Monday, 30 January 2012

Week 4 – more in-depth details about our Game Development Workshop…


Joe and Edward here, and as we go into the 4th week of our courses, we are beginning to apply our discussed changes to the game. Our major goals are to implement textures, shaders, sounds, and cinematics to the game in the coming weeks. There have been some different opinions on what needs to be upgraded by the end of the semester. To ensure we properly fill requirements we have come to a compromise on most aspects in order to prioritize work to be done. Before any major gameplay changes are made such as the addition of more models and or levels we must attempt to streamline our code. As the code was being developed last year bits and pieces were constantly added and removed leaving our code clunky and severely disorganized in some segments.
Other issues that were later repaired led to the development of some segments that are now of little use. Before developing new code to implement sound, textures, shaders, ect we must clean out and mend our old code. Unused segments will be removed and chunky code will be condensed and revisited for efficiency. One of the primary goals while condensing is to implement arrays more efficiently. Many models and characters being reused have copy and pasted code that makes navigation more than arduous. These will be transitioned into arrays so that we can utilize for loops to create a more efficient execution of code. This is extremely important because in our current state the amount of code required could exponentially increase if more assets are added. In the current state streamlining our code could potentially cut some areas down to almost 1/10th of their original size. This will be a major area of my personal focus this week while our programmers will begin assembling code for audio in the game.
A sample picture from one of our previous games that includes shaders:
              
            For the modeling aspect of our game, we are trying to change our buildings to incorporate a more cartoony look, such as the building in this picture:
This will most likely be done in the following weeks, time permitting, as it isn’t as much of a priority as the other things we need for our game, but we we still strive to complete it soon.
All in all, our progress has been going good, and we expect to have basic aspects of our models, sound and audio, textures, and shaders completed within the next few weeks. That’s all for this week, stay tuned for more updates from Project Oz :)

PROJECT OZ
Christian Perera (100343813)
Edward Kwok (100368569)
Joseph Tuffner (100393724)
Seonghyun Lee (100425275)
Shing Hei Yee (100419025)
Yang Zhou (100382767)

Tuesday, 24 January 2012

Week 3 – Game Development Workshop continued...



                Edward and Yang here, and it has been a very busy week, due to the overwhelming amount of homework we received from multiple classes. We just had our second game development workshop class, and Dr. Finney gave our programmers some new ideas and some code to help them to program the sound and audio portion of our game. It was truly a productive work period as our programmers now know how to work on our sound and audio programming. 


                Unfortunately, during our game development workshop period, we had an argument between several of our members, where our lead designer wanted to change many aspects of our game as well as the game play. He wanted to change our entire game code to include only arrays, which will require a fair bit of work and time in order to do so. He also wanted us to change the models completely, rendering our old models from last semester useless. This caused quite some trouble, and in the end, we all agreed that the modellers would only fix and change the old models up a bit, depending on how much free time we have for the semester.

                We also discussed more things to add to our game, time permitting, such as adding a boss fight to the game, in order to make it more interesting. We also wanted to add things like a menu, a HUD, and especially textures. The programmers will make good use of Dr. Hogue’s labs and lectures for the course computer graphics 2, in order to learn how to apply textures and shaders to our game, which will make it much more visually appealing. The sound and audio portion of our game didn’t seem to worry our group members as much, so it looks like the majority of the semester will be focused on our other course requirements.
   That’s all for this week, stay tuned for more updates from team Project Oz :)

PROJECT OZ
Christian Perera (100343813)
Edward Kwok (100368569)
Joseph Tuffner (100393724)
Seonghyun Lee (100425275)
Shing Hei Yee (100419025)
Yang Zhou (100382767)

Thursday, 19 January 2012

Week 2 - continued

Here are pictures of our group working hard to complete our first board game 
(a race to the end type of game):

 Brainstorming ideas for our game
Colouring each of the pieces
 All the pieces fully coloured


Creating the board

Monday, 16 January 2012

Week 2 - First week of the Game Development Workshop


Christian and Yang here, time to start on our new requirements for the semester… We would also like to introduce two new members into our group: Seonghyun Lee and Shing Hei Yee. Pretty excited about this because now we have the chance to improve our game further with more support. Kinda unexpected though.
When we started the class, Dr. Finney reported to us about all the features in the upcoming classes. We now have second year support for our Game Design and Production class, as well as the Graphics II and Sound & Audio classes for some of our other members. Meeting up with Dr. Finney and Professor Fullerton, we have a great idea on what’s going to be happening this semester.
As you may know already our game ‘Medium Rare’ gives players the role of a protagonist Alien whose race has invaded earth and is trying to find a new food source. They find that they do not like humans, so instead they go after cows. Our game gives the player the control of a good alien of the race whose goal is to try and beam up the cows to safety. Some design aspects we wish to change and update in our game would first be our gameplay. We want to make the game play in the sense where it will compete with NPC Evil Alien characters to beam up cows. We also plan on adding a HUD! It should look a lot better.
After meeting with Professor Fullerton, we’ve also been pointed in the right direction of where our models should be going. We’ve came to the conclusion that we would need to make our models a bit more cartoony with more realistic textures. The ones we’re using now aren’t the best but have served the proper purpose.
And now we’re working on our commitment documents, it’s good to be organized :)
PROJECT OZ
Christian Perera (100343813)
Edward Kwok (100368569)
Joseph Tuffner (100393724)
Seonghyun Lee (100425275)
Shing Hei Yee (100419025)
Yang Zhou (100382767)

Wednesday, 11 January 2012

Week1 post


A new semester has begun finally after a nice winter break…
 After attending all of our new classes, we must now continue to work on our project for this year, “Medium Rare” It is only today that the university assigned our team’s year a time slot for our Game Development Workshop. With the new semester, we have a lot of new assignments relating to the game.  Some issues in terms of all of our GDW requirements would be that our group members are in various classes. The one positive thing about this situation is that we all happen to be in the Game Design course. This will allow us to evenly contribute to all of our features.
In the upcoming Game Development Workshop session with Dr. Finney, we would first like to distribute the roles for each member in terms of all the documents. We are also still debating how and when we will be going to create the game trailer. Since we hope to add a lot of new features into the game such as textures, sounds and updated code for new levels, we want to put the trailer off until then. Identifying our game’s unique features in the trailer will probably be most important thing.
Another thing we will be discussing would be the development of our game’s paper prototype. This is crucial to our Game Design course… Still have no idea what to do. It may be a bit tricky but I’m sure we will be able to create farm. Still haven’t met with the entire group yet, so I guess we will see what happens come Monday...

PROJECT OZ
Christian Perera (100343813)
Edward Kwok (100368569)
Joseph Tuffner (100393724)
Seonghyun Lee (100425275)
Shing Hei Yee (100419025)
Yang Zhou (100382767)