Ciday!

Aidans take on Eleeso's outfit was not met with the approval art of this caliber deserves - or any for that matter.

Todays modern cupid has to be ready for anything. Looking sharp in his pink waistcoat and matching camoflage, Eleeso is ready for action. Ah well at least theres still the prospect of an unlockable outfit.

The Aidan art ban continues.


Its dawned on me that its been E3 this week and I haven't mentioned anything about it. Its definitely less of a spectacle now, still looking forward to Army of Two, MGS4 more epicness - would have been nice to see gameplay (is it possible to be over epic'd?), Mariokart Wii after double dash seemed a bit like Twilight Princess but for MK but !!! WiiFitness!! Where did that come from! Im genuinely excited about the possibilites for developers. Esentially a dual input, pressure sensitve DS screen. Mario Kart Pedals, giant Robot feet, skateboard - so much potential!

Darewise things progress ooookay. Had a meeting with Adrian about production and Protoplay - got a load of good tips for demoing material and discussed some broader production topics. Also got the inf0 about the computers were using which are essentially the same ones were using here at EA which is great news.

Engine Wise got some really good stuff - Rowen got a crude level of detail implemented and Rich nailed down the cyclical targeting and lock-on. The character also automatically animates to point at the target which is great news since we thought it was going to take ages and its taken about a day.

Art wise, despite my awesome contribution, Dave experimented with some character designs and Ross continued with mapping (almost finished!) Unfortunately we weren't able to get finished art assets in as we had hoped but we did managed to get our new island in and its now shrunk down to 1 grid (cant believe it was 6 at first!). Despite concerns that its too big we dialed up the flight speed to represent what it will be in the final demo and it feels really nice to fly around. Its got some awesome views and although once we start getting world objects in with Rowens new character generation script its going to really come to life.

Ive also been chatting to the guys from zerO.One over the last week, seems like things are going on well over there. Inevitably the topic quickly turned to Ross and whether he was on some kind of crusade. I think maybe in his mind he is :)
Ive been thinking about the whole ... opinion ... issue. I guess as people who have been playing games for years we like to see new and exciting things, so some topics are bound to irk. But being here kind of has highlighted why these decisions are made - because mechanically they work really well. Take crates, and hazardous liquids, and obligatory stealth sections, etc (insert your own pet hate here) they all perform a function really well for little cost - sometimes its technical limitations -sometimes its time. I kinda got derailed there - I guess what i'm trying to say is what about the ones we like? Coop, and com chatter and generic squad based epicness get me going every time (well most times), which makes them awesome ^_^

More next week!

The Lucid Dream Teamzor

Swimming upstream!

As time has been going by, lots of art has been added to our library and lots of crap has been created and redesigned in many ways. (All for the better of course!) With some past team issues, me catching a crappy cold and the miraculous E3 footage distracting the hell out of me, the last couple of days have felt like swimming upstream. Even though the texture library has had a wonderful improvement and the main character has received all the necessary maya love from my colleague Ross, it all feels like things have just not been going as fast as they should have been.

With that said, the time has come for me to end this week like one would end a chapter in a book before moving forward to the next one. Monday which will be my "D-Day" which will be the beginning of the next chapter in this story as the time has come to leave the past behind and move forward as a legend in the making.

Until then... This artist will be in a galaxy far, far away...

Word of the day

Buzzword (noun)

A buzzword (also known as a fashion word) is an idiom, often a neologism, commonly used in technical, administrative, and sometimes political environments. e.g.

'Set in the spectacular generic, thematic landscape of somewhere in Europe, 'Generic Non-Entity 00.02 alpha' is an action adventure game in which we play Chesney Wangstrom, an archetypal 'regular joe' which nobody finds any interest in, and 'extreme' sports fanatic who finds himself embroiled in a mystery of incredibly derivative proportions involving cryogenics, cold war conspiracies, ecological terrorism and other random words that enable the use of deus ex machina and other 'user-centric convergence devices' to cover-up a lack of ' front-end emergent game play stylistics'. Metrics.

Key to the game’s appeal is the way Chesney moves from place to place: he has at his disposal a wild array of gimmicks, including snowboards, terrainboards, windboards, paragliders, jetskis, boats, cars, trucks, windmachines, blimps, dinosaurs, horses, pogosticks, spacehoppers, rollerskates, canoes, zombies, ninjas, vampires, robots, robot vampires, aquatic mammals, and many other vehicles which we are describing to you to cover up the complete lack of actual game play mechanics ( because they don't actually exist). It is through these that we both navigate the terrain and race to catch up with and influence the unfolding story within our incredibly sparse low ploy environments which we should have scaled down because there is actually nothing within them. These twists and turns (scattershot plotlines) depend on Chesney’s actions and decisions throughout the game, just like any other game that has been released within the last five years, since the days of the Atari Jaguar, which in turn depend on how we as interactive digital radeon wishywashy consumers perform when faced with Chesney’s missions, challenges and experiences. '



The Annoying Wordpixie

War and Peace

No update yesterday due to a visit from our old lecturer that ballooned into a psuedo-reality TV level of drama that stretched long into the night. Despite the sledge hammer subtlety of Jon and inappropriate format of discussion i'm not entirely oblivious to how these situations arise, so we all learnt a bit. Still as with all these things a few pints and the natural balance is soon restored.

In a way its kind of apt / ironic as we have been talking a lot this week about how the games industry and the people in it are very passionate and how that this leads to a high level of personal involvement in projects. (especially one with shared creative input ^_^ )

Anyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyway - thats not to say things have stopped moving! Our visit by Mark and Ian from Lionhead really helped throw a fresh perspective on our game and some frenzied note taking during their visits lead us to really analyze a few key areas. Primarily we decided the shooting mechanic is far to difficult. So we've simplified this down to make it a bit more fast paced, easier to select arrows by colour coding them to the face buttons and faster arrows that make auto target much more effective. Its now a bit similar to a crazy GTA / Metroid prime hybrid where you can see all available targets and select them cyclically (GTA) thus locking them in and making them your central pivot and focus point (Metroid Prime) (mmmm post modern) (mmm brackets)

Other than that it has been business as usual with Ross having nearly finished prepping the Player Character and Rich making some good headway with the new and improved camera system. Rowen is stills storming ahead with our fancy new NPC import script and I had the pleasure of assisting Dave with picking outfits for our NPC on a kind of mad digital shopping trip.
Also managed to fill in a few gaps sound wise and fleshed out a few documents. Its hard to think that were coming to the end of week 6 already - Madness! With a max of 10 - 11 working days left until the internal show it will be a awesome to get all our new content up and running together!

More tomorrow when I will be doing my best to mimic angel like motions in our ghetto mocap session (Pics! to follow!)

Sounds and Scrums

The majority of my morning was taken up with adding to our growing database of sounds. Now that the art style is confirmed and finished textures are being mapped onto the finalized models we should be able to go through and see which sounds fit the worlds. Listening to 20 screaming sounds first thing in the morning isn't pleasant so I was kinda glad when (dare) dave come down for his meeting.

Managed to get some handy feedback such as a few camera tweaks we can make to make the world a bit easier to view for the users and also highlight the need to start getting finished assets in ASAP. This is something we've postponed for a while since we needed to ensure that all assets were at the same level to avoid wasting time making a redundant build - hence the reason we havent had a new build since the 2nd :'(. Still though since then there has been big progress so with any luck we should be ready for our Friday build to test (break) over the weekend.

We also had a visit from Nick from Zoe Mode about Scrum management / production technique. Its quite a different methodology than you see in most industries as it relies on being dynamic and adaptable, it was also kind of interesting to see how we've sort of adopted that method of working organically over the last 6 weeks (^ see earlier posts about redundant project plans and the fabled Gantt chart). He had a lot of analogies that rang particularly true for me such as Buzz Word Bingo and "resource controller" posturing (Sharpie feels my pain) and most importantly it highlighted the fact that it was the right choice to try and do this democratically and not rely on uber-detailed project plans.

Edit: used word interesting x3 in as many sentences .... brain ...melting

We also spoke to Simon whop had loads of great suggestions for work AI work arounds, that mean we should be able to reach the island population of 41! It came at at really handy time as Rowen has been struggling with the AI implementation and this is pretty much the perfect time to switch to the new method and avoid previous pitfalls. Currently hes got one test bed sorted for importing characters (and avoiding the 23step implementation technique which is always a bonus :)) and has just exclaimed "Lovely" after gargling with rage so I can guess its going pretty well.

Other than that Art is going well - have the building texture set up now ready to start being mapped to the models and player character is fully modeled and almost finished being skinned so ... yeah - tough going but were getting there ^_^

ThE LuCiD DrEaMeRs

Its a feature !

First thing today we had a small art meeting to discuss one or two things that came up during the weekend and make sure we were all happy with what needs doing over the week ahead.

With the internal showing in 2 weeks we want to get as closed to finished quality as possible so that we can get a bit more focused feedback from the guys attending.

So today we've had some really good progress and some not ... so ... good progress. Rich managed to implement our heart wipe with some Virtools wizardry. We now have an awesome Looney Tunes style effect to make the transition between play and cut scene a bit smoother. On the other side of the code fence Rowen has been banging his head all day trying to solve a problem with animating female NPC's. For some reason auto aiming on them as they get nudged is propelling the player character into the sky - the auto aim is a bit problematic due to the speed and drop on an arrow, but fingers crossed we'll be able to keep it in as we think its important to make the game as accessible to everyone as possible.

Art wise were making up for lost time of last week. Dave has almost finished all the building textures and today we took delivery of our player characters bow so with any luck Ross will have finished all the major modeling by tomorrow.

In the sound department, I began replacing place holder sounds with ones that we can use in the actual game. Since our game is quite focused on visual comedy it is important to compliment this with the sound. Up until this point it was a case of finding appropriate sounds of a similar nature and right duration, but now we can see more of the world and its style its definitely helping focus the sound direction. Going to do some research into how its handled in other media to make sure were on the right track.

We also had another visit from our friendly neighborhood camera man. Ross was soo close to keeping a lid on it but Piers seems to know how get him going - this week it was MGS and GH (Ross your wrong ^^) and got the chance to check out the diaries form last week over on the dare site. Its always nice to see that it doesn't turn out as hideous as i expect it to be. We also had a visit from some of the guys on the potter team who were interested to see what we've been up to and started a bit of a chat with the guys over on zerO.One (Hi Guys!) who sound like they're having an awesome time. So yeah pretty good day all in all and fingers crossed it'll be plain sailing for the next fortnight (:S ! :D)

Lucid Dream Team