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.

Foamzilla at play

I've always really liked having a game where a character has the ability to do something arbitrary. That is to have some moves you can use in strange combonations and "play" with them the way the designers never intended for you to. Or at least thats what you are supposed to think. The last few days Foamzilla has seemed very "fixed", but tonight with some AI changes, adding the stunned animation and some planned changes for how charge works, I'm really starting to get confident that it will be a very "playful" experience. There's a lot more testing and tuning to go, but it's certainly shaping up.

Johan has been working on the level design still and we knew this would be a big challenge going in. It's going slow. He's wanted to work on logo design as well, and a number of other things. I've found it very hard to delegate work as well, but thats exactly what we've had to do. We can do this stuff, we just simply don't have enough time, and we are both losing more than enough sleep.

Speaking of which, I had better grab some. Until tomorrow.

The cold makes everything slower..

A quick aside. I got home last night, and it's been cold so I went to the heater to turn it up. It was at 10 degrees inside. Thats lower than I've ever seen it. So I go away after turning it up and come back. It's 9 degrees... I crank it, and I can hear it running and come back after my toes are starting to get numb. It's now 8 degrees... I went to sleep with 4 blankets and woke up the next morning with the inside of the house being 3 degrees. It was actually WARMER inside my fridge. I hope the heating is fixed by the time I get home..

Today has just been tuning the gameplay code we have to get it working well. A bit of bot AI, fixing bugs with the size grow feature. And getting a lot of good feedback from Todd Batty, one of our mentors. Johan has been working on level design scenarios. We both really want to nail that gameplay aspect and there's a lot to it, I think he's starting to feel it. Feedback on the charge attack has been a bit negative too causing us to rethink things. One of the biggest problems is that the animation doesn't fire properly so it's hard to see when you start charging. But even with that, people want interaction in all they do. Makes sense, but I must admit, I am surprised to the level. So fixing gameplay and tuning is prime on our list, starting with charge.

Milestone two will have a build availible, but it won't be something I'm going to be too happy with. We are getting through it, it's just slow, despite the insane work we've put in.

Bots are finally afraid! Thats good I think..

Took forever to get into school today. Vancouver just got 15 centimeters of snow overnight. And it wasn't exactly a winter wonderland out there. Mondays are typically our storytelling classes, so are limited in the time we get to work on the projects. Our QA class was cancelled, so I dove right back into the AI.

The bots are running away in a satisfactory manner right now. They can get brave and fight for a little while but generally it's working as it should. They know how to go back to their home base now too. That's a bit rough though. The AI is unfortunately all I could work on today. Tomorrow is more tuning. Johan has been working on level design still but a lot of people are getting sick. And Johan wasn't doing so well so he went home to recover.

The next milestone is coming up, and I'm not too sure about reaching it's goals. This isn't the end of the world, but we have seriously restructure things if we don't make it.

Sunday Coding

It's been a long cold snowy day. I've been here since 9am coding pretty much the whole way through. It's getting close to 10pm now so I should call it. What was done today?

• Sun Evaporation is working ok now (still need more indicators)
• Shade zones (so you can be safe from the sun)
• Smarter but dumber solider AI. (they don't attack when you are large or huge, it isn't correct but it's a step in the right direction.)
• Font test for menus (Tried importing a font, worked pretty well, just have to tune and it should be in)
• Various improvements to charge (motion blur back in, charge times, doesn't stop when trampling things, does bounce back / flip depending on size)
• Size up animation started (doesn't work perfectly, but it's started)

Thats about it. Don't get me ranting about AI. Following the default unreal code is a pain. I still don't understand their logic for coding it the way they did. Creating my own from scratch was fine, but there's so many special cases you have to look out for. Wait.. I'm ranting. Ok no more about AI then.

Johan has been in this weekend as well. He's been working on the level design while I've been trying to get everything functioning. He's also brought in a speaker set to test out the sound properly. Tomorrow is all class. I'll still manage to get some work in somehow though. Not long until milestone 2..

Good Feedback Overload!

It's been another long day. Started off with meeting with mentor after mentor each who gave great feedback and each who mentioned a number of things to be fixed / improved. Johan was pointing out things at the same time as well. I love feedback, and it was all great. The list just grew and grew and it became ever apparent how much I had to do as I'm doing the lions share of the coding in this project. After a bit I found I just wanted to sit down and start cracking at the code and more mentors would come in with more feedback.

It sort of felt like I was a little kid getting fed far too much chocolate after a halloween haul.

It finally calmed down and to add to the frustration I had to switch over a large back end section of code so it's modifyable. In other words, I had to spend 5+ hours making changes no one will ever notice so we can save hours and hours of frustration when we are tuning.

After that I got burning on that huge list of bugs and requested features. Surprisingly I got 50% of it done...

Geez I'm tired. I may come in tomorrow to work, simply because there is still a horde of work left to do. It may be 68 days until the presentation, but it's 6 days until our next milestone.

Countdown and video

Well first you may have noticed that we have a new video up. Game design has been hard but we've finally had to cut our teeth and just start diving into it. So what you see there is more of a sandbox than a level but it works. We've included some indicators for when you are soaking up water and also for shrinking water puddles. All of which are going to look much better as we continue to get this base down.

And yes, we have a countdown clock! Thanks to Jacob Tran, one of our beloved mentors. I will be rewriting his code to include how long until we have our next milestones as well. It's good to keep the pressure on. There really isn't much time..

I haven't been playing any video games recently, and with the lack of sleep I've been feeling very VERY worn. I haven't even had a chance to play video games on my train ride home. I'm doing paper design work there too. It's been that crazy. Today though I took an hour to play Soul Calibur 3 with another student. (Hard to find good challengers..) And it was a load off. What a relief just to have that hour. But it's back to work now. These games just don't seem to code themselves...

The new level layout

Johan came up to me with a giant brainstorm this morning about how to lay out levels. "This will solve all our problems!" I think he said. It was good, but man I hate when he says stuff like that. There's definitely some great stuff in there though. We'll see how it pans out. We really really have to get the game to a game-playable state, and nail that core gameplay. After that, a lot of polish.

Getting down the quality controls is still very difficult. I think fundamentally the opposite of Johan, and I've been taking every chance I get to turn that into a strength of ours, but it's always a challenge.

No pictures again. We have the base level up, and I've been trying to squeeze everything in to get it working. So I'll try for tomorrow. I have to wake up in 5 hours.. At least I'm still winning the war on fatigue.

EA and so on..

We had our trip to EA Burnaby today. Have to say it's changed a lot since I've been there. Some parts are pretty much the same. New facility looks very nice. And it was great of Mike Butler to take our whole game design team there, and I also want to thank those who took time out of their day to talk to us.

After coming back I was in a mad rush to get our "puddles" into the game. But after talking to our mentors it became more obvious than ever that we have to get our gameplay solidified. The "demo" level we have to play and test stuff in just isn't cutting it anymore. We have to get an actual scenario area hacked out, and fast. The tutorial area can even be left until that gameplay specific area is done in fact. Again no pictures or video. I'm posting at 12:32pm here though and I want to get in early tomorrow. It's just been a crazy long day. So I better get home and grab a few hours of sleep.

Water sprays working

Talked to Johan and we are taking out the ground stomp among other things. I hate to see stuff go, but I would hate to have a poor quality game even more. Theres still tons up on the list, and we really have to press that base whiteboxed level to be done soon.

I spent a very long time on getting the water emitter to work properly. And then to actually be easy to place in the editor. Why would I spent 3 hours making sure the code is easy to use in an editor only we will be using? Because I know how much time it saves later during tuning tweaking. These little things end up saving gads of time. It's working at least, I'm not fully happy with it, but it will get tuned. The water looks fine, and it reduces in power as you soak it up. I still have to make it form a puddle, but I figured I would do that when I finish doing the last of our three water sources. The projectors that shrink (aka puddles).

Thats next on the list. However we have a fieldtrip to EA burnaby first. Having worked there before it's going to be good to see some of the people I still know that work there.

Oh and one of our classmates brought in a Nintendo Wii today. It looks sooo fun! I Wii-rlly want one! Ok, I didn't say that with a straight face... But seriously, I've been giving up ALL games and all systems until I graduate. For a hard core gamer.. man, it's killing me. I couldn't afford to get one now anyway. I'd be far too tempted to play it..

Sunday closing

Well my Sunday is up and I suppose I've gotten a lot done. Unfortunately a lot of that was trying to plan out the level design. I've reached the point that there is far too much stuff to plan in a completely abstract way. (On paper) So going to try it a different way. I know what we want. We'll try to lay things out with a base list of what we really want, then go over it in passes checking for all the little things. Thats the best we can do right now.

I took about 4-5 tasks down today and crossed them off as done. Which is respectable. The only problem is I put 3 new ones up. We are likely going to have to cut again. I'll worry about that tomorrow though.

Until then.

Weekend blahs..

Not too much happened on Saturday, as normal it's the day off to recover and get things prepared for next week. A bit more redefining goals on level design. Thats about it.

You'll notice that there's been no pictures of gameplay as of late. Thats because gameplay hasn't changed too much. This is still the point we are trying to boil down things even further to sharpen what we want to do and cut anything we possibly can early. I have a LOT of stuff to do today. Most of it is project planning and very unexciting to describe. As well as a few little bug fixes. I'll post at the end of the day to wrap up though.

Some new blood

As I said before, the core team is only two people. Me(Mark) and Johan. We can only do so much and our talents are far from perfect in every category. We are going to get some assistance from one of the students in a class behind us, who guys by the name of Carl Trett. He is going to be helping us with some of the level design and fleshing out the level layout. For now he is simply advising. He of course is busy with the same crazy schedules we were months back. He is also going to be working on his own final project soon too.

One more note is that we are looking for some talented 2D graphic artists to do layout for title screen, logo, and the few in game menus we have. If you are interested please contact me at gd05mark@vfs.com

The time to cut is now...

I think I said yesterday that my board is covered with "To Do" cards. And having the job as project manager I've tried a good half dozen ways to set tasks up for our group in a way thats easy to understand, accessible and still explains everything. I've tried a task program on the wiki, tried MS project of course, excel spreadsheets, daily reports etc. I'm finding that it really depends on the needs of the people you work with. Johan in particular is a very hands on sort of guy. So having these cards that he can take down and cross a big red line through when done is satisfying.

Going over HOW much stuff we have to get done it's just becoming more and more apparent of what has to be cut. We are in a good position right now, we are ahead of general expected schedule in almost all things, but looking at what we have to do, and then what we have to tune and balance... It's pretty daunting. The area we are going to level design for one is going to be shorter. And when I say shorter, it will still more than fill our 10 minute goal. I'd say gameplay is around 20 minutes average to complete. Certain extra "nice to have" things would be cut too. The goal simply is to cut early and help better define the shape of what this game is to become.

Saturday is the only day I'm not at school and my day off "technically". Things are still so tight that I will be working on a couple things like level design while at home.

I hope the weekend goes well for the rest of you.

Milestone 2 - Dec 1st...

Geez.. We just finish this milestone and the next one is less than 2 weeks away. We have a heck of a lot of work to do. We have more than we can possibly do at any appropriate level of quality, so some things are going to have to be cut. I have to take a photo of my desktop, I have the corkboard covered with ToDo tags.

The milestone review is still going good. The only concern with any of the mentors is the theme. And I had worried about this before too. Just goes to impress how hard it is to show theme and vision. Johan has printed out a bunch of sci fi games and boxes that are, as a sum, supposed to show something of what Foamzilla is supposed to be like. I don't know if that is working yet either. Some people who have come by have been rather confused.

This is seriously going to be tight, and I have a heck of a lot of work to do. I better go home and get some sleep.

Storms and Sickness

The title pretty much sums it up. I haven't posted for the last few days because I have been rather sick. I don't know what it was, but it came and went fast. I'm grateful because I have so much work to do. Unfortunately yesterday we were racked by a violent storm that knocked out the power and the internet. So there was no ability to get anything up on the web. My internet was still out this morning but fortunately it's back up now and things are running once again.

The first few milestone reviews seemed to go very well, but we won't know until we get the marks back. Johan tried to take the game home to install there but it didn't work. If any of you try it and it doesn't work, please send us the foamzilla.log file in the Foamzilla\system directory. We can figure out what went wrong from that. It's our goal to get this working on all computers out there.

Blowdryers and Menus

Fairly productive day. The menus *are* slow to do in unreal. But when they are done they look pretty nice. They scale, they are consistant with the game, and they just feel right. I may be spending an extra day or two making the menus in unreal but I certainly have no regrets.

Johan has been working on retweaking the UI pics as well as starting playtesting of the game. There's a lot of that to do and I'm glad we've gotten a head start.

I've also placed the proper projectiles for the blowdryers in the game. Well they aren't the right projectiles yet, but they are decent placeholders. The big problem right now is that they can get a little too big at their farthest range. All of it is a just a matter of tweaking. I'm not too worried. Foamzilla should also steam when he gets hit, I don't know why he wasn't doing it in the video. Maybe I introduced a bug. I'll take a look tomorrow.

Sleep for now.. The reviews of our mentors for milestone one await.

Menus.. ugh.

Yesterday, by the way, was the day I got caught up on my housework and small things like making lunches for the week, laundry etc. I did a little work on level design, but nothing exciting happened. And thus, there was no blog.

Today however I did get a good deal of work done on getting the menus up and running. Menus, often overlooked, but always needed. It's not quite as satisfying to do work on them as it is to put in a whole new feature of gameplay but it does make the game complete. I was told originally that unreal menus are a real pain to make. You are better off using flash. We didn't like how flash swaps over to load the game, and it wouldn't be consistant inside the game either. So unreal menus all the way.

And today there was definitely some pain working with them. But when all else fails, the process of elimination, no matter how slow, always works. The placeholders are in for the menus, and a lot of their stuff doesnt' work. But a good chunk of the work is done. And I'm going to be happy and call it a day at that.

Johan was organizing things with the sound guys today. They were disappointed at not having the footstep sounds in.. We can only do so much so fast... It's good it they noted that though. Now we can push to get them in before the end of the week. It makes sense too, you need to hear how the sounds in the game work out.

Just geez, there's so much stuff to do, and it's all top priority.. Anyway we are pretty excited about the sounds we are getting, those guys are doing a really good job. I look forward to putting the stuff in asap.

For now I'll leave you with the menu screen I slaved for hours to add into the game.

Milestone 1 Download

As promised our milestone one build can be downloaded from the link below. Note that you need Unreal 2004 to play it. We haven't bug tested it or anything like that, so for those of you that don't understand the process, this is simply the first (semi playable) interation games take on their way to becoming full games. To install it, just copy the Foamzilla folder into your Unreal 2004 directory, and then run "ut2004 -mod=Foamzilla" from your unreal system directory.

Sorry there's no install file either. I'll hopefully get it packaged better for next build. The good news is that if you have an Xbox 360 controller it does support it.

Today was a lot of bringing things together, making sure the build wasn't broken, adding the Xbox controller support, installing version control software for us to share code on, and plenty of bug fixes and additions just to make the game playable.

We are pretty proud of our progress for this first milestone. I get to go to bed now. It's about time...

Download the Zip here

Prepping for Milestone 1

Here's a video of most of the gameplay features working to some basic extent. You can see how much polish you actually have to do to make the game reasonable. The important part to start is simply to get the features in and test out gameplay as best as possible. We also have a very basic level structure in another level, but we are redoing the level design right now so we'll be remaking it soon enough.

It's been another long day. We just had a quality assurance class too. Have to write up 10 bugs. If you had to write up 10 bugs on the Foamzilla vid what would you write? Heh yeah, waay too easy. I'll see if I have enough time to pick another game.

Sleep time.

My Two Foamzilla's

As promised here is some of the concept art for Foamzilla. And I'd like to ask which ones you prefer. We've actually decided on the simplier one already (the blockier one) , and thats from feedback about the fact that it's more funny/absurd seeing a giant foam toy rampaging around rather than a more filled out and detailed model. We are still using both models however. It just may not be for gameplay for one of them.

The project plan is due tonight for the review so expect to see an update to that soon.

Bringing AI to it's knees

Well the whole day has pretty much been spent tackling AI. Thanks to one of our mentors Stephane, I've just began to get it tackled as I left for home tonight. I should be able to have it in fair working order within days.

Our milestone is coming up, and fast. I wanted to post some Foamzilla concept pictures here to possibly get some feedback, but I'll do that tomorrow. Possibly as an early post. We actually have to do a milestone review with our class and there is a bit of work we have to do in preparation.

Monday is remembrance day but we will be at school working. And if I don't have a build for you all to check out by Friday, I will have one by then for certain. I just want to be sure that everything works. (Well as best as it can. It's a milestone after all. They are supposed to be as buggy as hell..)

So until tomorrow!

Onto AI

It's been another veeery long day. The water source works, you can walk in, get bigger and deplete it eventually. I'm still working on getting the water level to lower based on how long you spend. But for now, especially with some of the other minor fixes and back in functionality, I'm pretty happy with it.

AI is next, and it's going to be a big pain. Contrary to what most people think, you just can't make bots super smart with any great ease. Worse still, the more bots think they more they hit the CPU usage. They can be worse than the complex geometry you put in. So, thats the last big hurdle for milestone one. The rest should be pretty straight forward.

Oh and big thanks to Shane Neville for posting me up on his blog. Just to return the favor, you can hit him up at:
http://www.shaneneville.com/

As promised I'm going to post pictures of our work area below. The desk on the left is Johan, and I'm on the right (with the black cans of sobe..)

I'm off. It's home-time.

"Good" is the enemy of "Perfect"

It's a mantra I keep repeating to myself and it is VERY hard to follow. I like things that work. I like things that look good. I don't like slapping something together with zap straps and call it done. When it comes to getting things done, especially for our upcoming milestone, you have to.

I've been working on making a water mover that you can walk into as Foamzilla and will drain as you absorb it. There's actually 2-3 different types of water sources we have planned. This one just happens to be the hardest, so we are starting here first. While making it isn't super hard, giving it the background coding so you can place them easier later, not to mention putting on a nice looking fluidsurface isn't super easy.

I think I have it down, but it's 11pm and if I have any hope of coming in early tomorrow I really should head home and get some sleep. Johan has gotten some first pass models back from our VFS 3D collaberaters. Looks good. I'll get permission from the modeller first, then post a pic of it tomorrow. I keep meaning to post a picture of our workspace but I keep forgetting to ask Johan about the pics.

Until tomorrow.

Level Design, and one long day.

I've been here since 9am, and it's getting close to 10pm now. It's been a very long sunday, but we did get a fair bit in today. Posted below is the level design flowchart for the level. At least a draft. The numbered areas have to be all filled in but the idea is simply to get the level logically playing out with all the things we want, and then try to construct this virtual tesseract. There's still more things to add, but once done, we will go through and do a mental walk through of every size and try to round up any last large design gaps before we actually commit this to physicality. It should be noted that we have made a number of levels already, but the problem is when you construct things first, you pretty much miss out on a ton of things you couldn't otherwise fathom. So level design has been a joyful nightmare. I only wish we had more time.

The rest of the day we've been working on getting up code for a very rough hud. (And I DO mean rough.) And I took a crash course in bot AI, which of course crashed my computer.. multiple times. I did get them to stand there and look threatening. So it's a start. Finally trample seems to work ok. You trample things you should based on your size. Makes sense.

This is all for milestone one, so really if we can get things working at even the most base level, but have everything there, it's a major victory for us. Again, I really have to stress HOW much extra time it takes to do the polish. To give you an example with the bots. It will likely take me a solid week to get them working decently. To get something that would impress people, that would take months. That little bit extra takes insane amounts of time, simply because you have to go back and tweak things. Then you get a good idea on how to optimize things better. But doing that requires you rewrite a huge chunk of code.. I hope you are starting to see how it goes.

I've always respected blizzard and nintendo for taking their sweet time when it comes to getting a game out. They are notorious for having some of the longest wait times for their games to come out. But you can tell the difference when you play.

I'm headed home to sleep. I have classes early tomorrow morning.

Adding research

Part of our job when putting together a game is to research all other titles that are similar that you would be competing against if your game went to the mass market. I've updated the design document on http://mockitup.net to include a research section after the competitive analysis. It's pretty plain right now and I honestly wouldn't consider those other games "competition". (This is a free game after all.) But the process is important.

That said, I should also note that we've played most of the games during our preproduction cycle. Some of them like Godzilla: Save the Earth, I wasn't able to locate until just recently. Locate is the wrong word.. "Locate for rental", or "locate cheap" are probably more apt. Students on a shoe-string budget can't really afford to pay much. But hey, actually playing a game for research is definitely one of the highlights of game design. Godzilla was.. hmm.. okay. But Hulk Ultimate Destruction was a really fun game. It was a bit mindless but I suppose it fits the hulk perfectly.

I've actually gone over some other games like Katamari 2, and a Godzilla game for the GBA, but I'll post stuff up on the design document for them later. So was I playing games all Saturday? Haha not quite. I was actually working on some level design specifics. Planning out level design for this game (especially before gameplay is completely worked out) has been very very challenging. You can't design normal levels. Foamzilla has five different sizes and we are determined to make the game fun and interesting with that same space, no matter what your size is. And thats not easy at all.

It's possible we bit off more than we can chew, but Johan and I have been working tirelessly on this. And I have confidence in our creative ability. This is something I especially can't wait to get feedback from you all on.

As a side note, we are looking for someone who specializes in graphics and web layout who is interested in helping us get our website look a little nicer. As well I've just registered www.foamzilla.com. Nothing there now, but we definitely have plans for it.

I'll post later on today too. I still need to get those pictures of our work area up.

Trample? Well not quite..

Worked primarily on cleaning up code and putting trample into the game. It didn't turn out quite like I expected, but it was funny. (See the movie below.)

The rest of the day was conceptualizing level design. Actually I meant to post a better example of a stupid mistake I've done than simply this bug. For now though I'm being called, and we have to leave for a student event. So until tomorrow!

Machinima and destructables

I just finished putting some rough machinima and destructable objects in the game. They work, but I hesitate to call them such. The destructables include a barrel and a building, I'll set up a short vid tomorrow when I have time. But there is still so much that has to be done to them to get them looking decent. It's actually pretty easy to get very basic stuff in, but it takes a very very VERY long time to get those things to look and feel good. I will have to come back to a lot of this stuff, but for now it's all about getting the very basic gameplay feel down.

The machinima intro is to help gauge how long things are going to take. We are aiming about about 10 minutes of play, and the intro video (without any actors or speech) right now is sitting at 1 minute. Thats about 30 seconds over what we wanted. And of course we'll be sure to make it skippable.

One more side note. Yesterday when I was chatting about ideas with my partner Johan, he came up with this clever idea that we both liked. I told him to write it down in our document. He said "don't worry, this idea is so great I can't ever forget it." We were talking again this morning, and I asked him to tell me what that cool idea he had yesterday that he'd never forget was. Yeah.. he had forgotten it. Anyway lesson learned. We both screw up, and we both learn from our mistakes. And to any aspiring game designers out there. Be sure to write the stuff down! It's worthless otherwise.

And tomorrow, some of the stupid mistakes I've made. It's 11:30pm and I get to go home.. Yay!

More Video - Charge

So this is the most recent stuff we have. Charge works, we are going to add some motion blur in shortly. The video also shows the different sizes of Foamzilla. There will be transitions eventually in between.

Todays been long. And lots of leftover candy has been going around giving people sugar highs. We've got a lot of our art up for the game on the walls of our space here. And my partner took a picture. I'll try to get the picture up next blog or so.

Everythings actually been going good, with praise from the mentors even. Maybe its because it feels like the calm before the storm that I feel I have to redouble my efforts. For example, we are trying to get this to a strictly playable sense so those of you out there can test it out and give us feedback. But working on the "cool" things like the slight camera shake when Foamzilla hits a wall can be a constant distraction. The cool stuff can often cost a lot of time early in the project when it's so important just to test out the core stuff. That camera shake took 2 hours out of my day when I could have spent it on getting a couple bugs worked out of the mouselook system.

Still a lot to go, but it's looking good. Time to call it a day.

Vid of Gameplay - Production Wk 1

So as promised here is the first video. This was actually done well over a week ago now, but hopefully these vids will show our progression as we continue the game.

Mentors and Updates

I'll post 2 today to make up for missing yesterday. Yesterday was rounding out some of the code for charge that was completed the day before. It's really true what they say, the first 90% of a task takes 10% of the time, and then switch it up for the last 10% (polish) for a task. And again, with a game, thats what everyone notices. Just looking up and understanding how to do "actions" in unrealscript had become an hours long task, with no real code progress.

The good news is that I got the camera working, and after meeting with the mentors, the same one who suggested I start this blog (Thanks to Shane Neville) suggested I start posting pictures up or film of the game at least to keep things interesting. I certainly think thats a good idea, and you would like to see this game progressing too right? Sounds good, so I'll take a short clip of film for the next blog to tie all you over for the first milestone release.

Again let me know what you think, and what you would like to see!

Charging looking good..

What a difference a simple feature can add. The charging is in but still very buggy. But for our basic purposes it works, and I will be smoothing it out in the coming days. And that is very good news. I spawned a few other bots into the game and sure enough, when you run into them it's gib city. Works on the default destructable objects too.

We have some art up and I've been meaning to take a picture of our workspace here so people can see what it looks like. I think I'll get some of the color art up first.

Johan came back today with a nice concept sketch of Foamzilla. He still has to finish it up but it looks pretty cool. We are going to still press for those 5 versions of Foamzilla to be up here on the walls asap. With the progress we've made in coding, graphics and other assets, it's looking very good that we will hit the first milestone with a very decent build.

Oh we got some feedback from one of our storywriting mentors on dialogue for the general. Making the case all the much stronger for him.

We are looking for someone to do the ADR (voice acting) for the general now actually.

It's been a long day, so no time to go to value village and no time to get a costume for halloween.. Well there is always next year I guess.

Just squeaked in..

Almost missed todays post! Working all day as usual. Had to look back at Foamzilla and realize we could have designed each stage better, from a visual point of view. Now it's time to submit the work to the modelers and we had to hash things out a lot quicker than I would have liked to.

It's the nature of things though. It's not like we had lots of time we were wasting last semester. Going to continue the flowchart for level design as soon as possible. The first 2 minutes is done but we really need the rest.

And the really good news is that after some hours of programming, I have the initial stages of the charge feature looking pretty decent. It's still not triggering the wallbump event properly but I'll look into that more tomorrow. White boxing is also done (for now) so I can focus on getting the machinima in as soon as this charge and the camera are fixed.

For some reason I thought the deadline for milestone one was the end of this week. But I checked things out again and it appears it's two weeks. Thats good news... Thats actually really good news..

Lastly, I have to say, I love Firefox 2.0. In-line spell checking is a beautiful thing (specially when you are running a wiki.) My spelling is actually pretty good in general, but even the odd spelling mistake I hate to make. Life is good, and I get to sleep for five hours. So until tomorrow!

First Blogger Blog..

Whoa.. this was supposed to be a day off. I suppose I did get to sleep in, meaning I got a full eight hours of sleep. Even saturdays are rarely a break for me. I get just enough time to do some shopping and clean up the appartment.

Well onto development. So as mentioned way down on the first post. I was looking to try to set this blog up at our mockitup.net site. But it ended up eating hours out of my day. So I looked around to see what the free web blogs are like. And most are pretty good, so I settled for the same one google uses: Blogger.

By the way, as a game designer, these are kind of the days that I hate. I did a lot of work today. At least 6 hours, and I'll be doing another 4 before I go to bed, but I can't show you anything cool added onto the game. It's all back end stuff, which helps a lot, but not nearly as morally rewarding.

Well by the end of this weekend I hope to have the charge feature roughy working, and by November 10th, as it is our first milestone, I'm determined to have a playable copy of the game availible for distribution.

Don't forget that the whole point of all this blogging is to give you (whoever the heck you are reading this..) insight into our design process. And all we ask in return is that you leave some feedback. We want to make this the best we can.

So until tomorrow, (when I am officially working).. cya!

- Mark

Level Design

Seems no matter how much I've studied level design, I've still got a lot to learn.

So we started doing the white boxing for our level, and it was going ok until we both started to review it and realize we had only loose ideas of what events are supposed to happen and when. We weren't thinking of the same events either. And as far as a timeline went, we weren't solid on that.

So even though the level has to be white boxed out, in terms of how big it is in relation to Foamzilla, and for playability, it was even more important to have the elements of the level detailed.

So we started constructing flowcharts. Actually it was a tip from another student that reminded me of that. Easy to forget things when you are being bombared with information from every corner.

Flowcharts are working pretty good so far, and I'm just trying to finish off the main gameplay chart right now. I'll add in things such as spawn placements and items in there as well. See how detailed I can get things before I have to write things down. It's a little like doing the encounter writeups for the paper and pencil games before doing the maps.

Thats it for today. Until tomorrow.

Stumpers

I hate getting stumped. When someone comes up to me and asks me about a portion of the game and I don't have a solid answer for them it really annoys me. One of my main jobs as a game designer is to have a very solid idea of everything for the game I'm working on.

Today for example we had some sound engineers come over to talk with us and they asked for some specifics on the sounds for some of the environments and areas. It was hard to answer without giving our best guess. I realize you have to do that now and then, but the problem with guessing is that you can say something, completely forget it and no one else on the project even knew you said it in the first place. Because it's not written down.

Even when things are written down people don't always read the design document over and over, despite change logs and even giving someone the nudge to do so. So often you have to go and explain a new item or feature and completely flesh it out, then document it, then go back and re-explain it to everyone involved. Needless to say, thats a lot of time.

This has caused me to get better about what I document though, a lot better. And that is something I like. I'm pretty decent about my documentation. Take a look at the game design documents and my timetable if you have any doubts.

For now though, when anyone comes up to me and asks me something I don't know, I add it to a list of stuff to detail out. And I make sure it gets done in the next couple days.

Some more web updates to get this blog up and rolling on the web. The project has all the inital screens and messages going into gameplay working at a fair alpha state. And Foamzilla is in the game! Although he is too large. Still, it's pretty cool to see your own character in the game. I'm going to be tackling the charge ability over this weekend. I really have to get it done for my next mentor meeting.

It's almost nine thirty now though, I figure I'll finish up some web stuff and leave at 10pm. I have an hour commute to get home and get some sleep so I can be back for 10am tomorrow morning.

Until then.

Million little things..

When you are split six ways from sunday on all the little tasks you have to get done.

I was going to talk about something else, until my partner reminded me I had to give him a map link. Then I remembered I had to reply to a number of collaberators today. Then once I started this blog, I got stopped twice as mentors came over to check up on us.

This is pretty typical and people go through this every day. I've decided that a million little things that are almost done aren't nearly as good as one thing that is. So for now, (and even though I restarted this blog). I figured I won't stop until I get finished.

It always amazes me though. People ask for stuff to be done, and even if you politely say no, the task seems so small and trivial that it's almost insulting to turn it down. The problem is that there are usually a million tasks to do that day. An exaggeration but I know I'm easily in the hundreds. And people are notoriously bad for underestimating tasks. That certainly includes myself. For this project I tend to structure my tasks and give them an estimated time to be completed. And I am always off, but at least I am getting closer.

One other note, I'm usually drained at the end of the day so I think I am going to start blogging in the morning whenever possible.

But look, I'm finished blogging for today! Thats one task down. 120 or so to go before I can get some sleep.

Until tomorrow.

First Blog!

Here's a sneak peak at something I've been curious about my entire life.

My name is Mark Barazzuol. I'm a student at Vancouver Film School and I'm studying game design. We are currently working on our final project. We are making a game. I'm getting the chance to do something that a lot of people have always dreamed of doing. I'm working primarily with my partner Johan Eickmeyer. The game that we are making is called Foamzilla.

Why am I making a blog?

Because of the nature of the game industry is to keep ideas are usually sealed under non disclosure agreements, I decided this is a excellent chance to show everyone out there just how a game is made. We've just finished preproduction, which means we just finished fleshing out the core ideas of the game. Now we are doing production. And I have to admit I'm swamped. I've dedicated 5 minutes each day to doing this though. Even if it means it's cutting into my five hours of sleep I get each night.

Thats it for today. Theres a lot to say, but very little time. Until tomorrow.

- Mark

Foreword.

I was actually setting up blogging on my own site, but time is my enemy, and I found I was spending too much time fooling around. So here we go and I'm using blogger. The following few blogs were recorded daily for the past few days. For the first five or so, don't let the dates fool you.