Pre-production week 4

With a month of pre-production behind them, FIEA’s four games are starting to take a more solid shape and really show their true colors. The Earth engine has proven to be a bit of a burden to the teams with the task of porting the previous assets into the engine. Another big setback only recently fixed was the integration of PhysX into the engine as two of the games are heavily dependent on it.

Delirium
With a dedicated scheduler on their team, Delirium is working on looking at their past three weeks and getting a better grasp on their team capabilities to better project their timelines and milestones for their next sprint. Sprint three is mid-way and as of now, it looks like it’s going to end even closer to their target goals as the previous two sprints. One of the new styles of deliverable management has been to tailor the workloads and tasks specifically to certain team members, playing to their strengths and abilities to get the best possible outcome at the end of the sprint.

For the first cut, their target goals have been set to having a dynamically reactive environment that plays with the presence of 2 distinct personalities that Edward has – the Psycho and the Schizo. These personalities will be functional with 2 walk and idle states, environmental effects unique to each personality, and unique soundscapes. The character Mr. Buttons will also be completed and attached to Edward, and the previously shown Elevator will be functional as an end transition to the level. The team has also been developing a flash prototype so they can better illustrate level design quickly and efficiently while still getting the game feel across. A rip-o-matic video presentation will be finished, as well as a demo of their scene designer process with lighting and collision.

The personalities have been revised to the final three types: the Psycho (formerly Feral), the Schizo, and the OCD. The former two will be present for Dan Day, with the third added soon after for the final game. The Psycho is a berserker-style combatant, unpredictable and vicious, who sees the world in a desaturated way, tinted slightly red. The environment will dynamically adjust to his presence within Edward’s mind and cause the surroundings to blur on anything inanimate, but keep in focus on enemies for better attacking capabilities. The Schizo is the paranoid personality that thinks everything is working against him. The environmental reflection of this disorder will be making everything appear more sinister such as longer shadows, darker lighting. One of the unique new ideas concepted for the paranoia is the ambient sounds of the hospital being depicted as text on screen. The OCD personality is obsessive over collecting objects, numbers, and patterns, and will therefore be focused on these for his environmental changes. Objects that are collectable/usable will be highlighted brighter within the screen and anything intricate or patterned will cause a sort of tunnel vision and distract the personality, causing Edward’s walking to slow. The environment will also appear dirtier to play up the compulsive cleanliness common with OCD, sometimes causing the player to not be able to go through certain doors for fear of germs.

Artistically, the new Mr. Buttons model is nearing completion to come closer to the new concept sketches of a ragged and restitched stuffed toy.



Edward’s finalized model now has a preliminary Mr. Buttons attached to his shoulder, creating a very iconic silhouette.



New concepts for the base level hallway are out with a “sane mode” style and the team is working on creating copies for each of the personality-unique views as well.



New animation demos this week included the steam-powered door opening and the elevator raising and lowering, both with sound effects added.

Programmatically, the level design is being done modular so producers/designers can easily create levels without having to do much coding. A preliminary module test shown in-engine had a movable avatar with a lit and shadowed hallway and functional steam doors, plus the opening menu screen was functional with sound and music.
For the end of their current sprint, the team is looking to complete their flash prototype, finalize the personalities and their nuances, work on further integration into the Earth engine, and develop a shader pipeline for the eventual environmental shaders they’ll be working with.

Drifters
Starting off their fourth sprint, the Drifters team is focusing on the name of the game – The Drifters. While past reports have mentioned more work on environments, abilities, and fiction, the Drifter characters themselves have taken a backseat to all that, and starting with this sprint that’s about to change. Some other areas of focus for their current sprint are on the primary game mode, sound, animation frame rate and polygon efficiency, and creating that overall “paranoid” feeling.
In preparation for a fuller demo build, the team has been working on modular design for their level building, as well as preparing a tool to create bounding boxes automatically on objects when collision detection is implemented. More behind the scenes work includes a review of their past 3 sprints to create a solid working plan for display on Dan Day and the creation of a more individualized task list for each area, which is viewable now on their wiki page.

New developments in the game mode have changed it from a “hunt and kill” to a “capture the kill” game, similar to Capture the Flag. Drifters will make a kill and then have to return to a central location, an ornate throne in the upper middle of the map, to receive credit for that kill. Multiple kills can be made and turned in at once, but any kills not turned in will be forfeit if the Drifter is killed before returning to the throne. The artifacts will represent the Drifters’ lives and also grant their drifting abilities. While testing this new game mode, the paper prototype of the map worked very well in helping to see how gameplay would flow.

Animations are being cleaned up and tested within the game, with 2 absorb, 3 idle, 1 run, 2 unposessed, and 3 walk animations currently captured. The team is working on a second mocap shoot for more varied body type movements (female, heavy-set, gaunt, short, etc.). The in-game environment has increased in detail and intricacy and the NPCs in the engine now have varied idle and walk animations. The Drifter aura is now visible in-engine as well and some particle effects are being tested. During these tests, frame rates and polygon counts have been a serious issue that the team is working to combat. The high level of detail on the environment coupled with multiple moving characters leads to a heavy frame rate decrease and issues with shadow smoothness, things that the team is currently working on.

Chain Game Project
The team met all their milestones for the end of their third sprint except getting jumping to work in-game and developing the level progression. The delay may stem from the focus of last week’s work having shifted to a more analytical look at the game, rather than pushing development further. Time was spent with focus group testing, mainly of the female FIEAns, to try and better define the female character’s personality and look. Six of the female FIEA residents participated in an hour and a half long panel where they were shown concept art, character profiles, model renders and animation tests of the two characters and asked to give feedback. The results were mostly positive, with a lot of exposition on the female character and how she can best be improved. All of the research and Q&A sessions resulted in the newly named “Sophie” character – a spoiled, slightly ditzy, sometimes offensive daddy’s girl. The level design has also been expanded to look beyond the first level “carnival entrance/promenade” with ideas such as a twisted petting zoo or a frozen hell.

Updates to the art include updated textures for Sophie and a finalized texture for Melvin, with Sophie’s texture being ‘accessorized’ further. The first secondary character, codenamed “Mr. Tall” has been modeled and base textured while the environment has a complete texture set on it. Both main characters have new run/walk animations, added an idle animation, and they both have “strut” walks for when trying to appear confident. Sophie has a freak out animation while Melvin has a trip animation.


Sophie's new model and preliminary texture


"Mr. Tall" modeled and textured

The demo shown in engine showed Sophie interacting with the environment and some basic collision detection. Music was working along with lighting, and she could transition from an idle state into walk or run and switch between the two.
Next up for the team is a development plan from the designers for the post-cut timeline, along with sound and environment puzzle development. Artists are working on modeling props to populate the levels, finishing Sophie’s texture to a final state and researching particle effects. The animation team is working on the jump animation as well as getting a Maya render of the punt kick move to show on the 16th, and a walk cycle for Mr. Tall. Last but not least, the programmers will get the jumping functional with the new animation as well as a player manager to get two players in at once. Also on their plate is the all important chain having PhysX applied to it and getting it functional in the engine.





The new environment model, complete with textures


Sultan(s) of Scratch
A lot of new scheduling and tasking changes went on this week with a new animation schedule put forth with the help of Central to get a set number of animations turned out per milestone. Because SoS relies heavily on a huge number of dance animations, they’ve worked on prioritizing getting those handled quickly and efficiently. A new mocap shoot has been scheduled with the previous dancer and an animation tree created to show the flow between various difficulty levels of dance moves. The team has also adopted a new task and milestone system more individually geared toward each team member to increase productivity and better tailor workloads.

The main UI screen has been changed to be a single DJ table with two turntables and a fader between.



Each DJ player will scratch on the table, and the fader will be used to switch between players – giving a more authentic feel and saving space on the screen. The dancer’s UI is being developed as well with the team trying to stay away from the common “DDR Notes” style of input as seen in most music games.

The art style has been better defined with the debate settled on the exaggeration of proportions to have a semi-realistic but still slightly cartoonish look to the characters. Two of the characters were redrawn and colored to show concepts of the colors and style with each character having his or her own color palette unique to them.




Variety is a big factor, with many styles and nationalities to be represented through the characters.




Environment sketches have shown various locations for the dance-offs including clubs, warehouses, subway stations, and outdoor stages.

The team also showed off a silhouette animation test with two character models, one with normal proportions and the other with slightly exaggerated features such as the hat, hands and feet.

The comparison was used to demonstrate the difference in styles and show why they decided it was best to go with exaggerations.

Within engine, the team had the exaggerated model silhouette dancing with a player on a DDR pad entering button combos to execute different dance moves. Another player had a 360 controller to do scratches on the DJ system that could fast forward and rewind the playing music. While these controllers are fine for temporary demos, the team is still actively working on custom peripherals. They met with Dr. LaViola from the UCF Engineering department and got ideas for prototyping as well as putting word out to engineering graduate students who may lend a hand in developing these as an independent study, or senior students looking for summer work.

Pre-production week 3

February 16th has been dubbed “Dan Day” or “D-day” for the teams, as they’ve got about 3 weeks left to prepare their games to present to Dan O’Leary of N-Space. This week saw a lot of shifting of schedules and milestones, as well as the creation of feature lists that each team is pushing to have ready to show by the presentation date.

The FIEA-born “Earth Engine” was released on Monday to the teams – the product of our Central Team as well as all the programmers. Earth was developed using Gamebryo and is forming the foundation from which all the projects will be built. This move was done to allow teams to easily reform when games are cut so programmers don’t have to switch gears to a new engine. Expect more big things in the coming week as our teams get their work ported into Earth!

Drifters
With the announcement of the first game cut date, the Drifters team has rearranged their milestones and schedule to create a target build to show during their presentation. The team hopes to have their environment textured and the ambient lighting functional, as well as the NPC diversity apparent. They expect to have their Drifters in-game with at least stealth skills and a basic attack functional to show the gameplay mechanics. A new programmer was also added to the team, so the backlog documents were updated to reflect this extra help.

The environment has been updated with some more variation in the components to make it a bit easier to navigate. A new entryway was modeled to allow for ambient lighting to play a bit more into the atmosphere. The 3D sound has been implemented and the sound team is working with various new background tracks to create the paranoia feel they’re looking for. Dialogue scripting has also started.

The fiction is nearly complete, although the team was wary of discussing too much until it was solidified. They did mention that each artifact on display in the museum would tie to a certain Drifter somehow and the story would be revealed to the player via “audio tour” mechanics – a NPC may be equipped with a museum audio tour device that when a Drifter entered their body, they would pass an exhibit artifact and be able to hear the story behind it. Each artifact will be tied to an appropriate Drifter ability that can be acquired, for example a sword would be tied to a combat-related ability while a musical instrument would be tied to some kind of audio-related ability. One ability is already available in-game, the skip-drift ability which allows a Drifter to appear to drift into the nearest body, but actually skip one person over and throw off any pursuers.


A concept of the Drifter aura

The Drifters themselves are being further developed with 4 personalities already shown, each with a unique Drifter form, name, stats and play style. The character model has been clothed and basic textured with a few different walk cycles inserted for variation in NPC behavior. The art team is working on making the character models modular so the torsos and legs can be interchangeable to allow for several more combinations rather than having to create whole models for each variation.
Currently the team’s main focus is getting their work ported into Earth, starting with the AI pathfinding. Once everything they’ve done is in Earth and functional, they’ll be working toward their “Dan Day” milestones and preparing their presentation.


The main male model with various clothing textures

Delirium
Delirium’s 2nd sprint ended this week and the 3rd is beginning with a new team member added to help control scheduling and process all the burn-down charts and timeframe analysis. Their milestones were better defined with a goal of 2 functional personalities and a fully populated level design ready to roll at the Spring Break cutoff.

During reflection on their two main game mechanics – changing personalities and dynamically altered environments – they realized that the two were too distanced from each other and needed to be combined for more effective gameplay. Their solution was to have the environment alter based upon which personality was dominant at the time, such as the Feral personality only seeing in black and white. Another way the team has decided to tie the personality mechanic to the gameplay was in the creation of the puzzles within the levels. Players are rewarded for not giving in to the personality’s condition completely and only using it to the point of necessity. For example, a player with the OCD trait dominant comes in a room with several objects to collect, but only needs a certain number, if they collect too many it allows the nurses time to attack, but if they collect only the amount needed they can escape in time.

While developing the various conditions of the personalities, several reference movies were brought up to analyze the common views the media imposes upon the mental disorders. Another tool the team is using to develop much of their level design is a flash-based level creator. This grid-style creator was originally developed for a semester 1 project, Scridoodle, and has been reconfigured to help design levels and object placement for Delirium.

The team was able to show off more concept art of the characters, especially of the designs of the nurse and doctor enemies, as well as more versions of Edward’s personalities and a new concept design for Mr. Buttons. Edward’s original design has been fully modeled and textured and a new model of the steampunk elevators that lead from level to level has also been developed.


The elevator model


Edward's model


Mr. Buttons' new concept art

Their first foray into the Earth engine was a demo of the 3D sound. A base room with several corridors and sound trigger objects was shown where as the camera approached the trigger objects, the sounds they were tied to would get louder, and then fade as the camera backed off. This feature will be critical in creating the mood of the game, as well as increasing the realism of Edward’s disorders.

Sultan of Scratch
Our first real glimpse into the newly started “Sultan of Scratch” game came this week with “more progress in a week than we would have seen for 3 weeks on the prior project” according to our Production professor, Rick Hall. The team is using the Spiral development method, rather than any version of SCRUM like the other teams have been doing. Their reasoning is that SCRUM creates features as milestones, while Spiral works toward one large goal at all times.

Their goal with this game is to create a cooperative team-style party game with elements of rhythm/dancing/music games mixed with turn based battle mechanics. Up to 4 players will compete as two “dance crews” with a DJ and a dancer on each team that go back and forth in a dance-off style battle. The DJ controls the music and performs scratches with “scratch nodes” that can create extra challenges while the dancer performs dance moves along with the beat of the music to pull off combo moves for extra points. The live play of the game makes for User Dynamically Driven Difficulty – a DJ can only be as skilled as their dancer and vice-versa. The better a crew works together, the better they are as players.

There are many unique features this team is working with, including a heavy dependence on the graphic user interface. A few early screen concepts are toying with the placement of the DJ turntables, the dancer avatars, and other necessary screen elements. Another unique issue the team is working on is the custom peripherals they wish to include in the game experience. For the dancer, a dance pad made popular with the DDR games is their goal, while the DJ controller would be a custom peripheral complete with an actual turntable-style analog control. A meeting with the UCF Engineering department has been scheduled to discuss prototyping and development of such a controller.


Early concept of the UI

The original pitch of this game included mocap data from a local dance crew and has been reused for the pre-production phase with another mocap shoot scheduled with the dancers again. Their in-Earth tech demo shown this week was able to use this early dance data along with turntable graphic prototypes to do some basic switches between dance moves.


A screenshot of their in-Earth demo

Their art style is in development with comparisons to Jet Set Radio using stylized character designs, a bit exaggerated in proportion but still semi-realistic. The use of bright, flashy colors to compliment the dance scene feel along with the art style has led to talks of creating a custom shader. This shader would have distant body parts have a thinner outline while parts closer to the camera would have a thicker line, creating a bolder feel to the character art.

As music and sound are going to play a big part in the game, original music tracks and artists are being researched and worked on early in production. The sound/scratch system is going to be a big part of their game and early handling of its control is crucial to development.

Goals for “Dan Day” include a finalized art style to produce a fully modeled, rigged and textured main character with the current mocap data animated. Controller integration, at least with the DDR pad and a 360 controller, will be functional and a base environment modeled and functional in game.

The Chain Game Project
Sprint three is in progress and the team has focused this week on narrowing down their target goals for the “Dan Day” presentation. The chain ability of “punt kick” has been decided as the major chain mechanism for their in-game presentation – one character will punt the other to an otherwise unreachable area and then use the chain to pull the kicker over with them. Since this ability has been decided, the environment design now plays to this capability to create a challenging yet still traversable level.

In accordance to this progress, the environment has been shown as completely modeled out and texturing has started. The theme park design is embodied with the characters first seeing the “hell” that is the stereotype of current fiction – fire, brimstone and a cave-like appearance. After going through the “employees only” doorway, they experience the real environment, which is a backstage area complete with scaffolding, secret entrances, and other things typical of a theme park backstage area.



Concept designs for the front and back views of Hell

The two characters have been better defined with personality traits, near finalized visual designs, some basic animations and models, and partial texturing. The afterlife intern, codenamed “Melvin”, is an underappreciated, short reaper intern who’s the constant target of ridicule from his co-workers. He tries to succeed in his job, but more often than not finds failure in his attempts to shine. This failure and ridicule leads him to bottle up his emotions and let them explode at once, but even that doesn’t seem to show much impact on his peers. “The Girl” is spoiled, impatient and disinterested, very self-centered and controlling. There’s a mutual understanding between the two that Melvin has to get The Girl out of hell safely, and she knows he’s bound to that duty, but she also respects that he’s the only thing keeping her safe from being treated like the other souls.



Original sketches of "Melvin" and "The Girl"

With the character personalities better worked out, the concept sketches could be turned into reality. Melvin has a completely modeled, textured and rigged model up and running with a run/walk/stop cycle almost completely functional. The Girl has a basic model done that has a run/walk/stop cycle as well, but not as complete as Melvin.

The goals for their “Dan Day” presentation include having both characters fully modeled and functional with the chain connecting them and basic movement applied to it. They’ll be able to run around and perform the punt kick in a textured environment populated with a few of the secondary characters that were also concepted out. The design team is working on asset lists for the extra items, sounds and other assets needed to complete this first level.

One of the unique issues this team has started working on fixing is their lack of female input for The Girl character. With the only completely male team, they found they had a lack of female perspective for a game that had a predominant female lead. Therefore, the team set up a focus group comprised of all the female FIEAns and ran through their concept sketches, models, and character profiles for the main characters and took note of what we (the girls) had to say about matters. They’re reviewing what they learned from the meeting to better work on The Girl and make sure her personality fits with her story, her visual look is on target with her personality, and everything works together to make the character playable.

Pre-production week 2

This week in development showed some major changes in several of the projects. The entire programming force was relocated to the Central Team to work on the engine to be used by all teams. Therefore, the teams this week were tasked to develop largely without the help of their programmers, leaving the Technical Artists and Technical Producers to jump in where they could. Even with this hindrance, the teams managed to get more in-game progress to show on the screen.

In an unprecedented move in FIEA history, the Resonance team has decided to abandon the pitched game in favor of the 5th ranked pitch, Sultans of Scratch. The team noticed a lackluster attitude toward the pitched idea and with low morale, progress was sluggish and uninspired. Rather than trudge along dragging their feet and complaining the whole way to produce something that would almost guarantee a cut in February, the team decided to start fresh using the next ranked game pitch which they were much more enthusiastic about. As they had made this decision just a day beforehand, they elected not to present this week.

The cut date has been set to be February 16th and all 4 teams will be presenting from 1-3PM. Dan O’Leary from N-space will be the guest of honor, coming in as an objective party with experience in the field but no prior knowledge of the games, teams, or history of the projects. This will allow an unbiased, professional look at the 4 games and give a better idea of which are viable for production and will survive through to the start of Spring Break.

Drifters
The biggest change in the development of Drifters was the environmental change from subway station to museum. This was motivated both by a lack of emotion evoked from the original location and a desire to strengthen the environment choice to the fiction. By changing to a museum, it would better explain why the artifacts of the Drifters’ past were gathered in one area while still allowing for the crowd in an open space setting.

A few new concepts were introduced, including “drifter vision” which would allow Drifters to see auras related to their powers and see the ability items that would grant them new powers. The ability system was better developed, including a collectible inventory system to allow them to be used as needed and also separation into combative and defensive types.

The team’s schedule has been better developed with the new changes; MS Project is being used for timelines and their sprints are based around 3 major deadlines before the spring break cutoff. Also developed and put into use this week were paper prototypes that mapped out the environment and helped the level design team analyze walking paths for the NPCs. This process allows the team to better determine the rate and flow of how many new bodies the players have available to drift in to.

The in-game demos shown included a redesigned environment better resembling a museum and the model now has a run cycle, idle stance, and when drifting into new bodies, the abandoned model has a stunned reaction animation before continuing on.

Their newly coined catchphrase is “We’re a multi-player Splinter Cell with body switching”

Delirium
First off was the Delirium team’s tech demos going to an in-game setting. They now had a portion of a hallway where a player could walk and the insanity variables could be manipulated to where the hallway would distort and colors saturate and desaturate. Also demonstrated was 3D sound in its basic form surrounding a box.

The design of the level has been streamlined by the creation of the hallway/room structure in chunks rather than one large piece. With several small interlocking pieces much like legos, the levels can easily be built by the design team by piecing different chunks together to create any number of unique floors.

Animation was a big concern this week with two new concepts shown, the animation of the steam technology used for most any moving parts such as door locks and the jointless animation for more fluid moving pieces like the straps on Edward’s jacket. The jointless animation is a code-based animation that doesn’t rely on individual frames, allowing for a more fluid and natural looking movement for pieces like fabric straps or hair.

The personalities for the 3 other forms have been further developed and are now more specific to their abilities and weaknesses, allowing for more of the level design to be closely developed to play to those elements. While combat is still not a major focus, the design team can now build level structure, puzzles and enemy behavior around these new strengths and weaknesses for each personality.

Paper prototypes are being used now to test enemy and environment interaction and how it effects Edward’s sanity. The team created a small calculation program that tracks the insanity levels and notes which personality is currently out to help ease the process of constantly adjusting the variables.

The Chain Game Project
“Traverse the afterlife as a tethered team”

Scheduling has been updated into MS Project with sprints 1 and 2 completely loaded in and the rest ready to be imported. This replaces the old method and will help better track how the scheduling works for the team’s goals. Sprint 2 ended on Wednesday and the team is ramping up for the start of the newly organized sprint 3.

The setting is updated from a cave-like afterlife to a sort of morbid, run-down amusement park where the ‘employees’ are the ride operators and the souls there are the park guests. The rides embody new twists on punishments in the afterlife, such as a roller coaster that constantly runs so the riders eventually succumb to constant vomiting. As the players will be more of “employees” of the park, they will be able to see a lot of the behind the scenes areas like the scaffolding and backstage areas, rather than the normal area the souls see. The basic environment has been created in Maya as a 3D rendered design to help develop the decision on the chain ability as well as the character scale and environment design.

The chain abilities are narrowed down to allow for at least one to get into the final game with room to expand to more if time allows. The five choices the team is down to are skeleton whip, body sled, kick propulsion, over the head hammer, and ceiling/wall anchor. Some are travel-based while others are combat-based. To make their decision, the team is looking at which one represents their game emotions best, which are “morbid and humorous” and also programmatically which ability is most apt to be implemented.

One of the other challenges the team has tackled this week was the notion of “game over” in their world. If they fall off a cliff in to the abyss, what happens? Instead of a traditional “you lose a life, you restart at the checkpoint or beginning of the level” they have been playing with the idea of exact respawn where the players fall back down to the spot where they missed the jump. Several other humorous, morbid “deaths” and “rebirths” have been pitched as well.

Some other things coming up during brainstorming meetings have been the notion of voice chat to allow players in different rooms to have a better cooperative play experience. The chain will be both a help and a hindrance to the players, so communicating to your partner will be key to completing the level.

Now that the setting is decided, the character concepts are also now defined with a short, skeletal being in an oversized hoodie as the reaper intern and a taller, plain sort of girl as the misplaced mortal. The contrast again plays to the theme of the game and they were decided on by majority vote of the team members. Both characters have been sketched out and modeling and rigging have begun on the reaper. A demo of some of the effects that can be done to the reaper model was shown where he can be squished and stretched.

Prototyping has gone beyond computers and paper and effected the team in real life. Two of the team members, Carl and Carlos, spent the day chained to each other in an effort to see how much of a bother it was to be chained to another person. They were able to better understand how impulsive you can be in a day when you automatically go up to move somewhere. The weight of a chain on your wrist was also an odd feeling for them and made everyday things like moving your mouse or eating slightly different. Other traditional prototypes are looking toward lego-built environments, placing dummy assets in flash or Panda3D environments.

"Sultans of Scratch"
This game was pitched with the first instance of FIEA having two dance crews come in and battle before the cohort. At first glance the game looks like a cross between Pokemon and Dance Dance Revolution where futuristic DJs control android dancers to execute devastating dance moves against their opponents. Players can choose their custom DJ avatar and pick from a variety of android dancers each with their own unique style and moves. The animation will focus heavily on motion captured dancers and will almost guarantee several guest actors being brought into FIEA’s studio to record their moves.

Art concepts shown during the pitch were very urban, graffiti style art with the DJs shown in several unique styles from raver to rap. Dancer androids embodied all sorts of styles including punk, hip-hop, and break dancers. The concept environment was set in an urban wasteland style almost junkyard where the DJs have used spare parts to construct their robotic dance crew. This project should give the artists a variety of styles to work with as well as opportunity for several different modeling challenges and character types.

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.