Cohort 5 completes their 5th round of prototypes

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

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

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

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.