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!