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.
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