As the days passed I felt even more worried than before. Honestly, I am not sure at all if we are going to make it. I don't know if Mike or Matt actually have something running on the Hololens as they say. For now, I am just trying to ensure at least get enough grade to pass with this blog and the journal. Awful to admit but sadly real. Besides feel shame for ourselves, I noticed that Nuhi was struggling a little to finding proper 3D chess piece models to animate, so I researched them and luckily found some interesting stuff. I had a really stylish board and a set of holographic pieces which just seems awesome. The bad new was that I don't know for sure if he could use because it requires a specific (not free) program. As always I am just trying to help while seeing how this ship keeps sinking.
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Using Marco's obstacles ideas Scott and I started discussing which one include or discard. Because our lack of experience and time, we decided go with easier and simple ones, the classics let's say. Those moving platforms would be awesome to give ways to the players do they can easily navigate between upper and lower levels. On the other hand, the spikes and pits are really easy to programming, they don't need further explanations and provide the tiles more dynamism. We are definitely using all of these (as long as we can of course).
Today I spent most of the day upgrading the key points in the Game Design Document. Basic stuff like influences or elevator pitch were change to reflect a traditional chess video game. Even so, I searched for suitable references like the old classic Battle Chess. I guess our main focus should make nice animation because there is not enough time to develop a complex IA for the game. When I was done, I asked Mike if it was possible to incorporate some of my ideas as game modes but told me that he doesn't think we have enough time for that... I am feeling pretty frustrated right now with the current situation and team attitude. I probably could have done a little more for the project but honestly, I don't know what else to do, how push the team forward?
Scott told me that I could fill out 4 bosses design document for the final trail in the Great Court dungeon. It supposes to be 4 strong elementals who are fighting each other when the players arrive. Then the player will have to decide how to deal with the bosses. In order to do that I did a lot of research trying to understand the basis of the game. Basically, I look for elementals numbers and tried to matches up with the enemy I already had in mind. It was actually an easy process, just took me some time balancing everything while tried to keep it realistic but challenging. Either way, I know the team will cover my mistakes when they take a look. I also learned a lot about the game. Numbers, odd, chances, and dice that's pretty much all.
Today Scott and I discussed a little about the relation coin-speed. We realized how hard is going to make that binomial actually works. I honestly don't have idea if we will be able to find a way but Ethan still believes in this as the core mechanic of the game. For now, we will be just trying harder, I wouldn't want to explain Ethan why this is not going to work but it could definitely happen. On the other hand, I gave Nick some feedback about his animations. Overall I think he is doing a good job, his style is easy to perceive and the animations are smooth. I just gave a couple of advice like "you could change this tiny part there looks weird" or "don't you think is gonna looks better if you add this?". I will be checking his work as long with Carly stuff more often.
After finished the general ideas for the items. We decided to focus on the star again so I had to include a little of the other's item effects and make it similar to Mario Kart's golden start. Those galaxy shards are going to provide the player invincibility, damage boost, and speed boost, so pretty basic stuff. As for the character, Scott also asked me to add some real coding numbers to these design. So when the programmers have to insert this logic to the game would be a little easier for them if there is some kind of traduction to code logic.
After the hard desition of changing the whole project (or rather reduce it) to only Augment Reality simple chess, I felt real frustration. I mean is a classic in this industry. I have read thousands of times cancellations of massive AAA games, it is sadly common. But it's going to be always harder when you experience it in the first person. I lost at least 3 weeks of work with this desition. It's not like my time is so precious to me (that also), what really make me angry is I knew it all along. In one of the first discussions, I expressed my concern regarding the inherent complexity of this idea. Nobody pays attention to me, nothing new. So I ended trying to find some new ideas to add unique features to our dull AR chess game. After a little research, I surprisingly find countless variations of the old chess (How I never thought about that? It is the historic chess, after all). I gathered a bunch of them (which I thought it would be easiest to program) to show the team and see what they think about it.
I didn't know Nikki was taking care of sound "department". Actually, we (as industry) should start to pay more attention to sound design. I know there are a lot of titles, job and budget for this issue in AAA games for example. But I still feel video game compositor are no treated like formal designers, artist or programmers. Sound in video games is relegated to the background, the simple fact of letting music and sound effects to the end is proof of this. Anyways, today Nikki showed me the results of her research regarding this matter, I must say: really liked what I heard. She makes it look easy but is a real challenge to finding propers sounds (or worst: background music) to a game and on the top of that, it has to be free. She managed to found a bunch of sound effect for the character, so I gave her my opinions about every single one. Most of them were useful, we only have to edit (just cutting or adjusting the volume) a few.
Scott what me designing at least 4 items ideas to pick one or 2 for following sprints. It was pretty much like design character: explain the core concept of the item, write a few lines about its plot, explain in detail the effect and add a couple of reference images to give the artists an general idea ho may look like. In order to complete this task, I started taking a couple of ideas from Super Smash and Mario Kart series. The original idea was to have our own version of Mario Kart's golden star power-up. I put a bunch of effects: invincibility, speed boost, and power boost but then I decided to split all these effects into differents items. Finally, I ended with one offensive (the meteor), one defensive (the galaxy shard), the star (in which I took the Smash's idea of gather 3 pieces of the item to trigger its effect) and the dark hole (another stolen idea from smash..) with the effect of push opponents the both side of the screen (winning or losing the match depending on the side).
As we finally have the task assigned on Psyberfire I (again, finally) started looking at these. So Kenisha, Nikki and me suppose to be working on Inventor's class. I just beginning trying to fill out all the hole I see on the class template. It was unfortunate that Nikki was feeling bad today because she could help me out a lot with this. Kenisha, of course, was busy being the project owner and taking caring of every single detail. Anyways I wrote a short background of the class based on the original Leo idea. Tried as much as I could to follow the aesthetic of our Skysend but I will definitely need someone else (who actually know about the game) correcting all this. Same apply to primary ability, items, and weapons proficiency. After this, I repeated the same process to Alchemist because in regards Artificer I still don't see the whole picture...
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AuthorI want to study Video Games in a theoretical way. Archivos
May 2018
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