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