Week 6 – Animation & Code Clean-up

Christian here, 6^th week of our workshop and slowly but surely we’re making progress, as mentioned in our previous posts, our coders are heavily at work on cleaning up our code. This has not entirely outshone the idea of new code being implemented. Since our code we’re primarily developed last semester, there is not a HUGE deal that we are focusing on at the moment. Right now our programmers have been working with some sounds and graphics. Our main focus for this week on the modelling side was the cut scenes

The modellers of our group, myself and Edward, have currently been working on updating the art styles of some of our buildings and models. We’ve also been working on intro cut scenes for our game, which will provide some of the players with a background story of our game, and not simply just jumping into the game like our prototype. This will somewhat make the game more interesting since they will be able to connect with some of the characters like most of us do in video games.

Currently, we have created 3 cut scenes roughly, which we hope to implement into our game trailer as part of our requirements for this semester. So far it is looking good, since we’ve been working hard with Adobe Premiere and Maya to create some cool stuff. Our cut scenes are looking great because we’ve added some cool camera movements. I have also created all of my textures in photo shop so everything is pretty much original; I believe my group members have done the same. Within the next week or so we hope to get started on our game design document, since we are getting a big idea of what direction we’re going to be heading in. A logo has also been developed so now we can properly show off the game, hoping to implement a menu system pretty soon…

Reading week next week...we may not have much of an update for next week. That’s it for today.

PROJECT OZ

Christian Perera (100343813)

Edward Kwok (100368569)

Joseph Tuffner (100393724)

Seonghyun Lee (100425275)

Shing Hei Yee (100419025)

Yang Zhou (100382767)

Week 5 – still about our Game Development Workshop…

Seonghyun and Shing here, and we are currently at the fifth week of our course. Building on the goals mentioned last week, we have managed to implement the basis of sound into our games. Although the code will allow us to insert any sort of sound that we will require in our game, to meet the course expectations we will still have to find/record some sounds and modify them – which will be done in the coming weeks, though it is not an immediate concern. Since this code was written wholly new, it is generally unrelated to the current code streamlining problem, which currently still plagues our code. In fact, attempts to fix it have somehow seems to have made it worse, causing the game to run at lightning speeds without any limit, resulting in a game over moments after beginning play.

Another achievement is the development of the trailer, the models and animation produced with Maya which can then be turned into a video file through Adobe Premier Pro. While the sound that will be used in the trailer has not been decided yet, test compilations through sample sounds have already achieved success.

Although both of us are new members to this group this semester, and did not know the full process of how the code was developed, it was quite apparent from the first glance that the main code was very inefficient – even though most of them are organized into sections, the sheer volume of the junk code makes it difficult to find all of them to fix it. As mentioned last week, the process of transitioning into arrays and loops is an ongoing process, though unexpected problems arise from it, and will need to be solved. Although our main focus was on sound and graphics, since both of us are working as programmers for this game, it is one of our main problems that we will need to solve.

All in general, we have made satisfactory progress in some of our critical requirements for the course this week, but the biggest problem that we face is still in progress. That is about the end of this week’s report – the next report will be at next week, as always.

PROJECT OZ

Christian Perera (100343813)

Edward Kwok (100368569)

Joseph Tuffner (100393724)

Seonghyun Lee (100425275)

Shing Hei Yee (100419025)

Yang Zhou (100382767)