Turkey and Testing

Oh man holidays. Not only do I get to see my family and have an incredibly awesome time (I still hate UNO and Monopoly, more Cranium and Pictionary please!) but I got to eat tons of food (green bean casserole and ham, I'm looking at you), and it also gave me a great chance to send an alpha build of Falling to some testers!


BIG kudos to the guys and gals who helped me with testing, I was able to not only get some performance feedback, but alot of bugs and ways to polish the game came to light. Again, thanks to all of you, you all rock!

Current Project Section

One more site update for today, I added a Current Project page which will have some details on whatever my current project is. Right now it's stuff about Falling so for a quick back story rundown and some basic character info, head on over there!

220 frames served!

So here's some sprite work from the characters in Falling. I just hit 220 total frames of animation for the main character today, and there's still alot of animation to do. Fortunately, all that's left is enabling death state for the player then all his gameplay aspects are complete. Then it's on to the girl's AI and building some new data structures (why ActionScript, don't you have a FIFO structure? really?). On another note, that's the final look for the girl character, she didn't look dressed up enough before, so I redid her. Expect more news (and screens!) very soon!

(Some) Code is up!

Alright! My code examples page is back up, and has some modifications I did to the animation system in Flixel for Falling. If you feel like checking it out, head on over to the Code Examples page! Expect more up very soon!

CON-struction... more like DE-struction...

Under construction... Constructicons... geddit? Anways, just a heads up, I'm smack in the middle of updating this blog, so hang tight while I polish up the new look, and get some more stuff up here!

Watch your step! - Falling

So I figured it was about time to put this up here, as a place holder at least.

Falling is a game about two people who, after a building collapses, find themselves underground. Now all they want to do is simply reach the surface, and get back to safety. Expect to hear more of it, and see it playable soon!

I've also added a couple of gameplay screenshots to the Media section. Check em out!

edit- updated the link with the new address... woo!

OPS: Mission Complete!

Well, what can I say? Two years went by a lot faster than I thought it would. Maybe it's the way Full Sail crams everything together, maybe it's because I enjoy doing what I came to school for. Either way, this Friday is my graduation ceremony, and our Final Project game is complete. All in all I think it turned out really awesome. Read for the game concept and my mini postmortem.

OPS is a first person game, focused on movement instead of combat. In fact, there are no weapons for the player to use at all in the game. You play as a secret agent in training, trying to complete a virtual reality course that is controlled by the Battle Aptitude Readiness and Recon Intelligence (BARRI for short).

The gameplay mechanics are all about tension, keeping momentum, and using things like vaults and slides to make your way past obstacles and to the end of the course in time, with a focus on learning the courses and turret placement for faster future runs.

What Went Right

Time Management

The entire time we were working towards final project, everyone kept telling us that we would have crunch for all of our milestones. However, my team ended up meeting 6-7 days a week for at least 8 hours. That seems like a lot, but it was in a laid back environment, and other opinions were right there. The thought process was, we're coming to school to do this for a job, so why not treat it like one.

WWise

Man, WWise made sound integration so much easier for us, and took a lot of sound related issues off of our shoulders, and put them in the capable hands of our sound team. We fought back and forth for a while whether we should use Fmod or WWise, but in the end the latter made for much faster integration when it came down to it.

Scope

The scope of our game for the time frame we had was almost perfect, the only thing we had over scoped was the levels (14 total were designed, only 4 were used), which we did on purpose, so we could trim later. All we had to do was hammer out the basic mechanics and test in each level to make sure the level worked with the game.

What Went Wrong

Work Distribution

Even though we as a team didn't have any real crunch periods, individuals did, just due to an unbalanced workload. For instance, I knew Maya the best, so I handled all the placeholder models, the models we got to put in the game, tweaking the layout of the levels, and item placement in the levels. This of course was on top of what my duties as a coder were. The final week before turn in, I was scrambling to get assets in, with the sound and art guys making them faster than I could implement. At the same time however, there were people who had literally nothing to do. If we could do it again, Scheduling would be a big thing to reevaluate.

Math Libraries

I don't have a real problem with the XNA math library, which is what we ended up using. The big problem we ran into was in the first month, we switched math libraries 3 times. Not only did this take a little getting used to, but some of the team had to redo code up to three times to make up for the changes. In the end we figured out the XNA math library and how to use it, it just could have been handled in a more timely manner.

As of right now I can't think of anything else to add to this, so with that, you can find the game Here. Give it a try and let me know what you think!