Am I getting lazy?

With posting blogs it would seem so. But not with the work. I've been working pretty much straight since the last blog. Thanks to Brennan Massicotte for pumping out some sweet looking front end screens fast and in a very professional manner. Having him up at 4am like I am is a real bonus too. :-)

Spent 2 return trips to future shop to get a microphone that works with my system. Finally got a USB one. Johan is in charge of sound but we need place holders for a LOT of stuff. Aside from sound I've been making sure things blow up nicely. I'm getting decent at the emitters too. The buildings still have me a bit hung. I don't know if we want to do the "sink into the ground" like most games or have them unrealistically break apart like a house of cards.

So although theres a ton of game stuff that needs to be done I have to back up and get some very basic (and not very fun) stuff done. Like business cards, Foamzilla.com, getting email sent to it, building a flash front end for it. Also have to get portfolios up for both me and Johan. The games expo is in 2 weeks, and not having it up before would be killer. And worst yet I've been working all day on the design doc. Which isn't bad actually. On it's own it's very dry is all. We have to submit that and the project plan tomorrow. I suggest you browse through the design doc at least.

Although I have far too much work to celebrate new years tonight, for all those people who are, happy new years!

Oh and here's the cool loading screen Brennan did for us:

Post Christmas

Hope you've all had a awesome Christmas. I let myself get dragged into a game I got for Christmas, Xenosaga 3, and lost a few days. Still it was an excellent game with an unbelievably well written story. I'm tempted to write a review of it, but I'm pretty pressed for time as is. So thats it for today. Hopefully I'll be getting back into the spin of things for tomorrow.

Slacking at blogs..

I know I know.. I haven't kept them up every day for the past week or so. It's become pretty crazy with Christmas and I have been doing a lot of last minute shopping / preparation.

I have been working on Foamzilla as well though. The elevator music is in! As well just trying to tune the level experience is a tremendous challenge. Fleshing out a level with the kind of detail those master unreal mappers do is true talent. I'm certainly learning it quickly, but it just breaks down to a lot of time. Their use of what I like to call "teaser space". That is, places where the level extends to but the character can never go, it's simply there to give the illusion of depth. Anyway, their use of that teaser space is inspiring. And I have newfound respect for all the little imperfections in the level that make it look so realistic. I will be using as much of the tricks and tips I've learned on the Foamzilla level, but it's simply a matter of time. I can't do it all, and gameplay is my primary concern. (As much as I would like to hone my level design skills.)

I'm off to wrap presents. I likely won't be posting a blog for tomorrow. Johan is off visiting his family in Washington state and I want to wish him a merry Christmas! And to you all as well, or happy holidays for whatever you celebrate. And I'll leave you with a couple of screen shots.

Oh, what the font..

I've been warned against trying to code the GUI in unreal, and yes it's a pain. Finally got the fonts into the game today, and it was about 50 times harder than it should have been. I hope the new unreal editor improves that process. I was going to post a long bit for the intro area, but fraps was giving me trouble, and I'm running late as is. So!

Comments, feedback.. please. The fonts are in the game, ignore the menus, they are all still alpha. Looking for feedback on what the hover, highlight, etc should look like for them.

I'm going to be attempting the settings menu as well. Yeah thats pain and a half, and really it's unnessecery. I like challenges though, so if gameplay gets decent I'll be giving it a shot. One evening or so at most...

Last day here before xmas break. Johan is going to see his family and I'll see mine. Although we are still working on the project from home. Sad.. yes I know. So enjoy the vid!

Time flies, especially during Christmas.

Seems I completely skipped sundays blog. What happened? A lot in general, but the intro sequence is at least mapped out camera wise. Some of the actors are moving. Waiting on the dialogue lines to put them in there. The audio stuff in general has been a pain.

The tutorial area is in there to some extent as well. I still have to go through and baseline it to make sure all the gameplay elements are there and solid. I've added a warp menu (F10) so you can travel all over the map. Helps us out a lot. You can skip the intro of course. And everything is rather buggy.

There is SOOO much I want to do. But I have to stick the original plan and see what can be done beyond that.

I did get my Christmas shopping done, but not to satisfaction either. It's just too hard to get all this stuff done. I feel bad for missing out on some things. Johan has been working extra hard to get all the assets in. And with destructable everything thats a lot. I should do a movie tonight... It's been a while. Ok, I'll go off and record...

There we go. All done and posted. Even the intro is buggy as you can tell. And for some reason Fraps can't record sound here. I don't know why.. Anyway enjoy!

The woes of optimization.

Optimizing unreal is not easy and for the most part not fun. There's an art to discovering just what has a bigger slowdown on the system, and at what points you should conserve a resource. Our framerate is passable on our systems at school, which is completely unacceptable for having a 30fps rate on 1 Ghz systems. There's still a lot more I can do, but there is also a lot to do in general just getting the game to a proper alpha state.

Both Johan and I are working hard to get this game proper and ready. It's just as expected; it's going to cost us a Christmas vacation.

No more assets.. please?

Still trying to round off that asset list. We are recording the generals speech tomorrow and I just got the speech list finished off. It's been partial for a while, there has just been no free time to look through it. Again, lesson in game design ridiculousness: If there is a small easy task that will take five minutes to do, if you are busy chances are you won't do it, or won't even remember it. Why? Because there's a zillion of those "small easy tasks" some of them aren't small or easy, they just seem like it. And all of them you have to prioritize anyway. Just prioritizing a zillion tasks takes a long loooong time. It's really no wonder why they don't get done.

We got the new barracks properly into the game spawning soldiers. Actually they shoot them out right now. Looks a little funny, and it's a bit buggy but it works fine for alpha.

Thankfully a classmate reminded me that we have our design documents and project plans due for tomorrow. Not cool. We haven't been working on them for a while. That pretty much means tomorrow is going to be taken up with updating those. Has to be done though.

Thats it for today. More sleep ahead..

Time to sleep.

Well it's been a bit of a marathon. All the projects for this term are done though. Foamzilla isn't of course, but it's still nice to have the other things out of the way. Machinima went great for most of our class, I'm really proud of my work and Johan's as well.

We finished up our QA class as well. It was a pleasure to be taught by Mike Butler. I hope he can make it to our grad.

Foamzilla is back to full swing after today, but for now I have to sleep. Pretty badly in fact. Good night for now.

No sleep tonight.

I don't believe I posted yesterday. As usual it's been crazy busy. It's amazing how much time it takes just to communicate. Email, phone calls and whatnot busted what was left of my Saturday after housework. Although I do admit I took some time for fun..

Well it's Sunday, no make that monday. (It's past midnight) And the end of term crunch is on. We have three courses this term and all of them have a major assignment due tomorrow. Foamzilla being a two person group we simply don't have enough people to go around. So I'll be up all night. Johan has been working pretty solid through the entire weekend as well. And Foamzilla is on hold for a day, and the few hours of night I have to work here.

I get pretty wacky when I'm up for 48 hours, so just a warning in advance if tomorrow night's blog seems a little off.

Have fun sleeping.

More bugs than we can handle..

So we are doing testing plans for our quality assurance course, and we have to get some industry statistics to use as a foundation for the plan. So looking up the stats, and doing the math, it turns out that while being generous to how well we can program, we should have about 750 bugs to find by the projects end. (The number could honestly be up to 4000 or so, but we are being generous..)

So running the numbers here, even assuming we had enough people to find all of them. I would have to fix about 3 bugs an hour straight for the next 44 days we have to get them all fixed. Apparently the lowest quality games will tend to have about 30% of their bugs left in by the time of their release. We are looking pretty close to 50-60%... Not quite the level of quality I was shooting for..

Well theory and numbers are one thing. What we actually present at the end of the day is another thing. It's just all the more reason we really have to get going on this.

One student from another game design class has offered to help. I hope that works out well for all of us.

Indicators! You must have indicators!

I didn't post last night.. Brutal. We had our mentors in again today, and got slammed on gameplay, which I was expecting. Thats not to say it's abhorred, we had some GD07's (Game Design Class 7, two behind us) come in later on and were excited playing it. But it is to say a lot more is expected of what we can do. And we will do it.

There were some good points though too. Getting direction is always a big plus, and we were able to make some graphics changes to the HUD and level in one day so we could have our graphics mentor Chu Chu take another look for quick feedback. The HUD is working, but not well. The indicator text is working now too, which is a big bonus for us.

And talking to one of the other classmates on the skytrain last night. Even though we know, it always strikes us as surprising how many indicators you need in a game. You really shouldn't assume anything about a player. You have to keep slapping him over the face with a large trout...

Vision Blurring..

I've been up so long I've got a headache now. Means it's time to go home. Have to be in tomorrow early. Supposed to do a presentation tomorrow, but there is no time to do powerpoint, so it's going to be all about the handouts.

So, don't remember if I did this already, but I'll post our new logo! Looks pretty nice. A big thankyou one of our visual instructors Rob, for that one. We are still pouring down to get that funfactor up and in. Johan is in charge of the vision and making sure gameplay is fun. But it's both our jobs to make sure the game come out great. I'm confident we will. All the instructor feedback has been great.

Terrain has been tweaked a bit today, ending screen (holder) put in. After this week I'll post another video. For now, just the logo.

Full day yesterday

It was an EXTREMELY full day yesterday. To the point where I only got 3 hours of sleep, and then headed into school for class after class after class. We had presentation class first thing on Monday morning. You can imagine how inspiring we were. Got a short amount of time to talk about our game project. Lunch for 5 minutes. Then machinima presentations, (I go next week) they all went really good. Then an a lecture with Tyler Sigman, with some very insightful game mechanics. 5 minute dinner.. Then finally QA class.

I played through the game. And hopefully that game mechanics lecture will help. We need to insert more fun into it. I'll be talking to Johan about that soon. Got some of the charge bubbles in yesterday though.

Sleepless night before school

It's 5am, and visions of test plans and alpha deadlines are the only things dancing through my head. Probably not a good thing that I'm up so early, but after 4 hours I simply can't sleep anymore. This means I will probably be cracking open a sobe energy drink at 3pm. Hopefully it means an early night for me. (Early being 10:30ish)

This next week is packed. So is the week after. We have the end of term and our alpha deadlines. Not to mention some pretty hefty assignments to hand in. Johan has been in all weekend and has been banging down his large alpha milestones. I'm really impressed with the work he has gotten done. I've been in most of the weekend as well, and I'm not so close to my goals. The snow last week caused a number of cancellations that have to be made up in the last week. Not to mention I think there is a games mechanic event happening today that I would really like to attend.

Mondays are for our writing classes; machinima and narrative. It's also for QA today. Translation: Good luck getting other work done today.

I'm up early though so I will take advantage of it. Getting charge down, and fixing the camera have proven to be hell. And now the controls need to be set like Mario 64 for the joystick. All of which sound simple. All of which are one of the hardest things to program. Comparable to AI for certain. The people who are going to be coming for the presentation know this though. So we will get it all working.

I'd better get the day started..

Soldier Gameplay Vid

Here's the gameplay video of the soldiers in our test level. I'll update more when I get home.

...

Ok I'm home. This week has been rough. Really rough. We did not meet our milestone 2 objectives, which means we have a lot of work to do. The gameplay isn't close yet, which is simply killer. And the weather has been abysmal. I'm really tired, and with the length we are behind I will likely have to work through Christmas. Alpha is two weeks away. There are 3 major assignments due in the next week. And did I mention I'm really really tired? We are both going in tomorrow and doing what we have to to make this work.

I will post the build as soon as I can get a decent stable build. I've been playing around with the camera to fix some minor issues. Unfortunately these minor issues take a very long time to fix. I'll have to brush up on my trigonometry. But for now, sleep.

Milestone 2 - We're behind.

I'm not pulling any punches when saying that either. It's officially now Milestone 2. We have not met our objectives for it. The reasons? Well scope is one of them, we knew we had a big game, but we feature packed it anyway. The other is written design. It's almost impossible to plan things properly when there is nothing written up. And the proof is sort of staring us in the face right now. Keeping up a design document, not to mention constantly revising asset lists is a HUGE challenge. But it's a completely necessary evil. If it's not done total quality suffers. Actually, total quality simply tanks.

The project *will* get done properly, we are both committed to it. I haven't gotten a chance to do a video today or post the milestone 2 build. I will do so over the weekend. For now I should get some sleep.