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.

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