Gradumeration

No Post yesterday as the intertubes were down - managed to get a fair chunk done though which works out well since, today was a little short due to graduation for some of the team. Pictures of us in funny hats and other general merriment to follow !



"Honkies gone wild"


SO the biggest thing about today and yesterday was the peak and trough-ification of our otherwise very linear tutorial stage into 4 staggered mini missions. Just finished putting the finishing touches and will need to be re written into actual text and dialog we can use in the final game but the feel and mission structure have been confirmed. One of the best things about Dare is learning the importance of methods that you are either unaware of or have had little exposure too. For instance in these mission structure I would have used to just pick arbitrary locations and people and shoe horn them into the game, but now realize its really important to consider the characters, their place in the world and most importantly how this immerses the player to avoid making glaring and out of place contradictions that will drag the player out of your world.

I mean one thing that always irked me about fixed camera angle survival horror games, is that a tooled up special forced agent / magical samurai can go toe to toe with the zombies and daemons but are frequently foiled by flimsy locked wooden doors or stacks of crates :(

From a game point of view this is a bit of a careful balancing act but was a really good exercise. Production wise things are progressing steadily, Dave is cracking on with the island and Ross has got a really nice rig up for the main player character. Rowen has managed to overcome the hurdles he was having yesterday and rich is making good headway with the sequencer.

Also having received our first comment on youtube we are official now E-famous. Even if it was just one of the other teams from Scotland trying to intimidate us with tales of uber productivity. Little do they know the awesome power of alpha build 2, official proven (by scientists) to make baby lambs cry.

Last I saw was Ross signing up for a youtube account to launch some kind of E-rebuttal, i think he took it kinda hard and saw it as a shot across the bows - actually Id better check since if hes got his own account he cant be censored - gtg!

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Team Lucid Dream


(Oh and also we got some rules through for the Bafta awards, which kinda adds a a sort of scary realism to the whole winning an award thing)

Safari Joe does it again ...

Despite a groggy start today has been really productive. It turns out we've been locked out of our designated gaming room again so looks like this evening will require some Snake covert sneaking. So whats been happening today ?

Had a few design thoughts following on from the chat we normally have with the EA guys about making stuff as simple for the end user as possible. While we can see the merit in that we don't want it to basically turn our game into stat watching so were building up a framework where we can try these things and cut them out / leave them in if needs be. The guys don't seem overly enamored with the game name either so were gunna look into alternatives - its pretty tough :)

Deliverables wise - made loads headway - Dave and I sat down and hammered out an ABC entity list as well as UV mapping some housing and carrying on with textures / scenery. Ross has also been working on modeling and skinning the player characters wings, got most of the main key frames sorted now so should have him in texture-less sometime soon.

Code wise Rich added some really nice touches such as a glow around NPC's that have been hit with the info arrow and an auto aim. Rowen has also got coupling working in our latest build, implemented a needs counter and got highlight paths done ! Pretty awesome stuff since it means were creeping closer to A.

Ive also been tearing apart Rich and Rowens baby and finding / replicating bugs all over the shop - on todays hit list air walking and fps movement in Bowcam.

More UT2004 carnage to follow - some punk slighted Tribes so its gunna get messy ^_^

ZOMG ! Pre-Alpha Goodness ^^

Pre-Alpha is up ^_^

So today has been a really good day - managed to get a whole lot done. Most importantly today was when we finally managed to merge our disparate prototypes and world into our pre-alpha. Its great being able to fly around and gives you a real sense of the world. Screenies don't really help demonstrate what we've got but hopefully THIS will.

We did want to upload it in its current state to let you guys get your mits on it and start breaking it but theres a couple of things we've got to do first. Namely theres the issue of getting fully keyboard and mouse compatibility. Currently its only really set up for the XBOX 360 controller, but shouldn't take to long to fix. We also went and put and FPS counter on the screen to help with a bit more feedback. We have some nice release notes and a handy bug tracking form to go along side it so probably be up tomorrow (?)

Kudos to Rowen and Rich who have been wrestling with this beastie for the last few days / weeks, that we can start plugging assets into.

Other news is that today we sent off our plan for our own web site which means we wont have to put up with comments from the denizens of Youtube and the likes - and also means well have a bit more control for feedback and uploading assets etc.

Camera guy was back - Ross managed to go a session without insulting an entire nation (his rant to follow, we've decided its safer for him to have his own page on the new site in an attempt to try and contain the rage).

Really good day - currently Ross is back to modeling the character and Dave is turning out some good texture work as well as putting together some image maps for Eleesos wings. Feels really good to have something more tangible up and running and should hopefully allow me to knock together a schedule for the remaining 4 weeks, which has been impossible up until this point.

More deluded ramblings and UT2004 smack talk to follow!

The Lucid Dream Team

Ross Rant 01

ice worlds, the last bastion of complete and utter genericism. You would think that someone would have outlawed their use by now, yet still i see them rear their ugly little heads, along with their slack jawed siblings, the fire world, the underwater world and the jungle world. Also lets not forget the space world, which is usually filled with steroid addicted space marines, and aliens with no genitals.

But no, still they appear in game after game, and still they torture me with their generic slip physics, lava planes and chasms. So well done to anyone who manages to come up with the stunning idea of taking an environment that is completely white, completely void of interest points and completely lacking in anything resembling imagination.

Congratulations, you just killed the originality pony.

So next time you're making a game, sat hunched in front of your star wars figurine collection, think about what you're doing, because god is a gamer, god doesn't like genericism, and every time you create a mindless, bland, and utterly boring environment for your games, he kills a kitten. Probably in some lava. With some fireballs shooting out of it. Covered by some sinking blocks. Guarded by aliens with no genitals.


Ross

Team Pwnerer

Its not all SSMB here at Lucid Dreams HQ. Last night we managed to get in a few quick rounds of UT2004 CTF. Was really really cool being int he same room and allowed for team based epicness.

Score Lucid Dreams 1 Cold Sanity 0

Some super awesome sniperage from Ross especially considering he'd never played it before and some solid back up from Col. Holt.... overall was awsome!

So what about today - had a bit of an admin frenzy and tried to stop Ross from going off on one when he discovered A) the presence of an ice world and B) Irish people commenting on our blog. He's already had at the Scots, next up the Irish, then who knows what - hell probably turn on us! Oh god - i can hear him typing now, should any of the other teams be reading this we cant control him.

So design wise came up with a few nice features to make our game more accessible, so now the info arrow highlights NPC's paths and colours them according to starsign. Whats nice is it makes life easier without being completely game breaking.

Deliverables wise - Rich managed to get some nice effects when arrows hit the ground, and looked into source control as well as began putting our first build together. No news at this point but it is one of those things that if you do wrong can have real bad ramifications (hence the need for source control)

Ross continued blocking out the island and adding stuff in as well as place holder textures with the help from Dave. Quite good from a production side of things, got my back log cleared from crazy design meeting week as well as documenting minutes and doing some research into protoplay. So basically the venue, what we need to provide, what we can / cant bring and began fleshing out some nice ideas for the stand.

Also managed to compile a list of all our required 2D assets as well as identifying all the storyboards and narrative stuff me and Dave will have to work on.

Oh and also got ourselves a QA template for when our builds up so we can get some feedback from you guys!

Overall a good end to a pretty mental week. Overall i give it 7 thumbs up !

More monday!

Lucid Dream Team