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!!!