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)