After a weekend of frustration, hope is restored

Last weekend I had two goals to accomplish for 'Fat Knight':

• Get all enemy character models in, and make sure everything works for different enemy sizes and models.
• When an enemy dies, their corpse should fade away.

Everything went wrong.  I originally got all the enemy models in the game, but was having issues with both the largest and smallest enemy models.  Then I broke the SVN.  To fix the SVN I had to lose all the progress I had made so far with the enemy models.  Once I finally got the models back in, I ran into a larger issue.  Whenever I would call for an animation to play on our smallest enemy, he would move to coordinate 0,0,0.  After learning that it was an issue with the model (so I couldn't personally fix the issue), I moved on to the fading corpses.  Only to decide after 4 hrs that we were not going to be able to make that work either.

However, not all is lost.  Today Damean figured out that baking the animations would solve the animation issue.  After a discussion we decided to scrap the corpse fade out, and instead change it to a particle effect that will disguise the removal of the corpse.  I also got the first couple pieces of our background.

Overall, things are looking better, I feel like I can now make some progress, and that we can definitely accomplish our new ideas.

First Playable: Mission Accomplished

Today showed off our first playable, and the good news is that we passed.  After talking over our project in a group with Marty we have set a progress goal for next week.

Us programmers plan on getting animations working in game, and add the jumping for next Thursday.  We will spent an hour and a half discussing how we should go about randomly generating levels, and plan to continue to work on that code to generate a castle with multiple levels.  We still have a bug or two that we need to track down before we will be able to run multiple level castles, but there are several ideas on what is causing these bugs, so it is only a matter of time.

Overall, we are making great progress, and will continue to do so.

Firs Playable, wow did that happen fast.

My how time flies when your having fun making video games.  In four days our group has to have completed our First Playable product.  At this point I still have slight hints of doubt that our First Playable will not be up to the quality that I would like it to be.  From a programming stand point, all our features are in, all we have to do is tweak and play test a little before Tuesday.  However, on the graphical side things are moving a bit slower.  Our artists have retreated into their creative lairs, and are slowly but surely emerging with finished pieces of art.  The only question is, will they emerge in time for Tuesday?  One can hope.

Another sign that causes me to worry is the fact that at this point in time, our game doesn't seem that fun to play.  Currently we have all our mechanics in place, but we don't have what I would call a game.  Over the next few days we will make sure the game is working, and make it so that more than 2 enemies will spawn.  So I truly believe once we change our variables to make it play like a game, that will add to the fun value.  I am still hoping we can get some simple animations in, because right now it is confusing why things are happening, because the code is executing properly, but there is no graphical representation of the action.

So while all we have now is a sphere attacking 2 enemies, it can only get more fun.

See you Tuesday.

Lets get rolling.

As we continue to move forward our deadline comes closer.  Our first playable deadline is 2.5 weeks away.  We have already made significant progress on proving that our game mechanics are capable of being created using Unity, and our artists continue to pump out concept art.  There is no direction to go but forward, and so future looks promising for the rampart team.  We have setup our rallydev, and plan on assigning tasks and starting our first sprint later this weekend.

More to come soon, possibly even a short game mechanics video.

The Goal: First Playable

So now that the team has finally decided on our game concept, Fat Knight, it is time to start shifting our focus towards first playable.  After having a programmer meeting me and Ron decided on the following programming goals for our first playable.

The Knight should be able to:

• Move (walk and roll)
• Attack
• Have momentum while rolling

The enemies will:

• have only one enemy type
• have basic AI which will let them move to a door, attack the knight, and die
• for first playable we will not have random spawning of enemies or ladders implemented.

After playing around this weekend I was able to get rolling working using a sphere and a xbox 360 controller.  We will keep on trudging forward, and I will let you know when we get more of a game done.

Ramparts idea #4

A better week, a better concept.  Our final game idea is much different than our others.  We decided rather than create a defensive strategy game, we would make an action game.  So wasting any more time head over to the team blog and check out our idea!

http://rampart3710.blogspot.com/

Going back to the drawing board.

In class on Tuesday we came up with our third game concept.  A puzzle game concept along the lines of eets or lemmings where you set items to help your character reach the end of the level.  However, after leaving class the group succumbed to a lack of communication and work ethic. 

Before I knew it it was Wednesday night and it was time for to create the one-pager for the pitch Thursday morning.  Excited to see all the interesting steam-punk based character and level designs that our artists were able to come up with, I signed into email.  But alas, my inbox was empty.  As I stared at my inbox it hit me, how am I supposed to do a one-pager with no art?  I immediately started a chat with my programmer teammate, Ron, to make sure that the artists hadn't forgotten to send the pictures to me.  This was not the case, and after a couple emails back and forth a one-pager was scrambled together by one of the artists.

Presentation day came, our one-pager was not great, Marty informed us that we can't move to the next stage until we get this right.  So once again we found ourselves at the whiteboard brainstorming.  On Tuesday the enthusiasm was low, and we were having a hard time generating traction on an idea.  Today things went better we came up with a great idea, that is much different than our previous three.  I see a lot more enthusiasm in the group in regards to this project, so hopefully this will encourage everyone to actually do their assigned tasks this time.

Hopefully.