To start off this blog post, I will talk about the prototype we are doing in unity.
The idea that we decided to go with was zombie / survival horror combined with bowling. This is an odd mix but I've had a few ides about a similar game in the past. Maybe either zombies replacing pins and they're running around while you try to knock them down or maybe they are coming to eat your brains and you are struggling to bowl as fast as you can to keep them away.
For the assignment we decided to go with something simple. Basically, the player is at one end of the lane and zombies are slowing approaching them from the other end. The player will try to "bowl" and knock out the zombies. At this point you may be wondering, why is "bowl" written with quotes around it? That's because we decided to change it up a bit and make it more luck rather than skill based. I've seen examples of how it would work with actual "bowling" but wanted to try my hand at throwing in luck to see how it will turn out. So instead of "bowling", the player rolls a dice, which determines where the ball gets thrown down the lane. With every throw, if the ball hits a zombie, the first one (aka one closest to player) is knocked down otherwise all zombies will move forward and a new one spawns in a random point at the end of the lane.
For GDW, everybody is working hard and making that big final push to get the game finished (and yes we did slack off a bit knowing that the due date was pushed back by a few weeks). A lot of the work is starting to come together now (the assets are about 90 - 95% finished) and whats left is putting all the pieces together and turning it into a great game.
For the modeling and rigging the medic character's rig is now completely finished and ready to go. I did run into a few problems but those have all been resolved now.
For the sounds we haven't gotten around to finishing recording the rest of the sounds but whats for sure is that we have edited the sounds we recorded previously and a lot of the sound effects are ready to go.
As for the networking, the path convergence code has been added and all that is really left is telling the clients to use that information to render. RakNet has been surprisingly easy to work with. For the remaining portions of the networking I have decided to pass it on to other group members. The networking professor has mentioned he is expecting everybody work with it and it would be wrong of me to "take away" another member's opportunity at learning. I will still help with the networking when and if they run into troubles but just thought it'd be more fair to have other people do networking rather than me finishing all of it by myself.
Hopefully we will have a game that is more playable in the upcoming week.
Sunday, March 25, 2012
Monday, March 19, 2012
Progress Update
To start off I will talk about the design of enemy difficulties in our game. In our game, the waves of enemies will "level up" and get increasingly harder, eventually being too overpowered for the players to handle and cause the game to end. I have started spending more time looking into the numbers to determine if they are more balanced, as this will be important to the flow state of mind.
We want to make sure that our game is intrinsically motivating. We hope that the importance of working in a team is enough to motivate the player to try as hard as they can so that they won't let their teammates down. To create the feedback loop and give the player positive feedback, our game will have rewards (as covered in a previous lecture) such as giving them special abilities, or additional resources, more playing time, sparkle, etc. Again, hopefully the positive experiences they get from working together as a team will be enough to keep them trying their best. These are all related to the flow state of mind and covers some of the principles of learning.
In other updates, most of the sounds have been recorded already (~80% done). The remaining ones are the ones that we can't seem to nail yet as they don't have the desired effect when played back. We are looking on how to fix these problems and then re-record them.
For networking, the base has now been fully set up. The clients will connect to servers and send update packets whenever keys are pressed. I have tested this and have successfully received the position/movement update packets. All that is left now is making sure that our dead reckoning works properly.
For entrepreneurial finance, since the requirement was only a partial business plan, it has now been officially completed. All that is left is just editing or changes that anyone in the group may want to make between now and the due date.
Last, the model I was supposed to rig is nearly complete. I have ran into a few problems but they should be easy fixes and the entire thing should be fully done by the end of next week.
We want to make sure that our game is intrinsically motivating. We hope that the importance of working in a team is enough to motivate the player to try as hard as they can so that they won't let their teammates down. To create the feedback loop and give the player positive feedback, our game will have rewards (as covered in a previous lecture) such as giving them special abilities, or additional resources, more playing time, sparkle, etc. Again, hopefully the positive experiences they get from working together as a team will be enough to keep them trying their best. These are all related to the flow state of mind and covers some of the principles of learning.
In other updates, most of the sounds have been recorded already (~80% done). The remaining ones are the ones that we can't seem to nail yet as they don't have the desired effect when played back. We are looking on how to fix these problems and then re-record them.
For networking, the base has now been fully set up. The clients will connect to servers and send update packets whenever keys are pressed. I have tested this and have successfully received the position/movement update packets. All that is left now is making sure that our dead reckoning works properly.
For entrepreneurial finance, since the requirement was only a partial business plan, it has now been officially completed. All that is left is just editing or changes that anyone in the group may want to make between now and the due date.
Last, the model I was supposed to rig is nearly complete. I have ran into a few problems but they should be easy fixes and the entire thing should be fully done by the end of next week.
Saturday, March 10, 2012
Implementing RakNet and other updates
With the GDW code freeze date slowing creeping closer and closer, everybody is working hard and giving it the final push so we can have it finished and ready.
Since the group hasn't gotten anywhere yet with RakNet and implementing it into the game, I have started working on it so that this isn't left until the last minute. At first I ran into 100+ errors, my worst nightmare has come true! Solving them wasn't easy, but I started looking up other similar problems people had, and started putting the pieces together. What I thought would take me a week to figure out ended up taking only a day! Here's a picture to show that the networking portion is working:
I have 2 instances of the game and the client is able to connect to the server.
Right now I am working on dead reckoning. I have the basics of it going but I still need to test it and do some tweaking if necessary. It is important that we get the position and movement updates using the first order model since this will be worth 25% of our marks. Once this is up and running I will continue to work on implementing path planning and path interpolation.
In the sound area, we haven't started yet, which is another bad thing. However, I am working with some other team members to come up with a list of sounds we will need, and we are going to record all of the sounds and it should take only 1 or 2 days at most. Unfortunately we left sound to last minute last semester and didn't get a chance to incorporate it into the game, so we are going to get it done this week so that the programmers can put it into the game early on.
For modeling, I still need to fix up the gun models from, UV and possibly texture map them. On top of that, I will also be rigging 1 or 2 of the player models. Depending on how well I manage my time this upcoming week, I may be able to get all of this done by the end of the week. Hopefully this will be everything we need to finish the game so that after the code freeze milestone all we have left to do is polishing to make the game look better for the GameCon.
Since the group hasn't gotten anywhere yet with RakNet and implementing it into the game, I have started working on it so that this isn't left until the last minute. At first I ran into 100+ errors, my worst nightmare has come true! Solving them wasn't easy, but I started looking up other similar problems people had, and started putting the pieces together. What I thought would take me a week to figure out ended up taking only a day! Here's a picture to show that the networking portion is working:
I have 2 instances of the game and the client is able to connect to the server.
Right now I am working on dead reckoning. I have the basics of it going but I still need to test it and do some tweaking if necessary. It is important that we get the position and movement updates using the first order model since this will be worth 25% of our marks. Once this is up and running I will continue to work on implementing path planning and path interpolation.
In the sound area, we haven't started yet, which is another bad thing. However, I am working with some other team members to come up with a list of sounds we will need, and we are going to record all of the sounds and it should take only 1 or 2 days at most. Unfortunately we left sound to last minute last semester and didn't get a chance to incorporate it into the game, so we are going to get it done this week so that the programmers can put it into the game early on.
For modeling, I still need to fix up the gun models from, UV and possibly texture map them. On top of that, I will also be rigging 1 or 2 of the player models. Depending on how well I manage my time this upcoming week, I may be able to get all of this done by the end of the week. Hopefully this will be everything we need to finish the game so that after the code freeze milestone all we have left to do is polishing to make the game look better for the GameCon.
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