A Caribbean Island is the way to go!

Hey guys,

It's the lead artist on Desire FX here... As you might have read already in the previous posts, we have been going through some crucial changes in terms of game design and art direction. We finally have a massive mood board up with endless amounts of pictures from the Bahamas and Jamaica as these two locations are my inspirational islands for our own creations. The fact that we have this grand image library helps us all get a better idea on what we are trying to create and what the feel of our game is. It took us some time to get this done, especially because it tooks us some time to understand the importance of these type of mood boards. On the other hand, all of this would never have been possible with the help of David, a EA Games veteran who has been around for about 12 years with the company. Not only was it a wonderful gesture of him to come down and provide us with the prints, he has always been amongst the developing teams to help out and provide us with his wise knowledge. I for one, appreciate that a lot and I admire his dedication to our cause.

Aside from that, not much new has been happening. Introversion games have been round and we have managed to see the gaming industry from a completely different point of view which was lovely. Mark and Vicky seemed like wonderful people with a great sense of humour. To end of the day, we had a wonderful EA programmer to explain to us on how to approach the development of our video game prototype which is what we needed in order to advance in the right direction. Oh and before I forget... yesterday was payday and guess what I got myself... A NINTENDO DS! Finally!!! So you know what I will be doing this weekend ;) See you guys next week!

Introversion !

Really cool day to the end of a pretty painful week. Work has continued steadily even though we were working kind of in the dark for the most of it. The problem, is it turned out was neither scale or being too ambitious. Its just we figured that since we had a hell of a lot to do content creation wise we'd better get cracking on with it. After our 6th or so chat with an EA official the message finally sunk in that we should focus on a teeny part of the island and get that feature complete, and then build the world up.

So its not been a complete waste of time and we can use what we've got to kinda make more assets, but the most important thing is now we have fully documented design plans, world plans and most important a method that we can use. So its looking like were just going to focus on 3 buildings, 3 characters and then build outwards. Had a good chat with Adrian the production mentor who just wanted to get a feel for our concept. Except now all my beautiful production plans are redundant :'(
We working to a cool new system which is A B C

Basically A is what makes our game our game. Without it we have no game. B is what ive decided to snapilly call "Gameplay Plus", its the same gameplay but deeper and more of it. Then we have C which is all out frippery which has zero impact on the game and contains things like, dolphins, volcanoes, submarines, light houses, sheep.

We've been tormenting Ross all day as hes taken a bit of a kicking art wise due to the (as you probably gathered) schizophrenic development up until this point. We've got it sorted now promise ^^

So yeah, we do have loads of stuff but despite my pleas dont have a playable build of it all. Yesterdays blog was a bit short cos it was basically a day of "heated debate" - so apologies to any other teams who may be reading this fro our frequent rowdiness :)

The systems and optimization guy was really helpful and kinda bought us round to the small increments building methods. i don't know if it was the way he said it, or maybe because it took so many people telling us to kinda remove the idealism fog or cos he had loads of anecdotal evidence but, yeah, well be doing it that way. And just leaving the "A" world size the same so the art guys dont cry :)

Also Mark and Vicky from Introversion came along and gave us a speech on becoming a small independent. I found it particularly interesting, i think because of the publishing view point (reminded me of being back at uni due to the frenzied note taking) ,and also because I think a lot of their games really resound with gamers because they remind you of the kind of games you used to play as a kid, but modernised. Its kinda hard to explain what i mean but it makes sense in my head. High concept stuff generally, nice delivery as opposed to ok concept well delivered. Its also really really encouraging to see people making it on their own with out having to forsake rights and IP to a title that they created.

After wards he came round for a bit of a chat but kinda got ambushed by questions so sorry to the other groups and the Introversion guys for tying up all your time.
We got to see the terrain generator they are using for their new game - check out the video HERE

So its taken us 1 week to plan a nd balance a road network on an island with 15 or so buildings, and they managed to create a full city with Highways, road networks, full populated with different buildings and population densities and parks abou, id say approximately 100 times the size and x1000 the detail in about 30 seconds. Procedural generation is kind of the key for content creation in small teams as, we are finding out, it is very long and arduous to create very little in a team of about 5 :)

So kind of a good resolution to the week :D - ready to crack on next week, actually knowing what were doing and with any luck have something to fly about in by Monday with any luck.

:(

Today wasn't so hot. Another day, another sweeping design change :)
Most of the mentors seem to think we mad. The problem is that everything early on is so interlinked that it makes even slight changes have huge impact on other areas.

So today kinda had to take a step back and realised we werent going to go for a city, we didnt want to throw away all the work we have done so far, so were just going to have to be a bit clever with world design. Mostly this centres around our actual island. Size isnt somuch the problem, its just if anything goes wrong it would pretty much render the game unplayable so were thinking very hard about how to add an element of modularity to the city / world building.

Self contained Archepelagos might work, and is apparently so bad an idea its actually good. So im gunna think about that a bit more. Despite the fact today wasnt overly productive it was still a good idea to get all these thoughts out and documented. Ross vs Rowen design argument was also great :) All of this was pretty much borne out of ongoing scale woes. But yeah, fixed some max / maya / virtools inconsistencies, dave and ross got some really good art input and we had a talk on focusing design with the mack daddy of flow charts. Also made steady progress on the code side of things -

The design debate rages on - more tomorrow!

Eleseo in the making...

Here you have it... This is our main character drawn by me. (David, Art Lead) It should be looking something like this in 3D after Ross is done with the modelling and I have added the real textures to it. Aside from that, more and more sketches of the environments are being made which will slowly make their way towards the Desire FX section of my website. You should be seeing some of Ross his lovely 3D results so far on this blog soon... Well that's it for now as more work is to be done. :) I love it! :)

Day 6 - Enter the Jon

Today we had a visit from some of our lecturers from Farnham, was good to get some feed back on how were doing (.. islands too big :) ) and as well as getting a fresh perspective on things.

This morning we had another another impromptu design meeting. As things tend to change so quickly i thought it was time to get a definitive list down on what we definitely are and are not doing so as to avoid confusion. Initially it was going to start out as a formal design document but we needed something a bit more quick and easy to alter so it got listified.

Most of our time today was spent on horoscope research and definition. Basically this involved researching various personalities behind star signs compatibility charts to define a kind of personality range matrix... thing. Lots of fun with arbitrary values ^_^.



Us ("Science") VS Horoscopes (Not Science) as you can see from our extensive research, starsigns make a pretty pattern... conveniently.

:D





Some trouble with floats meant that its been a fairly arduous task but Rowen finally managed to nail it. Hes also managed to solve the multi grid problem so today Cactus jack and Eva were able to run around large parts of the city and assign new targets dynamically.

It kinda cool and also served to give us sense of scale of the island (huge). Also were now proud to announce that Cactus Jack Juice Shack has started up in the grounds of the Lucid Dreams offices which should give the residents of the island something to drink other than booze.

Rich also succeeding in finally wrapping up all the character actions to camera transitions and button binds on the 360 controller. Might even host a .VMO of that because air swimming man is awsome, especially now he can shoot. Got some really nice lighting effects as the glowing arrows pull back as they shine on his face.

Over to Dave and Ross for ze art.

The Hunter Returns

Camera guy was back again today doing his thing, looking for the human angle, the story behind the story - but whats the real story?

I dunno, anyway Ross got caught out and is convinced they'll cut it to make him look as anti Scottish as possible. Camera guy is really safe so i think were all starting to get a bit more used to it now. It dawned on me yesterday that listing every thought and action we have just results in reams of text so today i'm going to try and just give you an idea of our day in general.

So today started off a bit slow, its kinda been one of those days on the AI side of things. Rowen has been pain painstakingly coloring in the AI paths of resistance for an entire island one pixel at a time. Particularly harsh since he spent most of the morning wrestling with trying to get multiple grids working simultaneously.

Design wise we identified the final play mechanics. It underwent a bit of a revision as over time it had been added to added to and so wasn't particularly robust. We've got it simplified and mapped now in some kind of crazy flow chart that I'm going to begin breaking down into stages. Also after our morning meeting we made a few decisions about camera angles and controls that needed to be nailed down in order to let the guys work a bit easier as well as realizing that the player is going to try and land on roofs so we need to take that into consideration when building the map.

Ross and David have set up an art pipeline which basically means they've got a solid work flow between them that will hopeful be way more productive than them working on things separately now. The key is that they both use their individual skills to get through tasks really efficiently.

Other than that looked into controller mapping, the air swimming guy is looking pretty swish now. Nice controller interaction and transitions as well as some nice camera work. The camera has a certain degree of elasticity that means you cant just spin it around to see behind the player (a particular group pet hate :) )

Not a huge update today despite the fact we did get through a lot of stuff, mainly cos a lot of it would just be listing every minor decision we went through in the day, such as "planned HUD" etc.

Its really nice now that we've kind of iterated the design, by stripping it back to the bare bones of gameplay, iterated this a few times to do some initial balancing (ie making sure people cant just repeat the same action over and over to win) and now we have a solid base to really be able to make a solid plan for the next 8 weeks.

We had a talk from Dave (Dare Dave) today about good working practices, and it was really encouraging to see that most of the stuff he mentioned we had discussed. Also in order to get some feedback were going to have a pre-protoplay demo night in week 8 to get valuable feedback, whcih were all really keen on as it helps focus things a little bit and get real user input on the title instead of just heading out to the event blind.

Oh also alot of talk on the topic of wings ^^

Look at that WACOM tablet!!!

Heeeeey! What's up everybody...

Ok so today is the day that I pass through the gates of heaven as we have just received some magical Wacom tablets from the IT guys from EA. These guys are true heroes and should be knighted if you ask me. :) Either ways, things are going really cool in terms of art and it will be getting even better with these Wacom tablets. I mean they are lovely and just look at the size of my own tablet next to the one EA gave me. For a conceptual artist like myself, this is a tear producing experience. God bless the EA staff at Guildford! Ok, so on to produce some more cool artwork... Speak to you all soon.

The Fear!

Ever wanted to see what 5 very scared people in front of a camera look like - Its funny in a kind of peep show way

The Fear

Hopefully next time he comes around we'll feel a little more at ease and generally less bewildered ^_^*

Today made some really good progress. Since the timescale of the competition is shorter than a team would normally have, we decided to work to weekly milestones as opposed to 4 or 5 major builds. The benefit of this is that it allows us to see what we have on a more frequent basis and implement in manageable chunks.

We also now have the Desire FX portion of the website up - link can be found over here -->
This is where we intend to upload art, gameplay videos and most importantly playable builds, so as the competition progresses it should fill up nicely.

On the code side of things Rich began working on the character implementation and 3rd person / aiming camera. Due to the nature of the arrows and more importantly the characters wing span it is important to get this up as soon as possible to make the necessary tweaks needed to make sure it is solid and accurate. Speaking of player characters:


CHECK IT OUT !

So this is the finalized concept for the player character courtesy of Dave. Were all really happy with how he looks, and the colours. Currently Daves working on making the translation to 3D but were all really impressed with how this turned out. Before hand we had an idea of how he was going to look but now hes become an actual character.

This was doubly handy because today we got some more 3D assets from Ross, so the feel of the world has really fallen into place. Firstly he's mapped out the road network and heights of the island. While these will probably get pushed and pulled about a little bit to accommodate the routes Rowen has been working on the main structure is there for us to start building. At the time of writing this the island has been imported into Virtools ready for the AI routes to start being mapped out. Ross also produced some more high density building assets that we can use to start building up the city.

Mechanics wise things are also starting to take shape. Today Rowen tweaked the grid reallocation as well as making our trusty subject cactus jack respond to the the compatibility % proximity every time. After a long battle he also managed to fix multiple path scaling and succeeded in implementing 4 VT characters each finding their own paths. This then enabled him to remove an individual script for each character and instead implement one over single script that controlled them all... AS WELL as making an array that handles moving targets for each character. This means that as their priorities round the world change so will their path depending on the simplest / most direct route to take by using way points (phew ^^)

Yeah so started slow but got really productive. As well as some crazy air swimming also looked into a few design issues such as whether we want (read will have time) to implement critters on the island, its quite time consuming but will add a certain level of depth top the nudgeable environments. Also decided that the spark system should reflect compatibility not only in intensity but also in color. Most importantly though we got our sound working so was able to investigate sound-scaping the game. The problem is currently that sound has to compliment the art as well as being easily accessible. What makes this tricky is how subjective music is in general so will need to have some serious thought. Now that we have a solid idea of the character and world this makes direction easier and so have been looking at similar themed shows and games for ideas. Ideally we'd like to have a nice intro sequence that lures people over so it looks like most sound will be under 30 seconds other than the BGM.

So yeah epic ...

Blog gets makeover

Hello there guys, it's the conceptual artist here... (Just click on the image to visit my website) After discussing this with our beloved Aidan, we decided to give the blog a quick makeover so I got up early in the morning and started cracking on this. I hope that all of you guys out there like the changes and if you have any better suggestions, just post a comment here and we'll make the necessary changes if possible.

Either ways, this would be my first post on this blog so I will take the opportunity to let you know how I have perceived Dare 2007 so far. It's all pretty much like Aidan has been saying... This is all one big epic fest! EA Games is treating us with the outmost respect and importance and it definitely boosts us all to work even better and harder. I can tell you now that we come in around 8:30 and don't leave the building until around 19:30 and sometimes we even make it up to 20:00 if possible. The fact is that we simply do not want to go home after a long day of work... we end up wanting to work even more!

We are very lucky to have this grand opportunity and we definitely are hoping to create the best possible experience out there. As a matter of fact, after discussions with Aidan, I have decided to use my website as a host to all of Desire FX's latest artwork, screenshots, videos and most importantly... our playable builds for you guys out there to test our video game and give us priceless feedback! This will benefit us more than you could ever know + we will obviously have links towards this blog from my website for you guys to start giving us your comments and suggestions.

So when will all of this goodness be up and running I hear you say? My answer for you is "Tomorrow!" How much more epic than this can it get? Obviously there won't be any builds to play yet, but some of the artwork and additional info will be posted + a suggestion box where all of you guys get to suggest cool ideas which could make it into the actual game if possible. So stand by and keep an eye on this blog because lots of great stuff is heading your way soon!!!