Week 10

          As you may already be aware our game in development is titled Medium Rare. The player takes control of a light hearted alien who vows to beam all the cows on Earth to safety in order to save them from a fate that would inevitably include BBQ sauce. On the side we have begun building a board game that reflects this general theme. Our concept utilises a square shaped board similar to monopoly with a UFO home base on opposite sides of the board. The game is intended to be team based (Good vs Evil aliens) and can at this point feature head to head or 2v2. Additional players can participate if additional cards are added to the board. Located around the board are two primary types of spots. These are barns and chance cards. Landing on a barn will allow you to draw a cow from a deck in the middle of the board. Cows are the main source of points and must be collected at your teams UFO. Before you can claim the points and put the cow on your UFO however you must either tame it (Good) or slay it (Evil). To do so any player on your team may sacrifice a turn and roll a dice for that cow. If successful the cow is loyal and may be banked for points by going to your UFO but if you fail the turn is wasted. There are many cows in the deck some harder to make loyal than others but the more difficult the cow the bigger the points so players will have to choose wisely when to roll for a cows loyalty. Chance cards allow players to mix up the game by stealing or losing cows. Some cards may let you beam a cow to your UFO while all the way on the other side of the board or make a cow loyal without risking a roll of the dice. To navigate the unidirectional board and obtain cow cards and chance cards the players will roll two six sided dice. It is important to note that each character has three health if you fail a loyalty roll for a cow, are landed directly on by another player, or are affected by certain cards you will lose a health. Lose all health and you will have to spend three turns in the hospital! The general idea for the game is ironed out and we are hard at work ironing out the kinks and balancing the game perfectly. Art assets are already underway and the board mechanics finalized. We hope to commence play testing by the end of this week so that we have ample time to polish the game.

PROJECT OZ

Christian Perera (100343813)

Edward Kwok (100368569)

Joseph Tuffner (100393724)

Seonghyun Lee (100425275)

Shing Hei Yee (100419025)

Yang Zhou (100382767)

week 9

             Continuing on from the last week, it’s been tougher trying to incorporate the few new things into our game.

While utilizing shaders and textures had proven fruitful in creating our levels, and the fog effect has been managed properly, the night-time level has proven more difficult than the others. The light (which is done through the shader) is able to move in proximity to the player character, but it seems unable to rotate in the direction the character is facing. Moreover, the intensity of the light begins to decrease when the player character moves away from his starting location. Simply making the game run at a faster pace did not turn out as expected. While the game now runs at a proper speed for most environments, it still remains rather difficult to control and especially turn properly. This is only a minor problem however, and adjusting game speed may be an option included later.

While sound has successfully been implemented into the game, there is still the matter of recording and including various sound effects which are required for our game. As the midterms have finished and the deadline is fast approaching, we should begin to consider our method of recording and editing, the former more imminent than the latter. The animated cutscene and the game trailer is coming along smoothly, and we have begun to draft up rough ideas for our game prototype (again, a requirement for our course).

PROJECT OZ

Christian Perera (100343813)

Edward Kwok (100368569)

Joseph Tuffner (100393724)

Seonghyun Lee (100425275)

Shing Hei Yee (100419025)

Yang Zhou (100382767)

Week 7 & 8

We’ve been a little busy with work, but we finally have an update after a couple weeks. It’s been tough trying to incorporate a few new things into our game.

 First of all, we’ve added some new gameplay conditions. This meaning that we’ve finally been able to add some new levels! Using the addition of Shaders and Mudboxed textures, we are able to implement textures into our game rather than simply having solid colours of a particular shade. In one of our new levels we’ve added a fog effect which makes it harder for the player to see things like enemies and cars. Another new level takes place in a night time, where the shaders also take effect. This brings the players a new experience and challenge.

Another change that we’re currently working on in terms of the games features would be making the game move at a faster pace. We feel the players will be able to enjoy the game if it went a lot faster. The player can also choose to redo the level or move on to another level once they’ve completed or screwed up in the one they’re currently playing. A few new controls have been added assigned to a variety of different keys. Though they are little things, they are design elements that we feel will make the controls more user friendly.

Sound has successfully been implemented into the game and we believe the graphics needed a little touch up. While Ed and I have been working on the models, I have also created a Logo and a new texture for our farms grass. This new texture was created from scratch in Adobe Photoshop. We are currently still working on updating the model styles, though at the moment we are not finding it a huge priority due to the fact that we need to fix up the textures for some of our models. Over the next couple weeks near completion we plan to complete our animated cut scene and game trailer as part of our requirements. That’s it for this week.

-          Christian Perera (100343813)

PROJECT OZ

Christian Perera (100343813)

Edward Kwok (100368569)

Joseph Tuffner (100393724)

Seonghyun Lee (100425275)

Shing Hei Yee (100419025)

Yang Zhou (100382767)

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)

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)

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)