Big Game Project; Week 4

For this week I planned a Pre-Alpha for our group in order to help us stay ahead of schedule. And for the alpha until the final stage we need to have our main features implemented.

The features that need to ready for this week, which also are our priorities for the whole game and our goal for GGC are:

• Gesture magic, you move the analog controllers in a pattern to conjure magical spells.
• Combining magic: After casting a spell onto the field which has a set duration time, you can hit it with another spell to combine it into a new spell with enhanced properties.
• Harakat-Mode: bullet time mode where you take control over time to execute and combine magic.
• Artificial intelligence (AI), Enemy behavior.

*Harakat in arabic means “movements”, or “stylized movements”.

Below ill present every area in short and also refer to their individual blogs for further reading in the areas that may interest you.

Programming

AI
Enemy behaviors that are implemented for alpha involve chasing, attacking the player and have a range of vision. They can detect you by sound and has a guard area in which they return to when they stray too far from their area.

The boss “Qadher” is programmed to have different behaviors (attack patterns) when he reaches certain points of his health meter. A player needs to rethink strategies and make use of the spells in store.

For more reading regarding this matter read Ladbon´s blog

Controls
We have an alpha set up for the control buttons which will surely change as we iterate them further through play-testing.

But for now, this is how the input looks:

This is only a mockup as we need to make the controls function properly. We need to get the main function of the analog sticks to be set for the alpha on Wednesday.

Read more about it in Herman’s blogg

Gesture Magic Casting
The analog controls for magic casting, has a script ready. What needs to be done for this is that the patterns need to be mapped for the player to cast spells that are assigned to them.
Magic Combination
The ability to cast the spell “fireflies” and hitting it with a “fireball”, which results in the spell “fire shots”, is written and ready as a script but we only have cubes placeholder for visual representations..

The lead programmer will further explain this matter in his blog, Oscar´s blog

Graphics

There is a lot of interesting visuals you should see in the artists individual blogs, you should visit them as I only write about their work and don’t show much of it here.

Animation

The animations for are mostly done, we have a spider that needs to be animated but we can’t do it in motionbuilder so we need to animate it in 3Ds Max, just recently we learned how to do that so unfortunately we may not be able to have it ready for Alpha. Mokhtar has some animations that need to be blended properly in Unreal Engine that should be only some small fixes, but for now we need to focus on features of the game rather than polishing the animations.

2D

Our Lead artist that also works as our concept artist, have provided us with a lot of art for our artists to follow. He makes a good job in representing the arabic style in artifacts and texts, he as gathered a lot of information and reference pictures that he and I have sat down and looked at.

I am not picky about it becoming 100% accurate but I want it to at leas be looking similar so that it gives the right feeling for our arabic influenced setting.

William´s blogg

3D

A lot of props are done, around 30 different stone shapes, mushrooms, the final mesh for our boss is being worked on and one extra enemy will have its base mesh done soon. And dont miss out on the bridges and other level based props he have prepeared.

Marcus blogg

Level

The level has the whole layout built, and should be placed in the alpha, later on we will make small changes in the level after we playtest it more. The level has still not been textured yet, but for now the lighting and some of the props are placed.

The level will always be under construction throughout the whole game developing process, so stay tuned by following Andreas blog below.

Andreas blogg

As far as we have come I can admit that I am a bit stressed as it feels like I am missing something, I tried to join the group as much as I could and help them out so I took it upon myself to learn how to animate in 3Ds Max to complete the spider animations, so far I’ve done a walking animation to 90% just need to do some final touches and try it in the engine and see if it works. If I get it up and running I’ll try to complete the rest of the animations; attack, idle and death.

The designing mission

I have a side assignment and that is also what I will be writing in my “post mortem”, that is about how I will try to teach the player about how to learn unconventional controls in an easy way, this and to make a short and understandable tutorial. I will write a bit more about it further in when we start to reach the Beta-stage.

So far regarding the controls in the pre-alpha stage, we haven’t gotten that far as the player can do some basic stuff like jumping and shooting a fireball but not doing the gesture moves with the analog sticks. But that was promised to be delivered for the Alpha on Wednesday, so I will have to keep track on what is done to make sure that it is done by then. But as far as I am concerned the control overall felt smooth according to the people that play tested it in school so that’s a good start I guess, and hopefully we will have something fun to play soon.

Next week will be a bit hectic for me as the I as a producer need to start attending presentation practices, and we still haven’t done much on the 2D side like for example the logotype for our game yet. But at the same time I don’t want to put too much pressure on our artists, so I’ll have to figure it out somehow.

Wish us luck for Alpha!