Letting them loose on it....

So yesterday, we had our first proper playtest session where the other teams got to play our games and we got to play theirs..... Eeeek.

This is a good thing as you can become blind to your own game when you are working on it and other people will see the flaws and bugs.

We set the game up so that the players got to see to key parts of the game.  The stasis section and an example actual level.

The feedback was good to get overall even though not all positive.  There are a few of main points which stuck out for me, apart from the obvious bugs we knew about, like the ladders not working.  The main point was that the game itself is too dark, as in lighting and not subject... The stasis scene is meant to be like this with the ECG light going passed to show your way.  A suggestion though was to have some kind of light around the player so he can actually see and use the ECG to see where you may want to travel too.  I like this idea.  In the main levels though, I had to agree, it was just too dark.  There definitely needs to be more ambient lighting around to show the scene itself, otherwise you just completely in the dark and keep dying.  Quite frustrating....

It was also mentioned that, because we are doing a platform game, we really need to make the character controller movement and play-ability a lot more slick.  This and the key mechanic of dying in the dark really need to be focused on and less on coming up with new design ideas for the levels.  I kind of agree as we haven't even got the basic right yet and I'm still being asked if things are possible in programming to achieve a new design idea that has been thought of.  We have been advised to lose the temporary character model and go back to just a block, as the model is distracting and nothing like the model we are hoping to have.  We have also been advised to create a new level with perhaps just one or two puzzles in that we can develop to a polished state for the vertical slice presentation.

We have a lot to think about and I hope Max can get these points across to the other guys who couldn't make the session last night.

Hmmm..... lets sort this out guys :)

Things are looking up...

So we have finally got to have a week off after our last pre-production hand in and time for a bit or R&R and what a week it's been.

I have managed to get myself a new job in the meantime.  A proper full time job back in Manchester which starts in June.  My new job is a senior developer for a huge opticians company.  The great thing about the job is that it will be coding in C# which is going to mean that I can can concentrate on my C# coding skills all the time now which is going to help the game coding no end.  There is also a fantastic opportunity to start game coding for them to as they want to introduce little games on there website which they are keen for me to start doing so it's defo a win-win-win situation for me.  It also means because it is back in Manchester that I should be less tired and have more to to concentrate on our game to :)

Before we left for the week we had a meeting to come up with the new product backlog for the production stage of the game and hopefully we shall be able to get the product pipeline running a lot smoother and not be waiting for work from other team members to be able to carry on with our own bits of work.

I'm really looking forward to getting back into the swing of things next week.

Hehehe :)

Now we get serious...

So we have got to another milestone in our project..... The end of pre-production...

The presentation has gone better than the first nightmare one.. but more of that later.

There was definitely a mad crunch period for this milestone even though the team has got a lot better at communicating and we have been doing mini update meetings every lesson and on Friday.  It still meant that the final weekend before the presentation we all we going like the clappers to get stuff done.  The technical document I put together to a lot longer than expected but got all the stuff in there.

We have has to scrap some of the design ideas due to the complexity of them and also learnt a few things on the way regarding the whole pipeline of stuff like getting the 3D model of the level done and sized correctly in 3DS before passing to Unity as it get a messy if you make alterations there.  Got to remember it's all a big learning curve anyway.  Better to makes these mistakes now than later on in the production phase.

So the presentation went well I thought.  The cost of the printing was ridonkulous.... £59 I'll have u know.  There was a bit of mix up with the girl in the printers saying it was cheaper to print in black and white, us telling her which ones to print in B&W, then her just ignoring all that and doing full colour everything... but anyway... There are not really any major documents to hand for the production phase so no more unexpected payments required....!!!  Anyway, we got them all in on time this time, which was a bonus :-)  

The other teams games were at a stage where they asked the audience for a volunteer to play test the game but I knew that ours had bugs in and it wasn't at that stage.  Also, as we were showing it we realised, the level(s) were huge and it would have taken an absolute age for someone new to it to get through it.  This isn't bad for the actual game, but for demo purposes... defo on the large side.

We'd fallen a bit behind on the art side so our game was very greyscale compared to the other teams... But no worries, we have now put Max in charge as the team leader and we are going to prioritise tasks better this time to make sure the important stuff gets done first... This obviously applies to the programming too.

So at this stage, we have just had our first production planning meeting and created our new product backlog....  When we next get together it's full steam ahead.....!!!!!

Onwards and upwards :-)

One step forward.....

So this week I decided that there is something not quite right with the combination of Unity, SVN and tortoise. It just keeps losing stuff, especially models... Which is highly annoying. So after consultation with David, we decided to give it up as a bad job for now and resort to just storing the prototype project on Googledrive for now...., not too pleased but I can't waste anymore time rebuilding stuff every time we need to work on it.

The other thing we decided is that we are just gonna add all the new from prototype 2 back into prototype 1 as this one definitely works. The code is quite messy, which is one of the things that Martin specifically told to me to be careful of, which is why I started prototype 2 from scratch. But again time is precious and we need a working prototype 2 for the second presentation.

On a positive note though I managed to build the newly designed level and throw in most of the assets the design guys wanted. There are a couple of things that doing really work but I can discuss this when we get together tomorrow at college.

I also got the the stasis ECG script back from Martin (at 4am may I add which shocked me a little as I was still out partying....) I threw it in the prototype today but it needs tweaking and my hangover wasn't being the most helpful of tools.... I'll look at it tomorrow....

Laterz.....

Wire him up, doctor....

So this week I had look into direction cameras.  They don't look too difficult but I have imported some JavaScript camera files from the Unity demo just to use for reference.  I can' actually code them just yet as I have nothing to direct the camera from and to :-/

On a positive note, got to have lesson with Martin this week, which is always a bonus, cos we just do his nut in with questions and in return he blows ours off with some holy f*** maths that even Pythagoras would squint at....  It's all helpful though.

I had some really easy questions for him to answer like why was a function running repeatedly instead of just onStart.  It confused him for while too but then when he changed it it started behaving itself.  Oh how we laughed.

As part of this weeks prototype task I wanted to have a look at getting the point light working in the stasis area of the game.  It's suppose to move work like an ECG display if you get me so that you can only see the platforms your moving against every few seconds.  A bit like this....

 
Anyway Martin was helping so the maths for this.  It involves lerping the light between points on the x axis as well as the y axis.  We managed to do the x axis and I can now build the points into a list for them to follow.  We ran out of time but Martin has got a copy of the script to have a look at the y axis bit.  He seemed to think it was very interesting what we were doing but cos it was nearly 10pm and I'd been up since 5am... my enthusiasm was some what lacking at this point so I told him I have to look at it the next day.  I have since re-read the code when I was more awake and I can now see what it's doing.  Winner !!!!

Looking forward to getting the stasis section working for the rest of the guys to see now...


Laterz....

Go on then... blame the tools...

So this week started with a disaster....  My laptop hard drive decided it was giving up the ghost so I spent all the weekend trying to image it put put on a new hard drive.... Managed to do everything but the bloody system drive..... Grrrr...  So this week has mainly been spent re-installing Windows and all the application.... So haven't got as far I had hoped with the game coding.

That said,  I have managed to now get transitioning between scenes working... kinda... with being able to carry data between them.  I have a issue with the OnMouseDown function not playing ball, even though the script is attached to a collider.  Also a script is running as if in an update function even though is it blatantly in the start function..... hmmm

I have also started to research direction cameras this week as we are going to need a couple of them in our game...

The quest continues.... 

Round 2, ding, ding...

So this week we've started the work towards our second presentation and milestone.

This involves a more advanced prototype including art assets, a Game Design Document (GDD) and a technical design document (TDD).

For the first prototype, I mainly worked on my own for the programming section on Unity but wanted to start involving David in this, so that we have a fall back position should anything happen and also, because I am out of the country for the final final milestone, it would be good to have someone who could make last minute changes (Although we are hoping not to have to do any of these)

I decided it would be a good move to make sure all the code is version controlled using SubVersion (SVN) & Tortoise and also to start a new prototype from scratch and pull in the assets and elements from the first prototype as we needed them.  Doing it this way was also a great mechanism to bring David up to speed with the code and assets and how to use the various software and tools.

Me and David have been concentrating on doing this and as of today we do have a new, blank prototype 2 (version controlled) set of code for us to both work on.  Job done.

The next thing I wanted to achieve was to learn how to have multiple scenes and transition between them in Unity.  Luckily, we had a lesson with Martin this week who showed us how to do this.  My plan is to now go and implement this in our Prototype 2.

Here goes...... 

Sit down take a breath...

So now the trauma of the presentation 1 is over, we got to take a breather and last night we managed to sit down and actually have a great meeting about the design of our game as a team.

This was brilliant for me, as it is the first time, since the start, I could actually focus on the project as a whole, instead of constantly worrying about whether the technical prototype 1 was ready to go.

It was good to have the chance to throw design ideas about between us instead of just letting things happen in some other department, which is how how I'd been treating it.

We came up with some great ideas for the stasis section of the game and some more mechanic ideas that I hope to be incorporating into Prototype 2 :)

We also brought up and ironed out some of the team / project management / lack of communication issues that we had.  We now have a better communication structure that we hope to carry on in the rest of the project so that we don't have a repeat performance of presentation 1 :-/

Tally ho....

Crash, Burn, Crunch, Roar...

Well.... What an experience.  Haven't kept to blogging every week, which which we are supposed to do, but it has been a roller-coaster ride tbh and I think I need to conclude this chapter and start again...

We have concluded the first part of the pre-production phase with culminated in the presentation of the work done so far on Monday to the rest of the group (more of that later)

The concept for our game has developed well through the weeks, with David and Max taking the lead on the design elements and documentation.  Harry has taken the lead on the Art side of things as is happily sketching and painting away.  As the lead programmer for the project, my personal goal to to get a list of mechanics that I could put together in the prototype needed for this first milestone presentation.   We decided quite early on about the basic mechanics, walking, jumping, climbing etc.  But also had more specific mechanics to deal with, like match lighting, darkness detection and the like.

As we had had the first term being introduced to Unity, I was glad to have the chance to go back to basics and go over building the basic mechanics again.  This was however quite a struggle to be honest.  Although, Unity is very good at throwing a game together quickly, when it comes to the C# scripting - It just doesn't do what you expect it to do.  As a programmer, I understand C# but the way Unity implements it is different and it is very frustrating to begin with.  This slowed me down no end and there is a lot of attempted code that is now just commented out.  I wanted to keep it though so I knew next time - Don't do it this way !!!

There have been many discussions between me and the other programmers in the other teams on how to achieve things which usually ended up in head banging walls.  This was actually reassuring that they were having the same problems and it wasn't me just being thick ;-)

It was so good when it was the programming tutors, Martin, turn to take us for the lesson as we can just have so many questions for him now.  I told him this would happen at the beginning of the project :)

Anyway, once I'd got to grips with the annoyances of Unity, I started cracking on through the list of mechanics.  The basic ones not so much of a problem.  A couple of them caused a few issues such as throwing as it used gravity but managed it eventually.  Collisions have been a constant bane of my life though, especially with the light/darkness element.  Once I discovered that you have to use sub-objects and have a different collider on each of them instead of the main object, each with their own parameters / scripts etc, this  was a eureka moment.  Things started to fall into place from then on.

I have also been trying to put these different assets/mechanics into prefabs so that it is going to be easier later on for other people to pick the level design and just plonk the elements in where they needed them.

In the final week, we went into the crunch period.  I put the hours in and made sure that we would have a workable demo for presentation with as many of the mechanics in as possible.  I then sat back and waited for the day of the presentation on the Monday.  I'd took the afternoon off work to go in college early to meet the other guys and get all the stuff together for printing and handing in....

This is where everything kinda went wrong.....

When we all got together at college, it became very clear that a lot of the documentation was not ready and there was quite a lot of work to make this ready.  We had basically not kept our eye on the ball and just assumed each other had done all the necessary work we'd each been allocated without actually checking as much as we should have.  The project management had gone out of the window basically..... At this point panic mode set in for me.....  We had to get the documentation together, take it to the printers, get it bound, copy it all on to a cd.  All this is time for hand in at 7pm when the presentation was meant to start.

The other teams were in the same boat but they all managed to get to the printers and back again before 7 (or maybe a little after 7).  Us on the other hand didn't manage to leave for the printers until 7.20pm.  Already late..... and I don't do late......  We ran to the printers and kept getting messages that the class wasn't going to start before we got back, even more pressure !!!!!

I went into meltdown....  The documents were the wrong size for the printers, they were in the wrong format, I was kicking myself as I stupidly had forgotten to bring my laptop (which has all the software for sorting this kinda stuff out), we hadn't really had any time prepare any presentation.  Earlier that week, I had daydreamed at work about the presentation with proper projected videos and music etc.... Not a chance in reality...

We were last to do the presentation and I was not in the right frame of mind at this point and felt that we had had to just wing it,  it was bad......  I didn't really do anything apart from demo the prototype and just left them to it.  Not me at all... :(

I just bit my lip, kept quiet, made sure all the docs were copied to the CD for hand in and then left.  Ben did say me to calm down on my way out saying it was all done now and I could relax...  He could obviously see my anger and disappointment.  I stormed off home, chatted to my mate on Facebook (vented my anger more like) then went to bed..... Worst mood ever :(

To be honest, I am as guilty as the other guys on the team for letting this happen but perhaps I should have known better as I work in team project environments in my day job. This is definitely a lack of communication problem.... so we are having a team meeting on Wednesday..... THIS IS NEVER HAPPENING AGAIN.....!!!!!!

Darren vs Unity - Round 1

Ok, so over the last 2 weeks we have been putting together some kind of plan to to get our game off the ground.

After a very frustrating first design meeting where we couldn't agree on anything and I couldn't even think of an idea, we went away and regathered a couple of days later.

This was much more successful.  We had to get the fact that most ideas have already been done and it's gonna be very difficult to come up with a completely unique idea so we and now much more contented with just using whatever ideas and mechanics we decide to use without worrying that someone is going to say "oh you mean like....."

Anyway, with our starting point of Afterlife we have come up with the idea that our character / hero is in some way either dead or on some way to being but doesn't actually know it.

We have tossed around some ideas between us and have come up with the overall concept of light and dark and the main objective is to head towards the light.  The character must not stray off into the darkness or this will mean obviously the end (whatever that may be....).

The main mechanic is going to be based on different light sources and the character must traverse through the game / levels by only staying in the light.  So this could be candles or matches or lamps or whatever really.  This will provide lots of opportunity for level design.  The main mechanic that the player will start out with will be a box of matches that they can use to light other objects in the room.  They will be able to strike the match and then throw it in the direction the player is facing but it will only have a set time limit once it is struck which will open up further challenges.

As part of the first stage of this process I was trying out some of the basic mechanics in Unity to get my head around them.

We have now progressed into coming up with a sample level that includes basic mechanics that we can use for our prototype.  Max and Dave were working on this and had provided me with a finished plan.  We walked through it in class to make sure it was actually playable.

Today I have made a start on this.  The first stumbling block I have come across is the fact that I had to upgrade to Unity 4 from 3D as the college has done this and I had to to transfer code between them.  Not really a problem, just time consuming.

The next obstacle I came when I realised that Unity is actually quite pants for creating models in for the platforms so I had to resort to cracking opening 3DS Max for creating the basic environment model.  I think this may be one of the tasks that we can all pick up as it was quite time consuming although easy to do.

Once I had done this and remembered that I had to export it as FBX format.  The last MAX format had many issues in Unity.  It has been pretty much easy to add the interactive elements of the level from my initial try outs.

I'm happy with the progress I've made today and got pretty far with it Will be showing the team  tomorrow to get their feedback...

Ashes to Ashes.....

Well the new year has brought us a new term and new challenges.  For the rest of the year we are to take everything we have learnt so far and produce a game from concept start to beta test level.

The class have been split into teams of 4 or 5 people to form individual "game studios" for the duration of the year.  We knew this was going to happen beforehand and for some bizarre reason, I was slightly apprehensive about this....(weirdo) Had no need to be though, ended up with great guys in my team.

So we don't all drift off into obscurity, the teams have been given words / concepts as starting points and we have been assigned AFTERLIFE.  I think this is a pretty awesome starting and it conjures up so many thoughts and ideas, in fact within minutes of firing up the Google I had the a full page of ideas to go and investigate further.  I'll bring these to our next meeting and hopefully brainstorm these ideas around with the other guys thoughts...


 



We also had to come up a name for our studio and create an appropriate logo for the company.

After throwing loads of ideas around and putting all our name into anagram creators and all that kind of behaviour, we finally settle on the name STALEMATE STUDIOS.  Not only does immediately conjure up images of chess, it in itself a game, but always concepts like conflict, catch 22, no win situation and most importantly deadlock.... dead.... death.... afterlife.... Ta Dah !!! Studio name agreed. Harry immediately started scribbling down some logo ideas so hopefully this should bring back some interesting results.

I'm really looking forward to seeing where our game ideas are going to take us over the next 28 weeks...  Bring it on !!!!