Pre-production week 2

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.