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.
