Week 5: Re-organising/Re-thinking

This week, I had a lot of things to do for this project...none of which involved touching the game engine at all! Here's a video of the current version of the game, it's just me messing around just trying to show the different systems & mechanics.

The tasks

1. Re-evaluate my project and goals by adjusting my schedule and creating a Gantt chart to better communicate how I'll be spending my time.
2. Produce a narrative for the game-play
3. Research fighting styles , character design and design a new playable avatar for the game.

Completing tasks : The how and why

1.

As I mentioned last week, meeting my personal tutor was the catalyst for me to rethink the way I had organised my time. I'm not suggesting that it was the only motivating factor, as over the first four weeks of tasks I was definitely paying the price for some over ambitious planning.

So, before I changed anything I went back to my pitch presentation and supporting documentation to get the list of my original goals for this project.

While I had to make changes, I didn't want to contradict or betray what I had said I was going to do originally. What I was able to do was prioritise the aspects of my product that I wanted to be as polished as possible:

1. The technical side : Since this is my main focus (programming & system design)
2. The visual quality of the product : This is, after all, a show-reel piece that needs to look and sound its best
3. The game play : While originally this was a higher priority, I realise now that I won't have time to do the extensive game testing that I had planned, but I can still do some at least.

What I got rid of was one of the two game testing sessions along with the bug fixing sessions that proceeded and followed them. I also have removed the use of the 'Microsoft Game state management' sample from my project. I originally planned to use this as a menu system for this game, however, having used in recently for another module I realise now that it follows a completely different program structure to my game engine & would require a lot of time to implement. So, instead, I've opted to make my own simple menu. This is scheduled later on in the project phase since due to its low priority.

What I added in was a much needed week to create a full art asset list along with an additional week to create game art. Generally, I've tried to spread things out a bit more realistically where possible, as I've found that I've often too many tasks for one week.

I also had to make an unexpected addition for next weeks tasks as the particle system that I implemented last week is quite a resource-hog. I hadn't noticed until I played around with all four players emitting particle effects that it actually slowed down the whole game which could potentially crash the whole game & is a huge risk.

While I've tried to mention everything that I changed/moved I'm sure I'll have forgotten something so here is both the updated schedule and new Gantt chart to see the changed for yourself:

(Note*: The Gantt chart was a downloadable template which automatically greyed out weekends, however I DO work weekends!)
Apologies for the poor quality of the Gantt image, its a long chart so I had to scale it. The downloadable excel sheets of both charts can be found in the sidebar.

2.

I was asked by my tutor to come up with some sort of narrative / incentive for the game. While I did actually have a loose idea of why these little characters were fighting, I never committed to my documentation :

You play as a small atomic being whose goal is to power up the dormant world you inhabit with your own type of energy. However, you aren't alone as other beings are after the very same thing ! Only the toughest and smartest will manage to gain the power to reach their goal, do you have what it takes?

3.

One issue that more than one tutor raised when I first pitched the idea for this project was that the characters were a bit boring & unoriginal. After discussing this with my personal tutor, he suggested that I move away from a human-like fighting style and look at the animal kingdom for reference.

So, I went and looked at the way that mammals, reptiles & insects fight, and what I found the most interesting were the animals (and sometimes people) that used their heads as their attacking instrument.

While I don't have access to a scanner at the moment (sketches will be up asap), what I came up with is a character that has a spherical base (with a rotating atom inside it) with a human-ish head on top of it. The character will only use its head to attack! Heres the rough idea (images stolen from google)

Week 4: Particle System (80% Complete)

This week I met my individual tutor which has changed my overall plans somewhat. Originally I was going to carry on with my schedule till week 6 (implementing the menu system), however, after the meeting, I needed to re-evaluate my priorities

It was suggested that I rethink some aspects of my project:

• Come up with an original character
• Research styles of combat within games
• Focus more on the artistic side
• Create a Gantt chart of schedule

The above tasks need to completed before next weeks personal tutor meeting. With that in mind, the rescheduling and reorganising of the project will have to be moved ahead a week to project week 5.

With a possible change in combat moves & mechanics coming up due to character redesign I've delayed the creation of the 'how to' section.

However, I stuck to the plan for this weeks task in ,modifying the sample particle system and effects and a system to manage them. What I actually found the most difficult was managing the different types of particle system, and not creating and implementing them into my game.

Week 3: Level design & negative player effects (90% Complete)

Leading on from last weeks post in regards to the changing of the time table, I'll be sticking to the current plan up until project week 6 (the menu system).

This weeks task again demanded more than I expect it, but this time, it was a manageable demand. I looked at the level I had and one thing was clear, it was too big! This would cause the game play to be too spread out and the opposite of what I wanted, fast paced & action packed. Resizing the level was relatively painless since most of systems that depended on the levels size (e.g where the AI patrols) wasn't hard-coded, so all I had to do was change the values.

With that done I could then lay out the tiles (platforms) that players will be jumping on and fighting over. I mentioned in the brief that the general idea of the game level is that the player will always want to be as close to the source as possible (they will gain the most charge over time and be able to score more quickly). So, that meant that the tiles had to be spread out so that the higher up the player was, the more difficult it needed to be for the player to move around. The only issue I had was with the player not being able to jump high enough, so I had to modify the physics properties somewhat.

Lastly was the task of creating the levels textures. I wrestled with what to do with the look of the level for a long time. On one hand I wanted it too look very sleek and metallic/cold, on the other, I wanted something that was very simple and almost child like.

I began creating the more 'realistic' looking textures, however they didn't fit in at all, and in fact, the place-holder art looked better!

When I went back to my original ideas on how the game should look like I found that my early ideas suited it much better. I set off wanting creating a very simplified almost Lego/childlike look to my game. Also, after having played many 'indie' games over the course of the week, I found that the simplest looking ones were always more fun & easy to play.

While the the look of the level may be revised during the scheduled sprite creation week, this level layout looks energetic and colourful as well as being practical for the purposes of game-play.

As for player feedback, I added in a rumble effect on the game-pad when a player is under the effect of a static charge stun. What I noticed when adding in the physical force knock back of being attacked by another player was that the PVP system has a major bug in it. The problem is that within the code that determines who the player can hit and if they have been hit, there is a bug that makes one or more players hit more than one target (even if those targets are out of range).

Therefore I have deducted 10 percent from this weeks milestones completion so that I can revisit it in a bug fixing week. While this is a pretty big problem, luckily, I know all the details of it thanks to adding the knock-back effect which should help me solve it rapidly.

Week 2 :Player feedback (60% Complete)

Having completed week 1's task fairly quickly, I was feeling pretty confident about adding user feedback to the game.

By user feedback, I'm referring not only to the HUD but also things like the screen shaking when a player falls off the screen & the player changing colour/flashing when they are hit.

I had a rough list of what I needed to add to the game to make the player visually know what was going on during game-play.

Firstly, I set about changing the colour of charge-burners to one colour(colour is subject to change). When a CB is chasing a player, it takes on a darker shade of colour. When 'focused' chasing one specific player, its colour will change to that of the player indicator (the small arrow above the players sprite).

Next I went about creating a system to add effects to a player when they are:
- Hit by an enemy (they flash)
- Hit by a CB (they blur)
- Stunned by SC (they glow)

Then it I added a global shaking effect for when a player falls off the world and when any SC stun is initiated.

Lastly I added HUD elements:
- Icons indicating:
- If a combo is active
- If unlock-able abilities are ready
- How much charge is being multiplied by

The problem was that all this took a lot longer than I thought it would. While I had some HUD elements created, the whole HUD system needed re-organising as well as re-thinking. Once I had created many of the elements, I wasn't very impressed with them either (since they were just static), so I spent time adding in interpolation/small random movements.

Due to the amount of time spent on the user feedback, I didn't have time to modify the existing character design either.

The basic shader effects that I had added to the player didn't look that great which has made me re-evaluate my priorities.

While I still want to play test the game, I think I have to put the presentation of the game above the gameplay. This might even lead to getting rid of the latter game testing session.

By the end of week 3 I'll have a revised schedule along with a priority list of things that I want in the project.