The Race to Monday

As the image clearly shows, we are in a race to reach monday's internal showing at EA Games. The last couple of days have been quite hectic and very intense. We have been trying our very best to put all of our assets together to achieve a presentable build by 17:00 on Monday the 23rd of July and so far we have done well, but will we have what we are hoping for?

There is no question that Lucid Dreams can develop and deliver great quality. We posses all the ambition, motivation and courage needed to achieve this. We have outstanding talent on our team and we have a very strong faith in our project. Desire FX might not look the way we want the game to look at this stage, but we know this... When the day comes to deliver the final result, we will deliver our finest and best piece of work. Lucid Dreams is not a team that will just stand still and give up or get scared away by its competition. Lucid Dreams is a team that embraces the competition and uses it to fuel its own progress and improvements.

Whatever Monday's outcome may be, it will be what we have managed to deliver and show by then. Whether that is a graphical beauty or a very basic representation of our actual game, that is not what matters. I believe that we as a team are capable of impressing a crowd with our passionate love for making games and more importantly, for this project. Monday will be an interesting day and I look forward to seeing what we as a team will be able to show the people of EA Games and our fellow teams. I do not believe that we will fail in our attempt to impress or fail in our attempt to provide our viewers with the core beauty of this grand project named Desire FX.

Lucid Dreams will continue dreaming as we are aware of what we dream and are convinced of our strenght. With that said, Monday will be a good day to look forward to...

teh teh teh

Now, E.A has put out some shit, don’t get me wrong. Catwoman was so bad it actually gave some people herpes, and The Simpsons Skateboarding caused Hiroshi Yamauchi to cry for the first time in 300 years. However, they have also put out some good things, and more importantly, they have come on board with dare. As we near our climax, huffing and puffing like Mario at the Olympics, it is time to talk about the good things rather than the bad things.

All those external speakers, the introversion guy (and gal) who showed us that good game design can still exist, even when money is scarce, Ste Curran’s absurdly awesome presentation about his mum (and his rather silly views about Halo's Library level) Mark Stacey’s ability to find cat gifs of truly epic proportions were all stand out highlights... These people and many others all gave up their time to come down and help us. In the short time that Dare has been a part of our lives, I’ve met some pretty incredible people, and not mindless, no-faced drones, covered in ‘property of E.A’ stickers like I expected.

It’s made me love the industry even more. The very fact that E.A has got on board with dare is a finger up to the typical internet forum fanboy who moans on about Fifa Street and the black death of franchise rape. They have actually opened their doors, let us in (at considerable risk) and spent many, many man hours setting things up. Dyack can moan on all he likes about bringing in creativity to the industry, but its things like Dare which really offer a glimpse at what fresh blood can produce. It’s maybe why I get so frustrated sometimes when I look at what other teams are producing. The chance to break away from the typical conventions of gameplay is never going to be greater than now. Why have a bathtub as your environment and fail to utilize it? Why can’t I hit the tap with a shot from my cannon, spinning it and turning it on, changing the game in an instant as the water’s surface goes from calm to violent, throwing the boats around, up to the sides of the bath? Why can’t I slide up the sides of the bath like a half pipe, teetering on the edge of falling out, but being able to get respite from enemy fire? Why can’t I shoot out the plug and cause the game to go into frantic meltdown as everyone scrambles from the resulting whirlpool? Why can’t I use that environment, instead of it being yet another, non-interactive stack of polygons?

But I digress

I
<3
E.A (and Dare)


p.s Alex Ward is coming down on Monday, and I’m scared of what I may say if he comments on his like of Crackdown… I’m sorry in advance if I make him cry.

anyway

Rainnnnnnnnnnnnn

Pretty shattered today, what was supposed to be an hour round trip to sort out budget issues at Farnham turned into a rain soaked odyssey owing to crazy amounts of traffic. Seriously though I cant remember a summer as wet as this. Still at least were not venturing outside much ^_^

So today I set to work making textures, got a few knocked up ready for Monday and made a couple of awesome signs for locations around our world - bright colours and really obvious signs are the order of the day:


Today is gonna be a bit light on the ground blog wise - I think Dave and Ross have blogged, but work continues. Got a few more building textures out the way, started animating character and getting him into the composition. Rich also fixed an issue with the player characters movement which involved lots of maths so now he turns at a constant rate regardless of distance from the target and got arrow trails / lights in which are looking really cool. Dave also mocked up our HUD for Monday.

Gunna be coming in over the weekend now EA have extended the times were allowed in. Had a chat with Mark and Adrian today who tried to address any fears we may have about Monday. I don't think its fear of EA staff more a case that we want to make sure we represent ourselves and our game well. I have no doubt it will all come together ready for the showing, just ... need .. to keep ... making ... textures ^_^

Dare is something we have been thinking a lot about and talking over as a group the last couple of weeks. While it hasn't been particularly smooth at points and we've had various troubles along the way were all loving Dare. In particular its been an amazing learning experience, especially being surrounded by and mentored by people who have been in the industry such a long time and worked on titles that we have played growing up - Alex from NC Soft took one look at our game and said "I bet you guys like Bullfrog games" which is pretty much all we talk about since meeting the guys here ^_^. Sometimes when i'm getting a cup of tea or working away I remember that im at EA games working on our own title and just think "Wow"

I know i've definitely learnt more in 8 or so weeks of Dare than a year and a half of combined academia and work relating to games. Even just being in a group of 20 or so like minded people has made the time we've spent at Dare really memorable

GTG!

Lucid Dream Team

Picture of the Day!

Let us celebrate our time at EA Games with this lovely picture of me and Ross sharing pure joy and happiness. It's the way it was meant to be!

Nostalgia

After almost 10 years of providing, nay inventing online team based epicness, the people of Vivendi games have decided to pull the plug on Tribes.

Whilst 2 alt master servers exist, this really just means its a matter of time until there is no more tribes ... evar! Some would say its been dead for a long time, some would say its time to move on - and maybe it is (its not) but that means the Tribes community is officially now a gaming community without a game. I think this is something well see more and more of and kind of a testament to the impact one game has when just its memory is enough to keep a fan base together. Here is a list of things in current FPS's that we take for granted that tribes invented:

1) Large scale team combat
2) Vehicles
3) Simultaneous Outdoor and Indoor Environments
4) Commander roles
5) In game lobby's / brower (with built in IRC)
6) Deployable's

I cant go on ! Noooooooooooooooooooooooo Tribes - I hardly knew thee - its seems like only yesterday! I haven't even started on the things you did right no ever game has done yet.
Maybe I should take Adams advice and get professional help. If Tribes was a person, our relationship status would be "complicated".

OK OK - back on track - This and a conversation about Iguana (Forsaken!) and seeing Goldeneye got me thinking about nostalgia. Is it that these games were so awesome because A) there was nothing like it at the time which makes them much more epic? yeah I think thats probably it.

Today we were visited by Alex from NC Soft. He had some interesting thoughts on MMOG's and especially the different types of player. It was also interesting to hear him mention Facebook because it must really be having a big impact on the games industry. Initially I was a hater but tbh if it keeps the focus of some games (Second Life) off socializing then i'm all for it.

Gamewise today work progressed on the art side of things, environmental assets got textured, more NPCs were added (96!), Player Character was finished to a sufficient level for the internal showing oh oh and we made this:



Cool eh ? ^_^ - thats our island

Alot of this morning was spent burning stuff to DVD for our Art Deliverables and chatting to Alex. The tables being set up in readiness for our pitch and todays deadline is a sad reminder that Dare will soon be over. Things are coming together, and who really knows whats going to happen but its been an awesome journey so far. Ive even got better at art! As i'm writing this an epic 2 vs 2 inter team game of Ouendan is coming to an end.

T- 3.5 days until the internal show, and the start of our testing / polishing / wrapping up phase so we'll upload the internal show build and let you guys have at it!

Cheers,

The Lucid Dream Team

Art !

Today I have mostly been texturing! After a brief wrestle with Maya I managed to get into the swing of things and managed to get quite a few environmental entities up to finished quality. All in all a pretty productive day all round.

Ross finished some more mapping and started texturing the church, which will be the focal point of our island. Dave has also added hair and wings to our main player character ready for animation. Check him out:



We've managed to compile our choicest art for our first deliverable, ready for printing off into awesome banners for Protoplay. It'll be really good seeing them up on the wall - its also been a great exercise in realizing how things have changed visually along the way. We also managed to animate mission 2 and 3 and is currently implementing a header system that will call each scene independantly as it was having a little trouble previously. Other than art its been a case of sourcing more sounds for walking on various surfaces and Rich has been investing compiling our game into an .exe (currently it runs as a VMO for web browsers).

Piers was back to day for his weekly dose of Ross, who had some very poignant thoughts on creativity and inspiration, and we got to see the latest Irish video which is frankly epic.
Note: Team Lucid Dreams would like to retract any previous comments about click warps in videos as none were present

(aaaaaaaarrgh, blogger is refusing to let me out of Italics)

Its getting quite hard to remember what happened today - Ross has been introduced to the class A equivalent of a cat gif site, in what we can only suspect to be a cunning ruse on behalf of the Irish teams, possibly there was Guiness involved as some kind of payment ^_^ and we uploaded an AI test video here.

Okies I think its time we get outta here !

The Lucid Dreams Team

55 frames ... 48 people

Woooooooooooooooooooow, NPC madness continues! Today Rowen has been incrementing on the NPC script slowly but surely and after many iterations, a revision to the path generation and our new shiny animation level of detail we have a now fully populated world! Thats 7 more NPC's than we wanted max not including mission NPC's and still have frames to play with... Sweet


Eleeso - surveying his targets

I have just been reliably informed this now includes animation Levels of Detail ... Sweet ^_^

Ive been trying to put together a very special video to highlight the epicness but have been having issues with sound so maybe tomorrow. Tomorrow were also going to be compiling our art assets to send off for Protoplay so kind of scary as its our first(ish) milestone.

Phew yeah so continued making 2D assets today, found out the technical term for those little flags you get is called bunting. .. cos knowing is half the battle (Especially when using google) and some awesome signs for our new denizens. Ross made an epic return today and had made some really good renovations to the island after his weekend experience with Crackdown and learnt a few lessons about making space more populated with what we've got. Its looking really good now and makes life a bit easier so bonus all round.

Texture wise Dave is real close to finishing the player character, ready to get some buildings done tomorrow so we can get our latest screen shots off for Protoplay. We also took delivery of our fancy new scrolling menu system and flight cam from Rich.

So things are really coming together now - while I still had to explain to Dare Dave why we didn't have so many finished art assets in, I think that by the time of the internal show well be just needing to tweak here and there and apply testing and polish. The only real hurdles at the minute are animating the player character and texturing the more specialized buildings but now with weekend access im sure thatll happen.

Also found out today that Alex Ward (Burnout Series, Black) wants to come down and meet us. It'll be a good experience as well need to justify what were doing and why, so its extra preparation for Protoplay. Also he says good things about Army of Two - so hopefully I can gleam some info and it will be like playing it by proxy :). Other than that the new video is out - Check it out Ross has his own section ! Apparently Northern Ireland are preparing some kind of Epic video rebuttal, thats so click warp intensive Mark refused to have anything to do with it ^_^ sounds great

On the subject of E-fame I don't know if i mentioned but i was having crazy VMO / 360 troubles Big thanks to mini rich who informed me of a sneaky driver update - sorted now, but while searching for 360 controller, VMO and virtools our blog came up numero uno on google - which while not helping me solve my issue was cool :) . Jeebus! Apologies for the rambly nature of this blog - just keep ... remembering ... things ...

Good day Good day!

Team Lucid Dream

(p.s A prize to anyone who can accurately tell me the frequency of the word Epic and Awesome in this post cos im sure its high)

(pps Hi Mike)

Madness!

In the words of Rowen "cripes!". Things have been moving full steam ahead today and its only monday ! Sorted out alot of admin for our internal showing next week and various bits and pieces for Protoplay, still only feels like weve been here a few weeks. We got an email through today saying EA will be open on weekends starting as of this weekend which I can see us taking advantage of.

Excitingly over the weekend Rowen managed to sort out our NPC generation script, so we can now import completely unique NPC's at the touch of a button (as long as their in multiples of 6 :) ) still its really awesome to see about 300 charaacters wandering along in a huge snake like line. He managed to get it into the island and working so now its a case of redoing the path map. Rich has also been pressing on with our new and improved camera and fire mechanic, the finer details of which we now have sorted. Simplicity is the key so we figured make it as easy as possible for the focus testing and then go from there. He also managed to sort out dynamic lighting which definitely makes things a bit easier for the guys art wise.

On that side of things today Dave has textured the majority of the main player character, if you've noticed a strange calm in the world today its because Ross has been taken out of action by some crazy virus. Hes all drugged up and will be back on the front line tomorrow ready to go toe to toe with some animations. Luckily our handy new target system has cut the volume of animations we need (ish). We also managed to sort various other bits n pieces such as creating a list of the all the names that our NPC's can use when randomly assigning names, and gathering as many 2D images for easy alpha making as poss.

Heres a nice pic!




The Lucid Dream Team