” will look on the host, as well as concepts for the subway station architecture. Over 30 animations were captured in their MoCap sessions including walk cycles, attack animations, and death states. The color palette for the environment was chosen and visual guides started.

The complete fiction has been fleshed out and a very detailed schedule laid out for the pre-production process. Pipelines have been started and a control scheme developed for both PC keyboard and Xbox 360 controller.
The team is using the SCRUM development method and finished their first sprint today. They are utilizing a post-sprint survey method to evaluate their progress and make changes to their workflow to make sure morale continues to be good and everyone on the team is working to the best of their ability.

Delirium
Delirium is a single-player steampunk horror game set in a Victorian-era insane asylum where you play as Edward, a patient with multiple personality disorder, who is attempting to escape. The various personalities the player adopts as his insanity fluctuates will allow Edward to solve various puzzles and clear obstacles as he progresses through the asylum halls. As his insanity increases, the environment will appear distorted and alter his progression.

Currently, the team presented an in-game demo of their custom shader created to saturate and desaturate the environment, as well as a demo of the object deformation. Camera deformation was also shown, using a dolly-zoom to create an elongated hallway effect. All effects shown were procedure based and able to be controlled within the code to react to the player interactions.

Artistically, the environmental style has been developed in accordance to a style of asylum common in the latter half of the 19th century called Kirkbride. The main character concepts have been sketched out with a gritty sort of visual style to add to the style of the gameplay. Level design is being worked on using paper prototypes.

The gameplay is focusing on more of a puzzle aspect rather than combat, as the use of the personalities is a key focus to the fiction and gameplay mechanic. The target is now to try and teach the player to avoid combat and focus more on the control of their sanity level to bring out certain personalities to pass various scenarios they may encounter.

For their development method, the team is also using SCRUM but using a “burn-down” chart method where they have very detailed graphs of individual progress of teams and their members that mirror the milestones in each sprint.

The Chain Game Project
Identified currently as “the chain game” this game project was created around the main mechanic: a team of players are tethered together with a chain and must overcome obstacles and navigate out of an area. Once the project was green-lit, the team was tasked with coming up with an appropriate fiction to justify the chaining and create an exciting and appropriate environment in which to place the scenario. The original setting was placed in a futuristic sci-fi world and was quickly denounced by the rest of the team as being one of the most stale genres to place such games in. After more brainstorming and concepting, the team settled on an afterlife world where a mortal has accidentally died and been sent to the afterlife in their physical body. An intern reaper is then assigned to be chained to them and help them escape the realm and back to the world of the living.

The art style is looking to be set at a semi-cartoonish, macabre sort of style with a dark yet still colorful palette. Environmentally, the underworld is looking to be a cave-like world with skeletal décor, but not leaning toward heaven or hell as a theme and keeping a more ambiguous, purgatory feel.

The team is the largest of the 4 due to the mechanic’s unique and advanced concept and they are already planning for expansion in the future with a “ramp-up document”. This document is sort of the FAQ manual for the project and will allow for new team members to quickly be brought up to speed on the project. The document, along with their wiki board, also serves as a good at-a-glance portal for current team members to refresh their knowledge of the game’s development.

One of the biggest challenges of the project is the chain physics, being worked on with PhysX. With the chain acting almost as a third player, it had to be dynamically reactive to the movement of the two players as well as the contact it has with anything else in the environment, feats that could potentially cause severe lag issues with frame rates and rendering. So far, the team has in-game a chain segment that reacts independently of an animation cycle and relies on code functionality for movement. As the development continues, they will be decreasing the length and object count to create a reduced but functional version for in-game use.

Resonance
“It’s like Guitar Hero with a gun” is one of the ways Resonance was described when originally pitched. Once in pre-production, the mechanic was altered slightly and the fiction strengthened to begin its early stages of development. Resonance is a first person shooter in which the player uses his weapon to harness sound waves in his environment to charge his gun and use as ammunition. The property of sound resonance is a big factor in the game and the environment will react dynamically with the force of sound waves acting upon certain objects such as glass. The main player’s assault on the Jericho Company is due to their kidnapping of his girlfriend and his hatred of the evil corporation is all he needs as motivation to bring the entire company to its knees.

Early weapon and character concepts showed the design of the sound absorbing gun and charge meters, as well as set the realistic style for the artwork. The environment is a large, corporate office building with a bit of an industrial/military presence.

Sound is obviously a large part of the game, not only as far as soundtrack and ambiance goes, but mainly with the actual combat and level navigation. One mechanic discussed was the enemy use of sound prevention fields that would absorb the sound in the room, rendering the player unable to fight and acting almost as a life system.

Happy Holidays at FIEA!

2009-01-08T11:19:00.003-05:00

While a lot of FIEA may seem like all work and no play (and far be that from the truth, most of the time our work IS play), that doesn't mean we don't take time to enjoy things like the holidays.

A FIEA tradition each cohort is privy to is the annual Halloween party at director Ben Noel's house. FIEA students past and present are invited to take part in this spooky celebration that features food, costume and pumpkin contests, and a live DJ. This year probably saw a turnout of around 60-80 people and will continue to grow with each new cohort. We may have to switch venues soon!

Thanksgiving was next on the agenda and while most FIEAns had the luxury of spending it with family, those who weren't able to gathered at Jon's house for a FIEA Feast! With a bring-your-own dish potluck dinner and plenty of video games to go around, it was a great way to spend the holiday and still pass out from a turkey coma.

The winter holidays lit up the main hall of the FIEA building with our very own Christmas tree:

Our final Rapid Prototype class of the semester was an awards ceremony complete with Santa Ron and his big bag of toys for the award winners. After watching the Cohort 4 internship presentations, those who opted in on the Secret Santa gift exchange gathered 'round the tree to see what kind of loot they got:

Of course, holidays aren't the only reason FIEA students gather to celebrate. Post-Prototype rounds are often celebrated by a trip downtown to unwind after a Monday final presentation. New TV show premiers, opening nights of movies, and game release parties are all common occurrences in the FIEA "entertainment" room. There's never an excuse needed to grab a few friends and hang out for a bit when you need a break from work, and there's no exception at FIEA!

Cohort 5 completes their 5th round of prototypes

2008-12-09T11:05:00.004-05:00

Cohort 5 has completed and presented their final round of prototype games. This round was a polished build on a previously designed game with a 3-week time frame, rather than 2 as usual. It was both a help and a challenge to work with existing game components, as we did have a starting frame of reference, but also had to deal with the nuances of using someone else's raw files. Luckily, our programmer was also the programmer of the original game, so he knew his own code, but our artists were tasked with the challenge of working with someone else's models and animations.

Our final build featured 4 objectives: talk to the roof mouse and obtain the acorn bomb, find the informant mouse in the warehouse, take back the nut diamond from Big Ratsy's safe, and escape the building. Overall the game evolved more story without getting cluttered and boring and enhanced gameplay. While the original was story and sneaking, the polished version included a bit more of a combat mechanic with the acorn bomb.

With Darrell's help we managed to get the buttons on the splash screen updated and transparent, so that whole screen was a total revamp and I think looks awesome.

I did a 2nd version of the credits which was a bit more cleaned up and uniform, as well as the new credits for voice acting. I managed to steal Carl for 15 minutes to record the new mice dialogue tracks that I wrote and then exported those out after deciding if we wanted a nervous informant or a French one.

Ryan's work on the intro movie did a great job of getting the story across without boring the player. This was a change we made after the first iteration where the story was told in a longer format and was too much text to deal with. He also picked up on an oversight with the end screens where they didn't fit with the rest of the game, so he gave those the newspaper treatment as well.

Kait and Katie did a great job updating the animations, even with how difficult the originals were to work with. The updates to the textures, as well as a few extra ambiance pieces like the posters really helped add to the Film Noir feel. Their additional renders of Big Ratsy, his office, and the mice were also well suited to fit the environment.

Overall, our only issues we discussed as being "needs improvement" were that we needed to be a bit more organized and have clearer goals set. Play testing more would have been a good idea as well, as the enemy placement needed some tweaking to give more of a controlled challenge.

As for positives, it went over really well, we caught all the major bugs before presentation so it didn't crash, the redone animations worked very well, and the expansion of the story and additional game mechanics expanded the game without cluttering it.

My final contributions:
- Redesigned the splash screen and buttons
- Wrote the fake newspaper text
- Created a credits reel
- Altered the safe texture to desaturate the red text
- Wrote the mice's dialogue
- Recorded the mice's vocals, mixed and exported

Overall, I'd say we polished this one pretty well. I could see presenting this as a single level of a game with multiple 'cases' that Squirle has to go on during his quest to finally put Big Ratsy behind bars. We had discussed wanting a boss battle, and I'd see a final showdown between BR and Squirle as just that.

More progress on the final RPP round

2008-12-04T19:43:00.004-05:00

This week was a heavy crunch week for producers, as we were finishing up our Design for Media projects (development documents for existing games). I was down to the wire editing my group's document, but we got it in on time, so that's one down and one to go. Now I can focus completely on round 5 which is due Monday...

After our second interim we had throwing implemented, as well as a "boss lair" complete with boss and the objective (nut diamond) hidden within a safe. After some assessment of our progress, time, and objectives with the game, we decided to finalize the plan as thus:

The player will begin on the roof and talk to a mouse informant who tells them his buddy is downstairs with the code to Big Ratsy's safe, where the Nut Diamond is being held. The player can pick up an acorn item to throw at the rats within the air vents and warehouse to stun them and get to Big Ratsy's office. Once they find the other mouse in the warehouse, they can go into the office and unlock the safe, grabbing the Nut Diamond and setting the alarms off. If they can make it to the exit doors without getting caught, they win.

We're recording some new dialogue for the mice and removing some of the old dialogue, as this was a 'story' game previously and was a bit heavy on the extraneous dialogue.

Recently I cleaned up the splash screen at the start of the game:

That involved creating some background images such as the crumpled newspaper:

I also did a preliminary credits reel using images mainly from the first iteration of the game:

I'm working on a second final version for the end build using the updated screenshots as well as adding vocal credits if we decide to have the mouse dialogue audible. We're also looking at the level design to see if we want to change up some of the barrier items inside to add a little variety and also to make sure it's balanced with the new acorn mechanic.

Team 4 - Arcane Furor

2008-11-26T17:39:00.002-05:00

Hey all,
The fifth and final round of rapid prototyping for the semester is upon us. This round our goal is to polish a game we created in a previous round. Our team from round three enjoyed working together and created an all around fun game in Arcane Furor so we reformed our team. We had a lot of design ideas were weren’t able to get into the game on the first go around along with various challenges we simply did not have time to fix.

Our programmers jumped strait in and refactored the code. This fixed a big memory issue we had during round three that restricted us from adding some additional features. The programmers have also added in the ability to select the number of players. They have also added in game states including menu, game, and pause states allowing us to add in GUI system which is one of our main goals for this round.

Our artist has also done some fixing of his own. He has expanded the number of character models from one to four and the models are currently being tweaked to have more contrast with each other. He is also working to create two additional levels. Each level will incorporate its own unique feature such as level deterioration.

Our producers have done their share of work as well. We did initial design work to find what features would add to our current game and were within our scope. This round is about polish so we are making some minor additions while still focusing on making the game look and play at its best. Tom has already upgraded all the particle effects associated with the various spells. I am in charge of organizing the team including scheduling meetings, recording meeting minutes and maintaining team communication. I have been working primarily on the GUI including designing the menu structure and functionality and developing the assets for the GUI. I have also done some minor coding including adding additional controller functionality and creating additional build configurations.

Things I have done:
Designed menu structure and functionality
Minor code changes (additional controller functionality, added build configurations)
Created team schedule
Recorded meeting minutes

Until next time,
Reid

Final polish round for Cohort 5

2008-11-24T16:50:00.002-05:00

For round 5 we're polishing a previously created game and our programmer Darrell convinced us to continue work on his round 2 project, Dick Squirle: Private Investigator.

The original gameplay relied heavily on audio clues to tell you what was going on and the mechanic was to explore the rats' hideout and retrieve the diamond without being caught by the rat henchmen. You could walk normally or use a sneak feature that allowed you to pass by the rats at a closer radius without them being alerted to your presence. The level began on the rooftop where you listened to dialogue between two rats, then you climbed down an airduct and traveled through the duct maze until you dropped out into the warehouse. From there, you snuck around crates of TNT, avoiding drawing the attention of the randomly placed rat henchmen, and eventually you'd find the stolen diamond, pick it up, and the exit door would unlock to end the level.

The flaws we found were that the sneak mechanic was a bit tedious and didn't offer any alternative way to navigate the level. So our first addition to the gameplay was to add a throwing mechanism where we could throw two different projectiles, cheese (to lure enemies) or acorns (to stun them on impact). Also in the original version the nut diamond was just sitting out in the open and once you picked it up, an alarm would sound and you had to get to the warehouse doors. We wanted to actually include Big Ratsy as a "boss" character, so we're making the doors lead to his lair rather than the game over screen.

The game originally started with the newspaper scene telling the Nut Diamond was stolen, Dick Squirle is on the case, etc. and then just dropped the player on the roof with little to no direction. We decided to remove the ambient dialogue of the two rat henchmen on the roof and replace that all with a mouse informant standing near the air duct.

Kait's mouse model, complete with jaunty cap

Upon approach he'll tell Dick the first part of the boss' password and tell him what to do next. This will lead the player down the air duct maze and eventually down into the warehouse.

The original level design

The warehouse was determined to be too bland and needed some variety, which upon analysis was seen to be too much of a linear maze - something we already had in the air duct area. So we're working on retexturing some of the crates and walls to make them pop a little more, some additional objects (barrels, signs on the walls), and improving the lighting. The diamond will also not be just sitting out in the open, but rather once the player finds the other 3 mice with the pieces of the password to the boss' office, they will enter the office door and confront Big Ratsy who holds the diamond.

I've taken up the task of redesigning the menu screens and doing the credit reel, using a Film Noir motif for it all to keep the theme of the game. I'm also going to work on the sound design a bit more as well as modeling some of the warehouse items.

Airfoil with lift

2008-11-14T16:30:00.006-05:00

Fluid flow past an airfoil.

Any ideas for how to use this in a game?

Maybe a puzzle game where you have to get a paper airplane to strike a target...?

Final Thoughts on Wall E

2008-11-14T12:11:00.006-05:00

ASSIGNMENT
Wall E:Eve's Garden was made in exactly 2 weeks time by a team of five people. There were two producers, one programmer, and two artist's working on this project. The goal was to use an existing intellectual property(IP for short) to make a game that utilizes indirect control. Using indirect control, developers can give players the illusion that they have lots of freedom to explore,when really they don't.

OVERVIEW
Our IP assignment was Wall_E. We decided to design our game around both the IP and the demographic it targets. Specifically, the demographic we targeted was children ages 10 & up. Thus, our controls & puzzle's were only as complex as the demographic required. Once Steve and I finished the level design we separated into two teams to complete the game. The programming team consisted of Victor and myself. Victor designed the games architecture and then delegated me programming task's. Steve, Carlos and Katie made up our art team. Katie did all the character modeling while Carlos and Steve did the environmental modeling.

MY CONTRIBUTION
For this round, I played the role of both a designer and programmer. As a designer, I collaborated with Steve to create the core mechanic's and level design. Our level design was challenging because we had to implement indirect control. The two tools we used to create indirect control was orientation and line of sight. By starting the player off facing a specific direction, we were able focus their attention toward the first important location in the level. Using boxes to block the players view, we directed them in direction's we wanted them to visit.
As a programmer, i learned how to use XNA's audio authoring tool [called XACT] to create sound files called "cue's". I them implemented the code that allowed the engine to read the "cue's". I also wrote the code that allowed our roach character [Hal], to travel through cracks in the walls. I accomplished this by using collision sphere's as "triggers" to let me know when Hal was about to collide with a crack; then i reset Hal's position to the corresponding crack. Lastly, I created spatial sound triggers that allowed certain sound's to be played when the player is at a specific area of the level.

AGILE MANAGEMENT
Just as i did last round, i again implemented agile management techniques using SCRUM. Since RPP is very short on time with very small teams, i tailored SCRUM so that it would be most beneficial to my teams situation. The heart of SCRUM is the daily meetings during which each team member answers three questions. These questions are meant to "synchronize" the team so that everyone knows what each other is doing. Every day at noon we held our 15min daily meetings.

CONCLUSION
Wall E was warmly accepted as our IP on day one, and we all embraced it during the two weeks. The end result was a polished game with a fun mechanic and enticing sound. We were fortunate to have such a talented, well balanced team. Carlos, Katie, and Steve worked very diligently on the art assets. Our characters and environment not only look great, but they truly capture the feel of the IP. Victor is very talented and extremely determined; he accomplished everything asked of him and more. I would happily work with any of them again. Great job Victor, Carlos, Katie and Steve.

Rapid Prototype - Post Mortem - Round 4

2008-11-13T20:24:00.006-05:00

Hey all,
Cohort 5 has just completed the fourth round (out of five) in our rapid prototyping class. This round we had two constraints. We had to work with an intellectual property (IP) and we had to use indirect control. Below is my team's post mortem for this round.

What Went Right
Indirect Control
Our goal for this round was indirect control and we met that goal. We were always aware of this goal and worked to design the game using indirect control. It turned out to be a bigger challenge then we initially thought. Our indirect control planning only took us so far. It was only through constant testing using different people and observing what they actually did that we were able to figure out what actually worked.

Pipeline
We established a solid asset pipeline early. Everyone knew what they were responsible for and keep the team abreast throughout development. The team worked together to make sure everyone knew how to use the tools relating to their assigned assets, sharing what we learned along the way.

Communication
As a team, we worked together to build a solid line of communication. We only had a few meetings and we kept them short and to the point. Each team member always knew what each person was working on and who to talk to if they needed information, assets or encounter a problem.

What Went Wrong
Overly Complex Puzzle
We designed a puzzle that was more complex then it needed to be. Our puzzle used the vertical space in our mall environment and many of our testers simply did not think or realize to use that vertical space. As a result, it was difficult to communicate how the player was supposed to complete the puzzle.

Complex Controls
Our controls were complicated and confusing. While we made sure our controls for movement were natural, our controls for grappling and defusing the bomb were confusing. We worked to address the learning curve by exposing the player to the controls only once they were needed and kept them readily available. Unfortunately, this wasn't wasn’t enough. In retrospective, we should have spent more time finding a control scheme that was simple and felt natural.

Got Ahead of Ourselves
We worked hard to have a good showing at interim but lost momentum afterwards. We were able to get ahead of schedule and as a result, we unintentionally slowed momentum for a few days. The momentum picked back up toward the end of the second week once we realized what had happened but it took some time to ramp back up. We should have maintained the momentum by pushing each other. It would have allowed us extra time to polish the game and fix a few issues we simply did not get a chance to address.

Closing Thoughts
Despite hitting a few bumps along the way, the team worked well together and we met our assigned goal. We were able to use indirect control to predict what a brand new player was going to do at a few key points in our game. We build a solid asset pipeline along with establishing and maintaining communication between the team members. Unfortunately one of the main aspects of the game, our bomb puzzle, was more difficult then we intended due in part to confusing controls. Not to mention the fact that the puzzle itself ended up being too complicated for the average player. Overall, Batman: Maniac Mall was great learning experience and a blast to develop.

Rapid Prototypes - Working with an existing IP

2008-11-13T13:25:00.002-05:00

Cohort 5 just finished their 4th round of Rapid Prototype Production where each team of 5-6 members was handed an existing Intellectual Property (IP) to create a game around. This meant that we already had artwork to base our design off and fiction to work with, making the game design easier in some respects but harder in others. The following is documentation of one team's work over a 2-week period on this round of projects, as seen through the eyes of a producer:

Our IP is Avatar: The Last Airbender and my first task was to get a better grasp on the subject material. So, 8-10 episodes later I’m remembering the little bit I knew about the series and have a pretty good feel for what elements make for an interesting game. We also made sure to take into consideration the idea of indirect control within the gameplay.

Our first meetings were spent learning about everyone’s strengths, weaknesses, and passions as well as their needs for assignments. After discussing the possibility of the Wii balance board with the Wiimote as a control scheme, and TorqueX, we ended up deciding on normal-flavor Torque. Our game mechanic evolved from a temple exploration game, to a balancing pole game, to a flying game, and finally we reached a decision on an obstacle course/gauntlet challenge.

While doing my IP research, we were still on the idea of a flying game, so I mindmapped the various nuances of flight in Avatar:

The hows, wheres and whys of flight in the Avatar world

So now I’m working on designing a obstacle course layout, and playing with the ideas of how to use the 4 bending elements in gameplay effectively.

Work done so far:

Gained familiarity with the IP (read: watched cartoons)
Worked with Brian and Darrell on a plan for the gameplay
Discussed art styles and needs with Pam and Lauren
Analyzed concerns with the other team members in regards to workflow and assignments
Came to agreement on what is needed for Monday

---------------------

Our interim presentation went very well. We had the Aang model in the environment and a basic temple structure in place. Aang can do the fire and water bending attacks, as well as a boosted air jump, so our mechanics were well in place. When mentioning the puzzles Ron suggested we concentrate on that and make them really reflect the use of the different elements. Currently in our design, which can be seen here:

Preliminary level design

We have a multi-chambered level with 4 elemental chambers, a central chamber, and a training corridor. The air chamber is tranquil and acts as a starting/ending point, as air benders are more peaceful and non-combative. The fire chamber is combative and intense, as are fire bending skills, while the earth chamber is more catastrophic and destructive. The water chamber, even though we are using an offensive water bending attack in the gameplay, is a puzzle chamber to reflect on the reserved nature of the water bending tribes. Upon hearing the idea of the puzzle chamber, Ron suggested we concentrate on that puzzle aspect and make use of the unique properties of the 4 elements to solve those puzzles.

I am now reviewing the various powers and coming up with ideas for puzzles that would require a specific bending technique to solve them. Some of my ideas are scanned below.

Some water bending puzzle ideas

Some fire bending puzzle ideas

I think for the purposes of a prototype of this game, we should do one large chamber that has a different puzzle for each element to solve. That way we can illustrate how the different elements can be used to solve puzzles and the puzzles can be shown as examples of obstacles that could be put in place should we build a more expansive level.

------------------------

Final build is done, amazing, and it’s only 5:30! Today was spent implementing sounds, finishing the AI, and testing.

Since my last post, I finished up all the game sounds (which I would normally preview here, but I don’t think .ogg files work with our blog), modeled and textured a Pai Sho piece as our in-game pickup, and I managed to at least get the attack sounds to work in the script, but couldn’t get the BGM to work. I figured it was just my novice programming skills against me, but Darrell had some struggles with it too, so I don’t feel quite so bad. He’s awesome, though, and got it working, so all is well.

I’m really proud of the Pai Sho piece:

I can't believe I actually did this...

I knew making the physical model was simple, just a cylinder flipped around to the side. But I had never tried to do a texture map before from scratch (I just modded a sample file for my donut in Intro, and my vehicle was just colored, not textured). So I sat down with the Maya tutorial files and battled my way through it. Luckily I had vectored out the White Lotus symbol way early in the production stage, so I had that readily available. Here’s the flat texture:

This may not look like much, but it's impressive to me

And the white lotus symbol I vectored out before finally got some good use:

Basically redrawn by hand from a reference image, easily scaled

-------------------

The game presentation went very well and overall, we were pleased with the end product. After the presentations, our group met to discuss how we felt it all went. We came up with the following:

- 90% of the audience agreed, they knew that the balls were supposed to go on the pedistal.
- Everything we wanted to get done was accomplished
- Troubleshooting went well, when things didn’t work we powered through them
- Torque was a good choice for our mechanics, Constructor worked out well for our environment (saved us on size)

Things we would change:
- Animation for flight, maybe the air sphere Aang rides on
- Color code or illuminate the ball/pedestal puzzle so it’s more obvious

And, a final list of my contributions:
- Researched IP, developed game mechanics and puzzles
- Kept running updates on changes and level design
- Designed temple puzzles (some of which weren’t used)
- Modeled and textured Pai Sho piece
- Developed all sounds and implemented weapon/character sounds in game code

Vortex splitting

2008-07-27T22:18:00.005-04:00

Vortices which separated now spawn new particles, maintaining a contiguous thread of them.
Have a look.

See you at SIGgraph.

Fluid simulation update: SIGgraph 2008 poster

2008-06-25T14:32:00.009-04:00

SIGgraph 2008 accepted my poster and I've prepared source material for it. Jon Tran and Todd Deery are working on the actual poster and Jon's first few passes at it look great. I'll provide a link to the PDF when it's ready for public consumption.

Meanwhile here are some new movies.

Heading into Production

2008-05-08T12:42:00.003-04:00

Hello good people,

I know it has been a long time since I last penned some words about the industry. There are so many things that happened in FIEA and the Interactive Entertainment industry.

First off, Take Two's Rockstar label launched Grand Theft Auto IV. I know that announcement did not need to be made on this blog, but it is big news. The first weeks sales eclipsed the sales of Halo 3 with $500 million, thus making it the highest-grossing opening week of any entertainment property. As we patiently waited for the release of GTAIV, EA was courting a buyout of Take-Two for a couple of billion. The negotiations came to a halt as the launch day came closer and closer. Now, I wonder will EA still entertain a buyout of Take-Two while they are riding high on the GTA drug or will they wait for the high to come down before opening up discussions, again? We know all the publishers out there want a Rockstar on their team, who will be the first to get one? Enough about the industry, let's talk about two games that are changing it-- Zephyr and Meat Mechanics.

Our preproduction stage came to a close late April. The presentations were excellent. The Meat Mechanics came in with a heavy hitting, body slamming, death match presentation. Their presentation was similar to watching an episode of WWE Smackdown! They showed off their real-time strategy game in real-time. They also created a real-time strategy game for your ADD gamer and gamers that dislike violent games. For the first time, I said this may be an RTS that seems really fun before playing it for myself.

Next, Team Zephyr was up to bat with a sky high final pre-production presentation. As the presentation snowballed into an action-packed climax, I thought about how much blood, sweat, tears, and sleepless nights that the team's producers, artists, and programmers put into the game during the semester. Zephyr's leadership pushed us through to the finish line. But, credit has to go to those team members that accept the vision and plow through the work to make it a reality.

Now, for some more rules.

RULE 4: Good leadership is important, but followership is more important.
Once the team completely aligned with the leadership, we were able to make miracles happen. As we struggled through the vision, the team was able to focus on a single course of action and make it happen. Everyone wanted to present a good prototype and demonstration of the game. The team learned to put all their differences and problems to the side to concentrate not only on the game, but the presentation. For once, meetings felt essential in order to deliver a fun prototype. The team was measuring every step and hoping the best result came from every decision.

Extra kudos to the programmers for sleeplessly working in the cohort space to make sure the game was worth viewing during the final presentation.

RULE 5: A combination of passion, planning, and action is the fuel to overcome ALL obstacles.
I know this sounds like common sense. But, you will be surprised how many people in the world do not use all three to overcome obstacles. Most people believe planning and action are enough to overcome obstacles; however, without passion they never overcome the obstacle because they do not care about the goal. People that are passionately active without planning become too broad and not focused on achieving their goals, thus never making it to the finish line. We all know what happens to those that only passionately dream without action. They wither away with time. So, the correct balance of all three is necessary for success.

RULE 6: Use success for momentum to conquer higher goals and not to celebrate. This is not the time to celebrate. The successful completion of pre-production empowers action in production. It is too early in the game to celebrate. Both teams need to take the feedback from the higher powers and hone in on fixing our mistakes and striving for success. If we celebrate now, we are bound to lose momentum and potentially fail. Nothing is perfect, but we should strive for perfection. One battle doesn't end a war. Both teams are not only in a war to complete an enjoyable and fun game, but in war with the other student games currently being produced at other institutions.

This enough for one entry, I'll be back next week to deliver the highlights from the Production kick-off.

Campfire with smoke

2008-04-29T11:12:00.009-04:00

I added another test case for my fluid simulation.

Thanks to Max Acree for the campfire model.

Semester 2 - Post Mortem

2008-04-27T12:16:00.005-04:00

Semester two has come to a close and a big congratulation belongs to team Zephyr. Their vertical slice dominated the vertical slice presentation. That's not to say that my own team, team M.E.A.T. did not meet expectations, simply that we got beat out. After talking it over with others on my team we've decided that we could either lick our wounds or we fight harder to raise the bar. We elected the latter.

This semester has been a whirlwind of excitement. From the beginning more has been asked of us than ever before. While some management decisions resulted in about a month of lost programming hours on our team, it did result in a well thought-out programming architecture and heavily researched approach. It also exposed us to new ways to think as a result to the classes of FIEA. While some of the programmers think it was a month lost, I can't help but wonder if our architecture (which has resulted in much praise on our own behalf and amazing results later in the game) would have been as well planned out. I dare say it would not have been, and our development time would have been littered with game-stopping delays.

I owe it to Sean McVey to say that he's done a wonderful job modding the scene designer to work with the terrain manager which was designed for the game. Although in retrospect we have identified this decision as one of the bigger mistakes of our team. We invested a huge amount of time into the terrain system on all ends, and we have been receiving feedback that “the artists could have done it better”. While this is usually the case, and probably is the case in this particular instance we wanted to free the artists of the level design burden and give that to the producers where it belongs. Doing the terrain programmatically also allowed us more control of terrain at the programming level and simplified our path-finding algorithms. I suspect that our post mortem at the end of the project will rip to shreds the time spent on the terrain manager, and in a future project of this scale it might elect to have the artists work more closely with the designers to generate levels. Although with our current solution if we decide to have more than the proposed two maps our producers will be in a good position to crank out a ton of them.

I'd also like to do a shout out to the other programmers on my team (Paul Watkins and our Lead Billy Bramer). It has been an incredibly stressful semester and it helps to have a support line of like-minded individuals. It is even better when you've developed what will prove to be lifelong friendships with the guys you've spent a year of your life "In the trenches" with. Stressful or not I'd like to believe we've all grown, and that in the end the semester was successful and well worth the effort expended. If even one of us dropped the ball, I would be writing a very different post mortem.

As a team, as a whole, the necessary comraderie has been missing to produce the best possible game. A lot of blame was flying around at the end of the presentation and I think we all owe it to ourselves to take a step back and ask the question if we are treating the other team members the way they should be treated. I know that I have managed to subconsciously treat some individuals less than they deserve, and I intend on working on that over the next semester.

I also think we as a team need to reflect on ourselves and verify that we gave everything we could to our project, our team and retrospectively to our education. Speaking for myself, I can happily (although somewhat wearily) state that I have given it my all.

Lastly, just because I have to give a warning to all other future FIEA programming students; Dr. Gourlay is not half as scary as he appears to be, but his assignments are ten times as vicious. Stick to it, don't fall behind, and by the end you'll be proud of what you accomplished.

Astonishing April

2008-04-18T12:06:00.004-04:00

I got a big surprise this week. The powers that be here at n-Space elevated me to the position of lead designer. I'm now in operational control of my entire design team and in creative control of the game. For those of you not keeping count, this happened about a year and a month since my first day at the company.

Making video games for a living at a great company with great people is about as close as you can get to "the dream." Actually being in charge of the whole operation is that much closer. It's a real thrill -- and a real change from my usual duties -- but I'm confident that I'll be able to get the job done.

All of my superiors were incredibly supportive and encouraging when I was given the position. But the greatest compliment is from everyone else -- my day-to-day coworkers. Upon receiving the news, they immediately started treating me as though I'd been lead designer all along. There were no jokes, or jabs, or smart remarks, or expressions of disbelief. It was simply business as normal. I felt really appreciative of that.

Exciting times!

Tree-based far-field interactions

2008-02-28T15:12:00.006-05:00

I added tree-based far-field interactions.

I provided two movies: pretty and nifty.

This diagram tries to explain how the influence algorithm works. Obviously I need to throw more words at that, which of course I will do in the near future. Stay tuned!

A Difference a Day of Production Can Make

2008-02-21T16:59:00.002-05:00

Team Awesome is almost halfway through the Pre-Production phase of our final game project. I am going to share some insider knowledge on our progress for the Cardinal of Zephyr , an airship battle game. Every Thursday, Team Awesome presents a status report to Executive Producer. The EP is the gatekeeper for keeping a project online. The moment he or she feels like your project is a waste of time or money, then the house of cards built by your development team will come crumbling down to fall into the fiery pits of hell.

Rule 1: Keep your Executive Producer confident in your ability to complete your game project. It may sound rudimentary, but you will be surprised how many games crash and burn because the EP has no confidence in the project.

Thus far, we have been able to successfully relay our vision of the game to the EP. Without fail, week after week, Team Awesome moves forward on Cardinal of Zephyr. Here are few more rules that I've learned by working on the best game development team this side and the other side of the Mississippi River.

Rule 2: Construct a rigid flexible schedule. Yeah, I know that sounds like an oxymoron. But, you want to make sure that your team can adhere to realistic deadlines, but flexible enough to shift dates around if necessary.

Rule 3: Trust your teammates to do what they are good at and encourage them to perfect their passions. This is quite tricky because some of your teammates may not know what they perform well. They may also assume they're distinguished at doing a task, but they are not that proficient at it. Even worse, their assumption may be their passion. This can be detrimental to the team's overall performance if this person's ability to complete the task is the weakest link. In order to avoid such misjudged mishaps, the leaders need to do a skill assessment and skill utilization management. While assigning tasks, the leaders need to zealously encourage their teammates to be passionate about what they are good at and build new passions around their strong skills. Sure, feelings may get hurt and egos may get bruised, so reiterate how important they are to the team and their skills are detrimental to the teams overall performance.

Those are enough rules for today. I'll give you some new ones in later posts.

We're back and "trying" to make a game...

2008-02-04T12:24:00.000-05:00

Semester two at FIEA has begun and it is hard to believe it is already almost four weeks in. I’ve been meaning to get to the blog since the first week, but somehow it kept getting pushed back “until I have more time”. Unfortunately as things usually work out I’m writing this blog now not because I have “more time” but because I’m just trying to get things off my plate, and this is a good place to start.

Since returning to FIEA we have been inundated with meeting requests from across the board; meetings for paper prototypes, board games, tone words, razor statements, tech challenges, feature lists, and meeting requests for presentations from industry leaders. It seems like every time I turn around a new meeting request is sitting in my inbox, and my TODO list is growing not shrinking. It wouldn’t take much for a panic attack right now, but somehow we trudge along.

Last I checked the programmers have their lives on life support and several are seriously considering pulling the plug. From what I’ve heard nobody wants to live the rest of their lives hooked up to machines like a vegetable. The latest diagnosis reads “no improvement expected over the next 9 months”. Bleak news indeed.

Somewhere in the next month or so I’ll try to keep you dedicated readers posted… All those non-dedicated readers will have to wait. Until next time!

Semester 1 Post Mortem

2007-12-08T10:49:00.000-05:00

Well it happened; we all actually survived the first semester. Somehow we all knew we would, but I think we all had our doubts too. We learned a lot and we’re becoming more and more familiar with the industry. The semester has been high stress and extremely demanding but as much blame as we can put on the teachers we can put right back on ourselves. We are perfectionists. That is why we’re here and that’s why we’re joining the industry with other perfectionists.In an effort to outdo the previous cohorts we have done many things right, as well as many things wrong.

I felt that the majority of the rapid prototyped games superseded the previous cohort’s prototypes however that was mostly due to scope. Being the novices we were at the beginning of the semester our games were hugely over scoped and not well polished. Near the end of the semester you could see as the individual teams learned; the project scopes got smaller and the final projects became more polished as a result. We also listened and cultivated Ron Weaver’s suggestions at the end of the projects. Ron has a wealth of criticism and praise. He was always more than happy to bestow his wealth on you if you’re brave enough to ask before the assignment is due. If you’re not brave enough to ask he will bestow it regardless when the assignment was turned.

The same holds true to the individual assignments given by the track teachers. I cannot speak much for the production class or art class, but in the production for media class Rick Hall had a tantalizing way of teaching. The questions he asked and the format in which he asked them echoed the industry. On more than one occasion in the middle of class he stopped teaching and broke us up into teams with a team leader, and elements from each track. He would then ask us for a task that might be asked in the industry. He would give us a chance to go through the thoughts on our own and guide us away from dangerous and time consuming conversations that can usually be overlooked. This too helped mold us over the past semester. We’re better at culling the scope of projects, as well as focusing in on the topics of importance when prompted with a broad and ambiguous problem.

Although I have mentioned the competitive nature from cohort 4 to cohort 3 and that we always want to outdo the previous cohort, some teachers take it one step further. For the first half of the semester Tom (the programming track teacher) held programming competitions against the programmers for the assignments due. What the winner would win would change, but it was always worth the effort. In addition near the end of the semester we were forwarded the opportunity to work on a simple two-week game in C++. Tom gave us a very simple OpenGL framework and we were told to plan out a game. We all split up into 2 programmer teams and pitched our ideas to tom. Upon approval we began developing the game. Three of the teams took the network approach while the other three did not. In the end these games were ported to the (original) Xbox, and most of them added in a multiplayer element, although none of them utilized the Xbox Secure Network Library (SNL). Were forced to learn and work through the problems on our own, as we would in the industry. We learned a lot through the porting process.

Throughout the semester we have been graced with presentations by various industry leaders (organized through great effort of the FIEA staff).

Our last presentation was by Steve Derrick of Vicarious Visions (owned by Activision). Although he did not know much about the Activision-Blizzard merger he did offer a vital answer when asked “How much of an edge a Master’s program like FIEA offer when getting hired”. He stated that it helps immensely and that the type of people who get their master’s degrees and PhDs are a different kind of people. They are the kind of people who are hard workers and work well within the environment of the game studio. As such they are in more demand than a student fresh out of college with their Bachelors degree and no experience, especially because FIEA helps give a real world experience.

With that I will live you with the 12 days of FIEA

12 Daily meeting requests

11 Hours a month gaming

10 Different ways to say “Here”

9 Final pitches

8 Polished Games

7 Days a week working

6 RPP projects completed

5 Great classes attended

4 Cups of noodles soup

3 All nighters needed

2 Cohort projects selected

1 Wicked program

Merging, lighting and sorting

2007-11-21T11:26:00.003-05:00

I added lighting to the fluid simulation.

Behold.

This version also includes vortex merging and depth sorting so I can crank up the opacity, which makes the smoke look thicker, lets you get away with fewer particles and lets you see the detail more clearly.

Derivative November

2007-11-16T15:56:00.001-05:00

A lot has been going on. Lemme break it down.

I finished my first full game, Star Wars: The Force Unleashed DS, which will be coming out alongside the parent product for consoles this coming spring. I'll be sure to spam you when I find out just when it's coming out. It's a great game and I think people are going to enjoy it.

I've already been assigned to a new product, and the lead designer and I had to scramble to get the game design document together this week. It was a rush but it's got some great ideas and I'm really looking forward to announcing it once I'm given the go-ahead.

n-Space also just released Call of Duty 4 DS: Modern Warfare alongside the parent company. I only had my hands on it for about a week but everyone else from FIEA that works at n-Space worked a great deal on it. I've picked it up myself and it's a great game. Support your working alumni and give it a shot.

November's been a great month for video games overall. Zul'Aman just came out in World of Warcraft and my guild (which has a decent number of people from my cohort) managed to down the first boss this past Thursday with relative ease. Still working our way through that. In my off time I've been playing Assassin's Creed, which is phenomenal regardless of what any reviewers say.

Finally, I still haven't seen any pictures myself, but a number of cohort associates and I dressed up as the Cobra Organization for a couple of Halloween parties this year, including the great one that Ben hosted. It was great to meet some new people and see old friends -- I hope something like that happens again soon.

Exciting times. I'll keep you posted.

Smoke and Mirrors

2007-11-16T09:26:00.003-05:00

I found these results mesmerizing and I wondered about the etymology of that word so naturally I looked it up. The word comes from an 18th century French physician named Mesmer who concocted the notion of "animal magnetism" which (he conjectured) involved the flow of a mysterious magnetic fluid that supposedly flows through all beings.

Perhaps I'll name my fluid-like simulation "mesmeric fluid" because both his fluid and mine are fictional but captivating.

Some earlier results:

Expect Expectations

2007-11-15T11:50:00.000-05:00

I’m starting to see that all the warnings given prior to enrollment are proving true. I was warned by faculty, and alumni the following:

Expect to live near campus
Expect to have little time outside of school work
Expect to have to make time for your friends, family, loved ones, and yourself
Expect to learn a lot

The general message is that we should expect to sacrifice for the 16 months of FIEA. However, what we are getting in return is well worth it. When you observe the situation from that perspective FIEA is exactly what a quality education is supposed to be, an investment.

While we half-kid about FIEA being a boot camp for EA, it is true that most people looking into getting into the industry are expecting the wrong things and are ill prepared for the cold hard facts. While it is true that creating video games is incredibly fun and rewarding; like your education it is an investment. The more you invest the greater chance of success.

Order to Chaos

2007-11-15T11:48:00.000-05:00

We’re all getting settled in here at FIEA. We’ve been here for a few months and things are becoming more routine; and by routine I mean most of the time we are going through the same motions but usually in different ways. The standard has become class, projects, and improv. However the professors have ways of throwing a wrench into the gears. On occasion they will call for status reports earlier than expected to see how well the group knows the project they have spent the past week or more working on. On other occasions they will mix things up completely and change the entire objective. These are things that WILL occur in the industry, and are vital tools to learn in a real-world environment.

Too many students are used to procrastination (myself included). At FIEA we’ve learned quickly that a day wasted directly reflects on the quality of the product. Whether the aforementioned product is the project you’re working on, your grade, or your reputation.

Fluid simulation, Atari 2600 programming

2007-10-03T13:08:00.001-04:00

Fluid simulation update

I added more features to my fluid simulation. Follow the links to see movies:

I also submitted an abstract to GDC for 2008.

Atari 2600 Programming

I collect Atari games, consoles, controllers and other Atari-branded stuff from the 1970's and 1980's. I'm also beginning to program the 2600. Its CPU is a 6507 which has the same instruction set as the 6502 but has fewer address pins. Many computers from that era used the 6502 including other Atari consoles and computers (5200, 7800, 400, 800, etc.), Commodore computers and the original Nintendo (NES). It's the first CPU for which I learned assembly programming. The Atari retro development community is quite active and even now, around 30 years following its release, people continue to pioneer new ways to get more out of that console, e.g. higher image resolution. Each year at the Classic Gaming Expo people release several new games for the Atari 2600, and they usually sell out immediately.

I recently obtained a collection of EPROMs (which currently have Atari games burned onto them) and 2 modified Atari 2600 cartridges with ZIF sockets that fit these EPROMs. I put the chips into a conductive plastic container I got from Skycraft Surplus for $2. This gives the appearance I'm engaging in industrial espionage.