Today was an uber productive day - maybe because twice the monitors = x2 the productivity. After discovering Ross's HDD was a bit defective we sat down to have a meeting to decide how to start the project. First our Gantt chart went out the window as we made a design choice that profoundly affected our game world . We decided to eschew the linear street plan in favor of a small floating city, in a similar manner to a wind waker island. This was primarily because the street model didnt really create the game play we imagined.
We finally managed to determine the kind of scale we would want to work too, as it was hard to balance the sort of small island based world with the kind of population we had in mind. We all really happy now that we have managed to come up with something that is both exciting to make and feasible. We wanted to make sure the Plaza acted as our central play point, acting as a facilitator for NPC's to meet and interact.
We also started an NPC and modeled our church which represents the focal point and starting area for the game, and decided it should be relatively isolated. The top of the church represents the height ceiling for the player character to ensure that people cant just fly in a straight line and are forced to navigate the world. Flight time from one side of the other should be about 1 minute to keep the time to fun short.
All this helped us determined floor heights and max building scales as well as enabling us to make a finalized map with building layouts (we took the opportunity to give ourselves an office on our new island opposite the pub :) ) and decided that most NPC interaction with the environment will take place outside.
We have now nailed down path finding, and realized that building curved paths not as hellish as we anticipated. Rich also added arrow lighting effects and Rowen finalized dynamic shadows with multiple objects.
Oh we also thought it would be awesome to add a crucifix on top of our church to get a cool cross shadow as it turns into night ^_^
The best thing about today was it enabled us to get a really good start on the project and map out how were going to progress over the next 9 weeks. Hopefully (fingers crossed) well have our map extruded tomorrow with basic block buildings, and get something you can walk and shoot arrows round. If we do well try and get it uploaded !
Oh and Rowen "or ill walk" Holts maverick T-pot rampage and Grand Theft Epilepsy were born in the name of progress / science!
1 comment:
Got your Facebook bro, sounds like you're having a great time and putting in some hard work :) GLHF!
Post a Comment