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 ...