Weekly Update

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.