Big Game Project; Week 4

For this week I planned a Pre-Alpha for our group in order to help us stay ahead of schedule. And for the alpha until the final stage we need to have our main features implemented.

The features that need to ready for this week, which also are our priorities for the whole game and our goal for GGC are:

• Gesture magic, you move the analog controllers in a pattern to conjure magical spells.
• Combining magic: After casting a spell onto the field which has a set duration time, you can hit it with another spell to combine it into a new spell with enhanced properties.
• Harakat-Mode: bullet time mode where you take control over time to execute and combine magic.
• Artificial intelligence (AI), Enemy behavior.

*Harakat in arabic means “movements”, or “stylized movements”.

Below ill present every area in short and also refer to their individual blogs for further reading in the areas that may interest you.

Programming

AI
Enemy behaviors that are implemented for alpha involve chasing, attacking the player and have a range of vision. They can detect you by sound and has a guard area in which they return to when they stray too far from their area.

The boss “Qadher” is programmed to have different behaviors (attack patterns) when he reaches certain points of his health meter. A player needs to rethink strategies and make use of the spells in store.

For more reading regarding this matter read Ladbon´s blog

Controls
We have an alpha set up for the control buttons which will surely change as we iterate them further through play-testing.

But for now, this is how the input looks:

This is only a mockup as we need to make the controls function properly. We need to get the main function of the analog sticks to be set for the alpha on Wednesday.

Read more about it in Herman’s blogg

Gesture Magic Casting
The analog controls for magic casting, has a script ready. What needs to be done for this is that the patterns need to be mapped for the player to cast spells that are assigned to them.
Magic Combination
The ability to cast the spell “fireflies” and hitting it with a “fireball”, which results in the spell “fire shots”, is written and ready as a script but we only have cubes placeholder for visual representations..

The lead programmer will further explain this matter in his blog, Oscar´s blog

 

Graphics

There is a lot of interesting visuals you should see in the artists individual blogs, you should visit them as I only write about their work and don’t show much of it here.

Animation

The animations for are mostly done, we have a spider that needs to be animated but we can’t do it in motionbuilder so we need to animate it in 3Ds Max, just recently we learned how to do that so unfortunately we may not be able to have it ready for Alpha. Mokhtar has some animations that need to be blended properly in Unreal Engine that should be only some small fixes, but for now we need to focus on features of the game rather than polishing the animations.

2D

Our Lead artist that also works as our concept artist, have provided us with a lot of art for our artists to follow. He makes a good job in representing the arabic style in artifacts and texts, he as gathered a lot of information and reference pictures that he and I have sat down and looked at.

I am not picky about it becoming 100% accurate but I want it to at leas be looking similar so that it gives the right feeling for our arabic influenced setting.

William´s blogg

3D

A lot of props are done, around 30 different stone shapes, mushrooms, the final mesh for our boss is being worked on and one extra enemy will have its base mesh done soon. And dont miss out on the bridges and other level based props he have prepeared.

Marcus blogg

Level

The level has the whole layout built, and should be placed in the alpha, later on we will make small changes in the level after we playtest it more. The level has still not been textured yet, but for now the lighting and some of the props are placed.

The level will always be under construction throughout the whole game developing process, so stay tuned by following Andreas blog below.

Andreas blogg

 

As far as we have come I can admit that I am a bit stressed as it feels like I am missing something, I tried to join the group as much as I could and help them out so I took it upon myself to learn how to animate in 3Ds Max to complete the spider animations, so far I’ve done a walking animation to 90% just need to do some final touches and try it in the engine and see if it works. If I get it up and running I’ll try to complete the rest of the animations; attack, idle and death.

 

The designing mission

I have a side assignment and that is also what I will be writing in my “post mortem”, that is about how I will try to teach the player about how to learn unconventional controls in an easy way, this and to make a short and understandable tutorial. I will write a bit more about it further in when we start to reach the Beta-stage.

So far regarding the controls in the pre-alpha stage, we haven’t gotten that far as the player can do some basic stuff like jumping and shooting a fireball but not doing the gesture moves with the analog sticks. But that was promised to be delivered for the Alpha on Wednesday, so I will have to keep track on what is done to make sure that it is done by then. But as far as I am concerned the control overall felt smooth according to the people that play tested it in school so that’s a good start I guess, and hopefully we will have something fun to play soon.

Next week will be a bit hectic for me as the I as a producer need to start attending presentation practices, and we still haven’t done much on the 2D side like for example the logotype for our game yet. But at the same time I don’t want to put too much pressure on our artists, so I’ll have to figure it out somehow.

Wish us luck for Alpha!

Big Game Project; Week3

For this week I will write about the game concept as an overview where I begin with telling a little bit about the game, and go through how far we have developed through this project.

The game we aim to develop is a 3D adventure game where you play as a Djinn disguised as a man with big mustache, he wields magic to defeat his enemies in hunt for their abilities. The gameplay will consist of a small demo where you fight your way through a cave dispatching of evil minions to finally reach the boss for a final fight. We got our inspiration from games like “The legend of Zelda” and “Kingdom hearts”, it may seem to be a generic gameplay, but we concentrate on the way to execute the attacks and how to combine them. And hopefully this game will catch the interest of our players.

Last week I completed the Design Document where I asked the members to write down everything they wanted more detailed information about, and that turned out to be a good way to keep everyone on track with the design.

The programmers are working hard to get the controls and the enemy behaviours working, in comparison to last week they advanced a lot as they started to understand how to make use of Unreal Engine, they work hard to implement everything. They also implemented an extra checklist for themselves to break down the things they have to complete.

On the art side of the project All the animations for Qadher (boss) are done and also some extra animations for Mokhtar (Player), but we have problems with one character (a smaller enemy) that is that we can’t animate it in Motionbuilder as it has a custom rig attached to it, so our option is to animate it in 3ds Max but that hasn’t worked this far so we have to consult the teachers to find what’s wrong with it.

The level has a rough build sketch with the whole level set up, a lot of props are ready to be used (not textured). We have done a lot of test drives on the level and made notes for future editing as we aim to try delivering a sense of progression in a small story and at the same time present our features in. You can read more about the level if you folow this link to our Level designer blog (Andreas Calmius).

The lead artist also started working on a third enemy that will be inspired by the “Ghouls” portrayed in Arabic folklores, he works skillfully in his art and is almost finished with the concept art. Lead artist link (William Mayer) This week I didn’t have a lot of administrational work to do so I had the chance to help out with the animations, I worked on three different animations, both on the boss and Mokthar. I also received help from our 3D3 teacher Nataska to solve the problem with animating in place. The problem we had was that the programmers needed to use root-motion to make the character run in place which created a lot of problems in the engine where the character was running away from the main position and also the hips where locked in position and not moving at all. This was due to a problem in motionbuilder where the character placement was wrong, but I sat down and fixed these animations and now he runs naturally in the engine without the programmers needing to fix the issue.

The Spider character is our biggest problem right now, it can’t be done in motionbuilder so it has to be done in 3ds Max, so I took on this task and tried to get it done. I did not manage to get it done even though I skimmed through a lot of different tutorials, the problem seems to be that the rig together with the mesh won’t be animated, but I could make the mesh glide in to a final position. Something is missing or there is a bug problem, I will announce this problem with our tutors and see if they have a solution for it, but that will have to wait until Monday to meet up with them.

This is all for now, I will try to upload as much pictures as I can, and I may be able to get some GIFs in when I get the time.

Mokhtar (protagonist):

Starting the Big Game Project

Hey, I am back here again.

We started this course called Big Game, where we present our concept ideas and try to get it greenlit in order to start the project. So these posts that I am going to post these weeks will serve as diary and also help me write my future post mortem writing.

The thing I will do here is not to talk about the concept idea, but rather about how we go about with solving problems, working around new ideas and the actual project progress. I will be posting some pictures on how far we have come with the art and hopefully with the game.

So my role in this project is being the producer and the lead designer, the first week we started I requested to do a quick prototype to work out the animations and the ability to shoot. We did not come too far the first week with the prototyping as our programmers where trying to learn how to use Unreal Engine. But they still managed to get the animations in and they implemented a lot from the tutorials like setting up HUD, controller movements and mappings. The second week we received our third programmer a lot more things got started like enemy AI, locking onto targets ant switching between them and more.

Regarding the graphics we had already loads of stuff done from the earlier course in 3D, where we had our main character (“Mokhtar”) modeled, rigged and animation ready for games. I assigned roles for each one of the artists (even though they already knew what they wanted to work with), we also had a new artist join us too and he directly sat down and started working on visual effects and level design.

The lead artist got the role of keeping the art style coherent, he follows the style that was already set and is working on it greatly. This week he worked on doing the concept art on the antagonist and this is how it looks:

Our 3D artist made the base mesh to start animating on and also added a lot of props for the level to be done.

Regarding the design all in all, I have been sitting down with the design document and nailing down the details for the group members, I asked them to write down all their questions so that I can answer them in detail. I have put up a list of needs for everyone to get done and put up milestones for our alpha, beta and final. I planned everything with two weeks earlier deadline so if we run into trouble we have two weeks to come up with a workable solution.

This is all for this week, more updates will come each week as we progress and for the final the game will be revealed and hopefully it will be a great creation. Stay tuned and I will write a lot more for you to read.