It's Beta Time!

This week marks the end of production for both games as they push on to alpha/beta stage. Only minor assets are being loaded in when needed to fix bugs, and the majority of the work for the rest of this month is testing, testing and testing. The only new things being developed now are the game manuals and box art, as well as finishing touches on the websites.


The museum environment got a much deserved facelift with a new lighting setup, making it easier to see and to cast shadows with the characters. The lighting is now baked in to the geometry, allowing the dynamic lights to be focused on characters so they now have shadows as they wander through the museum floors. The Sovereign has been seated on her throne and is being rigged for animations. She currently provides commentary on the match, commending or berating her Drifters on their performance against each other. Other sound additions include the announcement of the selected Drifter's name on the player select screen, more random comments from the NPCs as they stop at various exhibits, and the Drifters have more sounds including taunts, victory comments, and attack sounds.

The Drifter Vision no longer snaps from glowing character to Drifter form, rather a new light burst transition activates to reveal the Drifter form, letting players know they're now visible as a Drifter. While attacking, there's better response time, so a missed strike no longer makes you as vulnerable to your target. To better assist the player in learning to make better use of Drifter Vision and attacking, the video tutorial which was in progress is being updated with the latest assets and controls.

On the technical side, DevTrack is being used to track the bugs that come up during playtesting. As a bug is identified, a log is created by the player that tells when it occurred, under what conditions, and what the steps are to reproduce it. The bug is assigned a category, and then the QA lead reviews the report, determines who should handle the bug, and assigns it to a team member to work on it. The team is also busy testing on multiple machine setups, including 3 versions of Windows (XP, Vista and 7 beta), various video card configurations, and multiple processor speeds. The goal is to optimize it so the game can run on virtually any current generation machine capable of playing games like Half-Life2.

To kick off their last normal status report, the Sultans team revealed their final peripheral, a Turntable Lite if you will...

It's about 1/3 of the previous peripheral, isn't it adorable?!

The game is down to the addition of a few minor art assets in the menu screen and the DJ models in the crew transition modes. The new peripheral integrated perfectly in with the control scheme, so the game is playable with either the DDR pad and turntable, or the keyboard and mouse schemes. Now that the environments are finalized for lighting, the cinematic crew is placing the final assets for the final cinematic clips.

The last bits of the menu are coming together to complete the experience and this week some background music sets the mood for the record shop. The announcer can now be heard on the selection screens and once inside, he'll direct you to choose your crew, your turntable, venue, and song. Menu overlays are being placed and the animations on character select are being polished as well with each pair having a unique interaction animation set.

In-game the digital screen on the turntable finally gets its moment to shine and now displays the multiplier for the current crew, as well as the difference between the scores of your crew and the opposing crew. This lets you know at a glance whether you need to step up your game or if you're dominating the round. The crowds are fully placed, textured, randomized, and animated to create a real dance club experience, completed with animated props like the warehouse's traffic light speakers or the club's neon glow furniture. At the end of the level, a new chalkboard-style score screen shows off the winner and loser of the round:


Probably the biggest reveal of this report was the tutorial option, which guides players through the various controls of the game, plus introduces the combo system and how to activate "Pass the Spotlight". There's still some adjusting to do so the steps flow easier, and talk of splitting it into a normal and advanced tutorial set, but so far it's a great feature!

These next two weeks, Cohort 5 will be conducting interviews with many companies within the video game, simulation and digital media industries. With so many interviews and companies to coordinate among the 49 students, the teams will not be holding their weekly status reports. The final game presentations will take place on July 30th and that will most likely be the final development blog post for Cohort 5. We'll try to dig up some beta stage info for you in the meantime!

Drifters Team: BEARD-OFF! Final Week

No photo yet, because tomorrow (Thursday) ends the Beard-off!

Here's the latest update to the contest:

Hey All,

Just wanted to pass along the official Beard Off Update. The Beard Off will end on Thursday July 2nd so that everyone can be clean shaven by Monday when industry interviews start. Beard Off ceremonies will take place in the bridge directly following the Sultan’s presentation. I also encourage participants to bring in clippers, shaving cream, and razors, to shave some fun into this mess following the festivities. Rick, Shawnna, and Donald have agreed to be the three judges for the competition and will be deciding the winners of the following categories:

The Billy Mays Memorial Award (formerly the Grizzly Adams) – Grizzliest beard in honor of the greatest pitch man ever
The Patch Adams Award – Given to the participant with the saddest and patchiest beard
The Colonel Sanders Award – Given to the participant who looks most like this guy

The Ron Jeremy Award – Given to the participant who most resembles a 70’s adult film star
The Chameleon Award – Given to the participant who you cant tell is a participant
The Man Scaping Award – For whoever shaves the most creative design into their beard after the initial judging

Each Beard Off participant will briefly tell the story of their beard and their five week journey.

If anyone can think of additional awards, please reply to this thread and we will add them to the list.

We’ll buy some pizza and soda and prizes will be awarded to the winner.

Thanks,
AD

2 week countdown!

It's content insertion and polish time for both games! With 2 weeks left, there's no room left to add new features, it's time to really hammer down what's there, add the last minute shinys, and smooth out the wrinkles to make it into Alpha/Beta/Gold Master stages. Blogger's video system didn't like the several clips we had to share this week, so YouTube it is!


The first glaring change in the game was the addition of Lenore, the fourth and final Drifter. Once in game, the next large change was the huge increase in the variety of the NPC models. Through two gameplay sessions it was difficult to see a duplicated combination of parts, thanks to the magic of the Voltron rig and the design team's creations. Another addition to the gameplay was the drift radius highlight: when a player is near a driftable NPC, that NPC will have a faint blue glow on them...especially useful when you near a body that doesn't glow, giving it away that they inhabit a Drifter without having to switch to Drifter Vision.

Lenore, the 4th Drifter

After looking through the questionnaires from the focus group, listening to the Q&A tape, and starting to watch the player footage, a number of suggestions for improvement were brought to light. One of the major things the test players found was that attacking was a bit slow with the extended animation times, and when killed, the time to respawn in a body was also a bit too long. Also, when a player is killed while not in Drifter Vision, there's very little in the way of feedback to tell that has happened. The team has brought these issues up to the designers, who have formed a task force to adjust these parts of the game and eliminate the confusion and lag.

Some polish details in progress include baking in the lighting within Maya rather than the 80-some lights placed in scene designer. The artifacts are almost finished being re-rendered and placed in the museum, along with a few ambiance pieces such as benches and banners to add some color to the interior. The exhibit audio which used to project in a sphere from the podium, will now project in a conical 3D shape instead, originating from the new speaker boxes on the new podiums. The audio team is also working on adding a distortion filter to make the voice sound more speaker-like rather than the clear sound it has now.

All the models are being weight painted so the animations for their walks, tells, and environmental cues all flow more naturally. The attack/fail animations are also being retouched to help with the feedback timing and transitions between animation. While the Drifter models are complete, some slight detail work is being done to further push their individualism and iconic look, as well as the addition of particle effects unique to each Drifter. The finalization of the environment with the lighting and exhibit/prop placements will allow the cinematic team to get that in and render out the entire cinematic movie for inclusion in the game.

The website has also gotten a bunch of new content, including a new introduction video with the 4 updated Drifters and gameplay footage, art pieces, and of course, a mirror of these blog entries.

And now, your moment of Drifters play footage zen:

This week was a lot of gameplay tweaking and feature additions for the Sultans game. New art releases aren't scheduled until next week, but we managed to snag plenty of in-game footage to illustrate the new additions to gameplay and the user interfaces!

The team leads sat down and analyzed the polish backlog tasks, categorizing them by type and then by priority. This allowed the team to tackle the issues that were most critical and shift focus on the more elaborate and involved issues. Some of the small things that were adjusted were the look of the DJ notes, which now have colored flames spinning around them as they drop. The motion blur for pass the spotlight is now applied to the dancer:

And the end-game score sheet is now in place to show each crew how well they did:

Last week the transition from crew-to-crew was a sweeping camera pan, but that's no longer the case. The transition will now allow the current DJ to be shown at their table and then cuts to the current dancer performing a few of their moves before cutting over to the other side of the stage where the new DJ is shown at their table, then their dancer warms up and gameplay for the second crew begins.

Both environments has the textured and animated instances of 5 unique crowd models running during the game and the female dancer is now playable with her complete dance move, fail states, and idle animations all functional.

The menu now allows players to select a difficulty on their song by spinning the record that pops out of the sleeve at the top.

And, some full gameplay footage:

Drifters Team: BEARD-OFF! Week 4

There's been rumors of unnecessary trimming amongst the competitors...does anyone look specifically well-groomed to you?