Friday, October 22, 2010

Prototype is coming soon!


We're preparing for our prototype milestone next week! It's only going to get more and more hectic as we get closer. There are so many things that need to get done for this milestone. We basically need to prove that we have all of the basic functionality in for the core game. What this means for our game is that our car needs to be able to boost, glide, and jump, oh ya, it needs to go extremely fast as well. Everything is truly aesthetics.

What this means for me specifically, is that I need to finish up the game design document(GDD) and I need to build a level for the game. It's going to have to be in boxes, rather than our road pieces, and this is due to the fact that our physics programmer is working on triangle collision, which is some pretty nasty stuff I might add. On the side, I also need to find sounds for our game, and we have someone who is actually creating a music track for us! This is awesome because now we don't have to make music, which would probably turn out horrible anyways if we were even to try. I've also been drawing up concepts for our modeler/graphics programmer to have an idea of what each obstacle should look like in the game. That's it for now, thanks for reading, and I'll keep you updated on anything new that comes up!

Monday, October 18, 2010

More and more work


That's all there is to it. Our entire team is still working hard to get our game to a prototyping phase. The physics engine is having an overhaul to all of its systems, and just about everything else is being improved. Other things are just being implemented as well, such as the camera system, and lua scripting.

Game design is still in a flux, since I'm not quite sure about how to portray some things on-screen to the player. Because of this, I may have to change how the car ability mechanics work. I had the idea to have the car abilities on cool downs, but it may be too complicated to have the player tracking multiple cooldowns. Especially since the game is meant to be fast paced. The interface needs to be minimal and streamlined to be easily read and understood.

For prototype I'll be working on a song, the GDD, and a level for the game. Still not sure about the song, I'll have to tinker with the sound application I have. The GDD is roughly 13 pages right now, and there is still more to write about. I'm hoping to have it clear and concise for the programmers to read quickly and understand fully what they need to implement. Most of the explanations for why they have to do something will be in the appendix rather than the original explanation for them. I'll keep updating this blog, whenever something new comes up.

Tuesday, October 5, 2010

Engine Proof Presentation


Nitronic's, the team I'm on, engine proof presentation went very well. I'm pretty sure that we stunned a few people as to where we were with the game, and where we planned to go. We are very close to having a prototype of the game up and running, and we're only 5 weeks into the semester. Granted, we did work on the game over the summer, and it is most definitely why we are as far as we are, but we still have a lot to do to get to first playable. We need to get the physics to feel right for the car, and we need to improve the level editor so we can quickly prototype levels. All this is going well, and hopefully we'll be able to prototype levels soon.