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

Joe and Edward here, and as we go into the 4^th 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 1/10^th 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)