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.