Cohort 5 enters pre-production!

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!

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

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.