A Caribbean Island is the way to go!

Hey guys,

It's the lead artist on Desire FX here... As you might have read already in the previous posts, we have been going through some crucial changes in terms of game design and art direction. We finally have a massive mood board up with endless amounts of pictures from the Bahamas and Jamaica as these two locations are my inspirational islands for our own creations. The fact that we have this grand image library helps us all get a better idea on what we are trying to create and what the feel of our game is. It took us some time to get this done, especially because it tooks us some time to understand the importance of these type of mood boards. On the other hand, all of this would never have been possible with the help of David, a EA Games veteran who has been around for about 12 years with the company. Not only was it a wonderful gesture of him to come down and provide us with the prints, he has always been amongst the developing teams to help out and provide us with his wise knowledge. I for one, appreciate that a lot and I admire his dedication to our cause.

Aside from that, not much new has been happening. Introversion games have been round and we have managed to see the gaming industry from a completely different point of view which was lovely. Mark and Vicky seemed like wonderful people with a great sense of humour. To end of the day, we had a wonderful EA programmer to explain to us on how to approach the development of our video game prototype which is what we needed in order to advance in the right direction. Oh and before I forget... yesterday was payday and guess what I got myself... A NINTENDO DS! Finally!!! So you know what I will be doing this weekend ;) See you guys next week!

Introversion !

Really cool day to the end of a pretty painful week. Work has continued steadily even though we were working kind of in the dark for the most of it. The problem, is it turned out was neither scale or being too ambitious. Its just we figured that since we had a hell of a lot to do content creation wise we'd better get cracking on with it. After our 6th or so chat with an EA official the message finally sunk in that we should focus on a teeny part of the island and get that feature complete, and then build the world up.

So its not been a complete waste of time and we can use what we've got to kinda make more assets, but the most important thing is now we have fully documented design plans, world plans and most important a method that we can use. So its looking like were just going to focus on 3 buildings, 3 characters and then build outwards. Had a good chat with Adrian the production mentor who just wanted to get a feel for our concept. Except now all my beautiful production plans are redundant :'(
We working to a cool new system which is A B C

Basically A is what makes our game our game. Without it we have no game. B is what ive decided to snapilly call "Gameplay Plus", its the same gameplay but deeper and more of it. Then we have C which is all out frippery which has zero impact on the game and contains things like, dolphins, volcanoes, submarines, light houses, sheep.

We've been tormenting Ross all day as hes taken a bit of a kicking art wise due to the (as you probably gathered) schizophrenic development up until this point. We've got it sorted now promise ^^

So yeah, we do have loads of stuff but despite my pleas dont have a playable build of it all. Yesterdays blog was a bit short cos it was basically a day of "heated debate" - so apologies to any other teams who may be reading this fro our frequent rowdiness :)

The systems and optimization guy was really helpful and kinda bought us round to the small increments building methods. i don't know if it was the way he said it, or maybe because it took so many people telling us to kinda remove the idealism fog or cos he had loads of anecdotal evidence but, yeah, well be doing it that way. And just leaving the "A" world size the same so the art guys dont cry :)

Also Mark and Vicky from Introversion came along and gave us a speech on becoming a small independent. I found it particularly interesting, i think because of the publishing view point (reminded me of being back at uni due to the frenzied note taking) ,and also because I think a lot of their games really resound with gamers because they remind you of the kind of games you used to play as a kid, but modernised. Its kinda hard to explain what i mean but it makes sense in my head. High concept stuff generally, nice delivery as opposed to ok concept well delivered. Its also really really encouraging to see people making it on their own with out having to forsake rights and IP to a title that they created.

After wards he came round for a bit of a chat but kinda got ambushed by questions so sorry to the other groups and the Introversion guys for tying up all your time.
We got to see the terrain generator they are using for their new game - check out the video HERE

So its taken us 1 week to plan a nd balance a road network on an island with 15 or so buildings, and they managed to create a full city with Highways, road networks, full populated with different buildings and population densities and parks abou, id say approximately 100 times the size and x1000 the detail in about 30 seconds. Procedural generation is kind of the key for content creation in small teams as, we are finding out, it is very long and arduous to create very little in a team of about 5 :)

So kind of a good resolution to the week :D - ready to crack on next week, actually knowing what were doing and with any luck have something to fly about in by Monday with any luck.

:(

Today wasn't so hot. Another day, another sweeping design change :)
Most of the mentors seem to think we mad. The problem is that everything early on is so interlinked that it makes even slight changes have huge impact on other areas.

So today kinda had to take a step back and realised we werent going to go for a city, we didnt want to throw away all the work we have done so far, so were just going to have to be a bit clever with world design. Mostly this centres around our actual island. Size isnt somuch the problem, its just if anything goes wrong it would pretty much render the game unplayable so were thinking very hard about how to add an element of modularity to the city / world building.

Self contained Archepelagos might work, and is apparently so bad an idea its actually good. So im gunna think about that a bit more. Despite the fact today wasnt overly productive it was still a good idea to get all these thoughts out and documented. Ross vs Rowen design argument was also great :) All of this was pretty much borne out of ongoing scale woes. But yeah, fixed some max / maya / virtools inconsistencies, dave and ross got some really good art input and we had a talk on focusing design with the mack daddy of flow charts. Also made steady progress on the code side of things -

The design debate rages on - more tomorrow!

Eleseo in the making...

Here you have it... This is our main character drawn by me. (David, Art Lead) It should be looking something like this in 3D after Ross is done with the modelling and I have added the real textures to it. Aside from that, more and more sketches of the environments are being made which will slowly make their way towards the Desire FX section of my website. You should be seeing some of Ross his lovely 3D results so far on this blog soon... Well that's it for now as more work is to be done. :) I love it! :)

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.