So, I write this blog from the safe confines of Stonehaven, my base of operations for the next 3 months.
If you didn’t know I’ve recently start my Engineering Internship at Outplay Entertainment in the good city of Dundee! Started Monday and was immediatly thrown in the deep end of my project.
All is good, very much enjoying the project which is to port one of their existing games to the Android platform. It’s not that simple though, I have to use their SDK which is a whole lot of other stuff! Getting there though!
In other news, Graveyard Baby Hospital is getting a new start as we’re decided to re-do the code as it really needs re-done to be honest. So that’s happening on the code side, plus I’m meeting up Olympia to discuss art and stuff on this coming Monday after work. Be nice to see the project getting going.
Also we have got ourselves the help of a great person to help with an idea we’ve had for GBH promotion. Can’t let much out of the bag now, but hopefully in the next month we’ll have something pretty awesome to show.
Finally started re-development of Graveyard Baby Hospital, our Scottish Game Jam 2012 game!
Have design meeting today! Gonna design the crap outta this game!
Preliminary sketches for my new game idea, “Wheels”! Very excited, think it’ll be awesome although may need some folk to help!
So it’s semester 2, first blog about the AlphaTeam progress.
So we have about 10 weeks to complete both our Omega Engine and the game which we’ll create from it, “Dybridium”.
At the moment my main task is to get our basic AI framework built, mission structure and objective and our event handling sorted. It’s coming along well, I’ve got the basic entity level AI and their collective AI is nearly in. I’ve got the event handling and mission loading nearly done too. Still a lot of work to do even after this time because it’s jsut the basic framework and interations for the AI and other systems.
We will still have to add in the actual full functionality, the path finding, the file loading and the algorithms we need but they will be added int he cmoing weeks.
My other tasks, which is as always project manageemtn is to create our scheduale for going forward. Jsut waiting for the other guys int he team to get back to me with the tasks they feel are needed to complete the project and then I can get the chart done.
All in all, very much looking forward to continuing the project!
Wow, what a crazy January I’ve had!
First up I had two exams and a project hand in. I’ve had the results through and I an happily say all is good :D The project for Java was an absolute nightmare! Don’t want to do anything else involving 2-3-4 Trees again! Actually I don’t really want to do Java again! But anyway…
The most exciting and fun part of the whole month has got to have been the Scottish Game Jam which me, Keith Grant, Giovanni Masucci and Daniel Livingstone took part in this past weekend. IT was a lot of work, but working in XNA was an absolute joy, it’s so easy to get something up and running quickly!
One of the best parts about the Jam was getting to be involved in all parts of the game development. As our team was all programmers, we all had to be involved in everything. I got to use a graphics tablet for the first time, it was awesome! Totally have to get one for myself so I can start making more games at home that actually look half decent!
The game we created is called Graveyard Baby Hospital and can be downloaded at http://globalgamejam.org/2012/graveyard-baby-hospital
With our Game design documents submitted, we’re now into the final part of this semester. The final tasks left are to create a proof of concept demo, do a presentation and submit a final plan.
We’ve already writen up the slides for the presentation, everyone has their own parts to put into it and they’ll be talking about what they’ve been doign this past semester. It all seems to be going fairly smoothly as everyone in the team seems pretty comfortable talking in front of others, which is a very good thing!
Keith and Neil on the implementation team have done some sterling work, I think we’ll have a very cool video demo to show everyone during the presentation, and I think they’ll be impressed.
Over the past couple of weeks I’ve been thinking about the next parts of our project, making the engine and the game! Very much looking forward to getting some coding done on thsi project as I’ve pretty much been stuck doing documents and project management stuff. Someone has to do it, and I did put myself forward, I just wish there wasn’t so much paper work.
This past week we’ve split the team in two as we have a couple of tasks up coming which need focused on.
Firstly we have the implementation team which is Keith and Neil. They will be working on creating a short proof of concept demo for week 12 which we can demo in front of the class.
The second team is myself, Anthony and David who are working on the design of the game, the design document and the final presentation slides and script.
The game design is looking good, lots of chat about the factions, the game play and the plot behind the game. We’ve settled on what I feel is quite a good sci-fi plot involving wars, resources and an ancient evil (robotz!).
The implementation team have been workign hard on the background code for showing a rudimentary version of the engine. They are being careful to only put in the essential thigns as we won’t get marked on anything submitted this semester, next year.
This week we’ve spent most of our time getting class diagrams and the implementation documents completed. This following week we have given ourselves the task of completing our technical document.
All is going well though as we have been writing documents on our research and design for the past few weeks, and now we’re doing the class diagrams to go with it! I feel I’ve gotten a lot more I did the implementation for the particle and physics system and worked with Keith on the AI architecture and design. That led to me having to create an algorithm for the AI to make decisions…which was complicated…
Other than the technical side of things we’ve started work proper on our game design. David is taking the lead with this and has lots of good ideas so far in regards to races, setting, powers and all sorts. I’m plannign to split the team into two groups going forward. Myself, David and Anthony on the game design docs and the remaining documentation/presentation and Keith and Neil creating a prototype demo of the engine more than the game.
All looking good!
Hello all
Slightly slower week this past one for myself, was mostly looking at the physics and particle systems for the engine. The particles however I’ve left for now as we’re doing them on Friday in one of our other modules.
The physics is quite simply as it only be a small module containing some functions to modify a particles positions based on acceleration, gravity, velocity…that sort of thing.
I also completed the basic combat rule set for the game which is taken from the dungeons and dragons d20 system. Obviously ours is not as intricate and complex, but the basic rules concerning attacks, damage and defense are used. Was quite nice to finally put that seemingly useless knowledge to use!
Going forward I have to take over David’s work for on the event system as he is unavailable this week. This shouldn’t be too bad as we’ve had a chat as a group about how to go about it and it seems like it should be fairly straight forward.
Till next time!
