Wrapping things up!

Golden Release is today, and I'd be a liar if I said I wasn't nervous. There are still a few loose ends we're trying to tie up; namely, getting the first level totally finished and polished. We met with Michael and Dom last week and they gave us some really great advice on how to make our first level really cool. We've spent the past week trying to implement the things they've said. Our first level goes a little something like this: it's your first day on the job as a space janitor; you're running through a rudimentary training exercise when suddenly space pirates attack! Since your ally's ship's big lasers are offline, it falls to you (the player) to somehow disable the pirate ship by shooting trash at it.

Originally, the obstacles the player faced in this part of the level would be the lasers fired from the tiny ships that spawn from the bigger ships. But the ships tended to cluster up in one area and it was easy for the player to go around the danger and destroy the pirate ship with relative ease. Michael and Dom advised us to spread the smaller ships out so that the player would be forced to dodge through some lasers on the way to destroying the ship. Also, the uniform up-and-down motion of the alien ships is a reference to the old game Space Invaders, which gives our game that retro-feel that is so popular these days.

Additionally, we're trying to prepare for our presentation today. I'm writing an instruction manual and Xuan is designing a box that we can use for our golden submission. Everything is coming together, I think. At any rate, Space Waste is getting 'released' today, so look for it on the shelves of your local Gamestop!

Time to Prioritize

Since our beta release is due next week, we've decided that we need to prioritize what we want to finish. We definitely don't have enough time to complete all of our lofty goals, so we took some time to map out some realistic goals for what we can finish. Our focus has changed to getting a completely functional and somewhat polished version of the prologue and level one. Here's a preliminary list of things that still need to happen for this goal to be realized:
- An introduction cutscene which explains the nature and the premise of the game needs to be created using flash; also, a button that would also the player to skip the cutscenes should be created just in case
- Dialogue needs to be written for the beginning of the prologue level that will explain the controls and the objectives to the player; additionally, the means by which we present the dialogue needs to be finalized. We know that we want to have drop-down boxes with a picture of the speakers head on the left side and the text scrolling to the right. The appearance of the dialogue boxes needs to be rendered and the sound that the text makes as it scrolls across the screen needs to be created.
- The actual lay-out of the prologue level needs to be created: size, scope, position of sprites, etc. Designs for the pirate ship/friendly ship need to be finalized.
- Event-driven objectives need to be implemented that will allow the player to complete the objectives and advance through the level
- All additional music and sounds need to be created
- An in-game cutscene to introduce the arrival of the pirate ship needs to be rendered; how this cutscene is going to affect the flow of gameplay needs to be decided as well
- The GUI needs to be functional; when the player gets hit by lasers, the health bar needs to go down.
- A cutscene (or something) needs to be created that will play in response to a player's defeat; the player should also be allowed to continue from a checkpoint. This also means that we need to institute the checkpoint system (obviously)
- A similar cutscene needs to play when the player completes all of the objectives and wins the level

I think that's mostly everything. Time is running out. Panic panic!

Designs/Goals for BETA

We met this Tuesday and we sketched out the first three levels of the game in greater detail. Completing these levels is our goal for our upcoming BETA release. Here's a quick run-down of what we have planned:

Prologue/Level 1:
The game opens with the main character floating in space near Earth's moon. The main character is starting his first day of basic I.B.L.O.U. training. This level would be a tutorial type level where the player can learn the basic controls and mechanics of the game. The controls and goals of the levels would be explained to the player through radio briefs from the Captain. The objectives would be simple: grab the gravity gun, pick up a few pieces of trash, and bring them back to the trash freighter. Once the objectives are complete, a cut scene would ensue which would segue into level 1.

The camera would pan to a shot of an approaching space pirate ship. The music would change in accordance with the more dangerous atmosphere of the level. Now the player's objective would be to gather up trash and shoot it into two exhaust ports on the pirate ship. This message would be relayed to the player via a radio message from the Captain. Lasers would shoot from the pirate ship, creating obstacles that could damage and potentially kill the player. And once one of the exhaust ports is destroyed, the pirate ship would dispatch smaller fighter ships that would shoot more lasers, creating more obstacles for the player to dodge. The level would scale in difficulty: enough trash can be gathered to destroy the first exhaust port without having to enter the grid of laser fire, but in order to destroy the second exhaust port, the player must time his or her movements through the laser field to collect enough trash to clog the second exhaust port. Upon the destruction of the two exhaust ports, the pirate ship would be severely damaged, causing it to retreat. Then a congratulatory cutscene would follow and the player would move on to level 2.


Level 2
Extremely large trashteroids (large clumps of trash that float through space) are careening towards Mars City. These trashteroids, if unchecked, could break through the Mars Atmospheric Shield and threaten the integrity of the Mars City Dome. Unfortunately, the Vaporizemorator Cannon is broken and in need of repair. This is where the player comes in. As a technician, it is his or her job to enter the cannon, repair it, and fend of the trashteroid attack. The level would star with the player hovering near a giant laser cannon sticking out a domed city on Mars. The planet would take up the entire portion of the screen and the camera would be fixed, so the player couldn't stray to far from the city. The player would be instructed by the Captain to enter the laser cannon and repair it. We didn't discuss the possibility of a repairing mini-game at our meeting, but I think it might be a cool idea. Secondary, but something we could throw in just for funsies. Anyhow, once the player is in the cannon and it is repaired, he or she assumes control of the cannon. The objective would then be to aim and shoot the cannon at falling trashteroids before they hit the translucent blue shield surrounding Mars. The cannon would have infinite ammo, but the player's rate of fire would be limited by an 'overheat' meter; if the gun is fired too fast, it will overheat and force the player to wait for it to cooldown before it can be fired again. I visualize this meter in the lower left hand corner of the screen. In the lower right hand corner would be a numerical representation of the Mars' Shield Integrity. It would start at 100 and drop for every trashteroid that hits the shield. The numbers would start as blue, but change to yellow if the integrity drops below 50, change to red if it drops below 25, and start to flash if it drops below 10. The shield would also change color to correspond to its health. If the integrity drops to or below 0, the shield would break and disappear, but the player would not lose until a trashteroid collides with the city itself. The player would have to defend Mars for a period of about two minutes. The difficulty of the trashteroid shower would increase as time goes on, with more trashteroids falling at a higher velocity towards the end of the shower. If the player survives the trashteroid shower, another cutscene would ensue showing the pirate ship from the first level hovering a few miles away from Mars space. Then a mini boss fight would ensue where the player would have to shoot down projectiles from the pirate ship while simultaneously attacking the pirate ship by shooting switches on its weakpoint. The ship would be destroyed if the player could toggle every switch at once, but the switches reset themselves after a while, so the player would have to shoot quickly and accurately while making sure not to allow Mars to get damaged. Once the player destroys the pirate ship, it will make a crash landing on Mars. Then a cutscene would show the player wandering off towards the pirate ship to settle matters once and for all.



Level 3
This has been the hardest level to plan so far because it's so unlike the others. Rather than take place in outer space, this level would be confined entirely to the downed pirate ship. The most difficult aspect of creating this level so far has been deciding which camera angle we want to use. We settled on a sort-of 'over the shoulder isometric' camera view or something; it's comparable to Zelda: A Link to the Past from SNES. Other than that, I don't think we really thought of too much for this level. There will be a boss fight, and the identity of the evil bad guy will be revealed. The emphasis of the level will be on exploring/adventuring the derelict ship, with some attention given to basic combat. But nothing concrete for this level really exists yet. We figured we have our work cut out for us just getting the first two levels finished.

Headshots!

So here are some works in progress of character art that will (hopefully) be finished and colored soon so they can be incorporated into the on-screen dialogue scenes:



Yes, our main character has a pretty awesome handlebar mustache. The other dude is his... friend. I'm not going to elaborate on that because it would totally ruin the epic plot we'll have.

Confession time: I cannot draw "manly" men. I therefore had to look up a few hundred pictures via Google images to use as references. After I had finished the sketch of our main character, I realized that the inevitable happened:



But I swear we decided that our character would be bald and mustachioed months ago. Really.

Alpha Release!

Okay, so just for clarification, here's a run down of the design of level 1: the premise is that today is your first day training on the job for IBLOU. You are puttering about in outer space near the moon (Earth's moon), picking up trash and depositing it in specified locations. This training phase for the main character will serve a dual role because it will also instruct the player how to play the game. Once the player completes the tutorial, that is when 'space pirates' attack the facility(there's more to them than meets the eye- a later plot twist). Then the focus of the game changes- the player is thrust into a dangerous situation and forced to adapt the skills s/he just learned. The objective will then be to gather up some trash and clog the pirate mothership's engines, overheating the ship and blowing it up.

What we demoed this Wednesday was the latter half of level one, so it's no surprise that it might have seemed a little confusing without any prior explanation or background in the game. There's a pretty hectic battle scene taking place in the background that is no doubt very distracting. But we just wanted to exhibit all of the features that we had been working on up to this point. Here's a list of everything that works in the Alpha so far:

-Gravity physics
-Each object has its own individual mass
-Collision detection
-Art (player model, gun model, HUD, backgrounds, ships, trash, etc.)
-A functional minimap
-Light and shading effects
-Ability to pick up the gravity gun; gravity gun effects (recoil, shaking, etc.)
-Suction of trash/shooting of trash; player gains mass as trash is collected; player's backpack changes size based on how much trash is possessed
-Menu screen; option to change resolution
-Sounds/Music
-Other NPCs on screen: Friendly Mothership/fighter ships, enemy mothership/fighter ships
-Player HP (I think)
-Lasers that affect trash/hurt the player; the capacity to 'lose' the game by getting shot
-An objetive; The capacity to 'win' the game by destroying the enemy mothership

I think that's everything. What we're doing now is deciding what direction we want to take the game in. We've decided to give the game a puzzle/action focus with RPG elements. Features that we want to implement for the Beta release include (so far): Upgradable equipment/skills through training and purchasable items, an interesting plot progression (in the Alpha, the objectives were written in the corner of the screen; we plan to have all the level objectives be delivered to the player via in-game cutscenes), and more levels, obviously. We also need to start developing more weapons that could be used and figuring out how they would be applied to our gameplay. And just because Spring Break is coming up doesn't mean the progress is going to halt; Eric and Jack said they'll be hard at work tweaking the programing, Xuan said she's gonna whip up more art, and I'm gonna bang my head against my desk to try and come up with ideas for new guns, levels, characters, upgrades, and all that design stuff. It'll be nice to have time to work on JUST the game without having to worry about our other classes!
-Charles

Hitting the Ground Running

The game has been making progress by leaps and bounds in the past week. For starters, much more of the art is finished. The main character has a gun that rotates wherever the player is aimed, and what's more, he has to actually pick up this gun first before it appears on his person. What's more, the gun comes with a backpack, and this pack gets bigger or smaller depending upon how much trash you currently have. The HUD has also been developed; in the lower screen shot on the bottom of the screen you can see the spaces that will correspond to weapon selection, and on the right you can see the space where the possible health/oxygen bars will appear. And taking up the upper right-hand corner of the screen is the fully functional mini-map, which shows the player location, nearby trash in grey, and planets in blue. The backgrounds also look beautiful and polished, as you can see from the pictures. And there are multiple different types of trash: papers, banana peels, etc. Oh, and the first spaceship has been put into Level 1, which will serve as the player's home base throughout the level of the game.

The game has also been advancing from a physics standpoint. The trash gun pulls things in faster and the shooting of trash has been perfected. Gravity has also been implemented; humongous planets have their own gravitational pull and attract nearby trash. Also, if trash is fired at a particular angle near a planet, it can be put into perfect orbit around said planet. This is another nifty feature that we might implement in a level design down the road, ex. Put enough trash around Venus to shield it from the imminent burst of deathly-hot Solar Wind! (Or something like that)

The menu screen that was posted in an earlier screen shot has also been put into use. The player can pick either 'New Game,' Options,' or 'Quit,' from menu screen. New Game launches into the present prototype of level one, and Options allows the player to change his or her screen resolution. Down the road, we intend to allow the player to mute his sound and/or music and perhaps even adjust the difficulty of the game.

Sound has also been implented into the gameplay; the trash gun makes a different sound when it's activated, when it sucks something up, and when it shoots something out. But we still need some ambient space sounds and a sound for radio chatter, which I plan to make as soon as I can.

Our current goals for stage one are to finalize the polish and implent enemies. Enemies can't be put into the level before we figure out how enemy lasers are going to demolish trash and hurt the player, but Eric said he had figured something out today that would make PEW-ing possible. The first level and menu screen need music, so I wrote a few tracks tonight that we might be able to use. I guess we also need to craft the cutscenes that will give the player his direction when he starts playing level 1; we need to figure out if we want to have out-of-engine cutscenes solely for plot purposes, or if we just want to run any plot developement that might occur in engine. I surmise that we'll have lots of questions for our mentors tomorrow.

-Charles

Still very much a work in progress...

After last Friday's meeting, we set some pretty ambitious goals for features that would be completed by this week - namely, a working prototype of the first level and additional features (weapons, effects, NPC elements, user interface, etc.).

As usual, I did not complete as much as I would've liked, but we've got a rough title screen (that will be filled with random floating, rotating trash) and a screenshot of the basic UI and gameplay.





























In an hour or so, we'll be meeting to throw to together what we all have and see what is still needed. Tonight's time will probably be spent drawing large spaceships and tiny guns.

Screenshot 1

Here is a screenshot of the test build we are currently building. Eric did a great job creating the star effects (which actually rotate and create a nice aesthetic which you can't see from the screenshot). The "LOVE" circle is our current player ship which is controlled using the "WASD" scheme and the mouse is used to control which way it is facing (aim). The large rectangle is our current "ship" item which will most likely become and enemy. The two blue dots are what we are building our "trash" items from. The large circle represents a trash item that is too large to be "picked up" so there is a restitution factor that I added which makes the player bounce off of it. The smaller trash item is going to be able to be picked up by the ship since its radius is small enough, and therefore it has no restitution.

Mentor Meeting

Sorry about the delay in blog posts; I went back to my parents' house this weekend and they don't have internet access. But I'm back on campus now and I've got all the time/internet in the world to update this badboy.

Last Friday, we drove out to Hunt Valley to finally meet Michael Curran from Firaxis. Walking into the Firaxis office was one of the coolest experiences of my life. Games are actually made here! How awesome is this? And everyone is dressed in casual street clothing and everyone is smiling. The office itself was lavish but not gaudy; soft carpet and panelled walls that were inviting instead of intimidating.

But enough about the building. The meeting was the important part. Michael, who was a sound producer, had one of his programmer friends, Dom, sit in on our meeting. They were both very friendly and very knowledgeable. The first thing they asked us for was a general run-down of the game idea. I explained it to them best I could, with the rest of the team filling in the gaps that I missed. Then the two mentors started telling us about the design process and how Firaxis goes about it, and that segued into Dom giving what sounded like good advice to Jack and Eric about programming (they were both nodding and saying, "That's a good idea," whenever Dom said something, so I'm assuming the ideas were good. It's not like I would know the difference. Something about a Luau?). They suggested that we make deadlines for ourselves, even if we don't meet them. The idea is that having a direction/a goal will make the game get done more easily/earlier.

Then Dom left the room to go flag down another guy who was an artist. That left us alone in the room with Michael, so I took that opportunity to ask him about sound and music and such. He told me about the vast sound libraries that are available, and he even offered me samples from the Firaxis sound-base, which I thought was very generous. We talked a little more about audio editing software, but then Dom came back and took us to another office that belonged to someone who's name I forget. But I remember he was older (maybe 30's?) and had a green goatee. He was an artist and he gave us advice on how to build/construct game levels and enemies. He agreed with Dom and Michael that we should set deadlines for ourselves, and his agreement prompted Dom to challenge us to complete a working prototype of the first stage by next Friday. So that's where we are now- we're going to try and complete a prototype this week. We're closer than I thought; Eric showed me a model of the first stage and it looks great. He layered the stars in a certain way so that the 2-D level l looks 3-D. I'll try and post a screen shot here.

Skeleton Engine

The team met at the DMC yesterday; while we were there, I unsuccessfully tried to get the SVN thing to work on my laptop. Jack and Eric were much more successful in their attempt to program a rough version of our engine. They developed a little program where there was a cirlce that could be moved using WASD controls relative to the direction the circle was facing (there was an emblem on the circle for the sake of keeping its); the circle's direction was controlled with the mouse. It was pretty wicked.

On the art front, I worked on more plot/level design and Xuan sketched some more concept art for planets and weapons. We plan to meet again tomorrow at 5:30.
-Charles

Idea Exchange/Mentor

We met again after class today to try and arrange time where we were all free so we could finally meet our mentor.  We're shooting for Friday afternoon, but if that doesn't pan out, we're going to fall back on Thursday morning.

After we had that straightened out, I showed the team the ideas I dreamt up for different guns and such.  Many of my ideas still need a lot of work (the elemental phase shifter, namely), but the good news is that now Jack and Eric can start actually programming our engine and Xuan can start sketching.  We're meeting again tomorrow at 5:30; hopefully tonight I can polish my weapon ideas and maybe even draft a rough copy of the narrative arc.

-Charles

Goals of our Game

The team met today and we decided once and for all on the direction our game is going to take. We're going to stick with the action/puzzle idea in a 2D world. The main character is going to be a lowly I.B.L.O.U. grunt who gets kicked around by his superiors. I'll write more of the narrative later. Right now, I just want to jot down the goals of the game that we've developed. Ken Rolston said we have to have goals, so here they are:

1. Suction of trash/cohesion of trash ball mechanic
2. Portal/Warphole mechanic
3. Gravitational physics
4. Other guns?
5. RPG Elements of gun advancement/skill, purchasable upgrades

Goal number four is still under development. I'm gonna sketch some things out before our next team meeting this coming Sunday.

Oh yeah, we should probably meet with our mentor soon. I don't think Peter will buy the 'I've been suffering from lupus' excuse that I was going to give in class today.
-Charles

Concept Art

As Charles said, we had a brief meeting today just to go over some possible ideas for the game. I did some rough sketches of the spacesuit for the main character - à la the infamous Big Daddies of Bioshock. I'll probably be working on updating and cleaning up those sketches on Photoshop some time this weekend.

Also, I came up with a very rough (read: unfinished) background concept for the game via Photoshop:



I think the planet turned out pretty nicely. :D


~Xuan

Art Meeting

I met with Xuan today to swap some ideas about design, plot, and art. She liked most of the things I suggested: the Intergalactic Bureau of Locating Obstacles in the Universe (I.B.L.O.U.), localized damage, skill trees, the storyboard for the tutorial prologue, the open-ended world design, the big plot twist that I can't talk more about. Then she showed me some concept art for space suits; they were pretty wicked. I like that our game will essentially be Fallout 3, Mass Effect, and Bioshock all tossed into a blender. Since we're combining our favorite aspects from three of the greatest action/RPG's of all time, we really can't go wrong, right? Then Xuan showed me some of the photoshop work she had done. The dark planet scene looked awesome, but due to a discrepancy in the contrast of the monitor, I couldn't appreciate the full beauty of her second picture because certain parts of the image weren't being displayed. But it's kinda good that it happened that way because now we know to look out for that.

Unfortunately Xuan and I couldn't get much work done on the system or the setting or anything concrete like that. All we've really done is come up with some cool ideas and art. Our inability to design the game stems in part from our team's unanimous decision to incorporate RPG aspects into the gameplay. I was thrilled with this idea, but our group hasn't had a chance to meet together and talk about what exactly we mean to do. Xuan and I thought it would be presumptuous for us to decide such important aspects like the plot and the system just by ourselves, so we decided to call a team meeting tomorrow so we can nail down all the important details as a group. This is a team project, so everyone should have a say, yes?

Team name

During our hilarious lab section today in which we tortured four hapless students, Xuan coined a named for our team. She said she noticed last night that the little power buttons on computers look like I's inside O's, so we should call ourselves IO Games and that our logo could be that little power button design thingy. Eric pointed out that IO also means input/output from a programmer's perspective, so the name IO carries a clever double meaning. Then I added a useless anecdote about how Io is also a moon of Jupiter and the name of one of Zeus' mistress who wound up getting turned into a cow and doomed to be chased by a gadfly across Asia Minor for the rest of her cow life. I'm glad I bring so much to the table for our group.

Anyway, the point is that we have our team name. We are officially... IO Games. Has a nice ring to it, yes?
-Charles

Proposal

Met with the team today. Eric helped me finalize the technology part of the proposal. Unlike me, his writing was short and to the point. And with the help of everyone else, we were able to finish the schedule part of the proposal, too. Our plan at this point is to let Xuan and me design the first level of the game from a non-technical standpoint. Then once we have the art and the plot worked out, Jack and Eric can look at our ideas and see what they would need to program.

We're having a terrible time coming up with our team name. Everyone else seems to be naming themselves as if they were a game company. We don't wanna jump on the bandwagon, but we don't wanna feel left out, either.

In other unrelated news, we've established 5:30 PM on Tuesdays as our designated meeting time. While we're on the topic of non sequiturs, our mentor responded to us. He said that we would need to drive out to Hunt Valley to meet him. This will be a little inconvenient but not really a problem; I've got a car and I live around here, so I know how to get there. But as of right now I don't really know where 'there' is. I'm sure he'll give us directions later.
-Charles

Up and Running

I guess it goes without saying, but we registered for a blog on Blogspot.com so we have somewhere to keep track of our production status. Things are still in their early stages, but we figured out the general idea of our game in our brain-storm session after class today. The premise is loosely based off of Katamari Damacy in that the main focus of the game will be to gather items into a ball or some kind of shape; but unlike Katamari, which takes place on the Earth, our game will take place in outer space. Our game is set in the future (perhaps 2050, maybe even later) and the 'plot' is this: the population of earth has grown to a point where there is no longer any place to stash people's garbage. NASA comes up with the bright idea to start firing 'trash rockets' into space. The ramifications of this decision do not make themselves evident until many years and hundreds of trash rockets later. Eventually outer space becomes so cluttered that interstellar travel becomes an impossibility (I guess I should have mentioned earlier that humans have colonized different galaxies at this point in time in our game world). We haven't ironed out the specifics of the rest of the plot, but somehow Earth or some other nation develops an Intergalactic Sanitation Department whose agents use Black Hole Guns (or something) to round up the free-floating garbage in space. The player will assume the role of one of these Sanitation agents and his goal will be to gather the garbage floating around the stages while dodging obstacles and dangers like comets, stars, black holes, and space pirates. Other difficulties include time limits and the player's air supply. We plan to have realistic physics of gravity and interia that affect the player and his movement. The trash that the player collects will accumulate in front of the player, adding to his mass, affecting his movements, and eventually giving him his own gravitational pull. There will be certain excessively large pieces of garbage that can only be picked up when the player's personal ball of garbage meets a certain size. The game will be fairly linear, with a progression through different stages that gradually increase in difficulty. There will be a 'hub' stage from which all other stages are accessed through warpholes, but certain later stages can only be accessed once certain requirements have been met, which will add a degree of non-linearity. At the end of each stage, the player will be rewarded with money that can be used to purchase different upgrades (increased propulsion, etc.) There is also a plan to incorporate a multi-player aspect into the game, but we don't want to set our sights too high at this point. We decided that multi-player should take a backseat to getting the game itself built.

I think that's everything we covered in our brainstorm session today. We're meeting again tomorrow to finalize some of the specifics. I'm going to write up a formal proposal tonight so that my other teammates can review it tomorrow.
-Charles