Week 14

- what you have done this week for the project
- where and when you met with your group
- what you are going to do for next week


So this week we had to take care of our five page document as well as create a short video clip of our game and have a beta done. Lots to do, very little time to do it. We managed to take care of everything but it was a really close call. Also, we had to abandon some features for this week that we had hoped to accomplish. Our cut scenes did not work due to an error in our game engine, but i've emailed support and they said that it should work. So i will have to re-install the game engine and try again later. Also our final boss is having some sprite issues but we will take care of that for the final version. After we get the boss and the cut scenes in, we will have a finished game. We met online this week and we established our milestiones for this week. They will change as the deadline gets closer, but for now, here they are:

Weekly Milestones:

THERE WILL BE MORE THINGS WHEN I GET TO THEM, I’LL NEED THESE THINGS BY FRIDAY NIGHT.

Darian: Discuss and figure out how much effort it will take to have a mini driving game. Zoom out for the final end boss fight, stop scrolling. Fix end boss. Send Ching the syringe and crack grenade.

Ching: Syringe Icon and crack grenade “highlight” icon (all you have to do is put a yellow border around the pictures so the user knows that it is selected.

Alex: Send Darian all the bmp images for the “attack left” frames. Cut out the dead space from all directions on the security guard boss attack left frames.

Johnnie: Cut out the white space for ALL the rat frames.

Joseph: Cut out the white space for ALL the priest frames.

Terry: (if you have sent me any of these things already, please send them again cuz I must have misfiled them, hehe)
Music:

Music for one more level (I have two music files, need one more)\
Game over music (something that makes the user feel disappointed)
Level complete music (Victory music)
Game complete music (Really Victorious music)
Main title music (for the intro screen where the user hits play game or
instructions, something happy and funny)
Final Boss music

Week 13

- what you have done this week for the project
- where and when you met with your group
- what you are going to do for next week

So this week wasn't terribly productive which is a shame. I wanted to have the game done by today but it seems our workload is too heavy in all of our other classes to get most of our milestones done on time for this week. We worked on our characters and the levels as well as the values for the characters and levels, but we still came up short with some of the characters and levels. We almost made up for it, however, today in our meeting. We met during the lecture and continued our meeting straight through until 8:30pm tonight. We went through every single character, and went through all their sprites to see if there were any missing, so we can have them completed by tomorrow morning. Also, for each character, we recorded audio lines so we will have some unique sound effects for each one. This will add a lot of humour to our video game. Our milestones are pretty harsh this week, they are really all for today or tomorrow to complete to make up for last week. I told the team that after those milestones are complete, i'm going to give out more milestones as i need them. I'm really impressed with how they are handling this all. Anywhoo, here are the milestones for this week:

Weekly Milestones:
(remember most of these milestones are due tonight, and they will change throughout the week, keep in contact because I’ll be emailing you little things to do as I find them)
According to Magy, for next week we need to have:
- playable Game (not final, but close to final)
- non-playable movie of the game (in AVI or other format, make sure to tell me what Codec is needed)
- 5-page document on the game, description of the game mechanics and concept, you can use MDA as your framework for describing your game.
What you learned through the process of creating the game and working with the engine, i.e. reflection on the process.
For this, each person must write half of a page on the process, what you learned through the process of making this game and doing whatever it is you did.
(Due Sunday Night)

Darian: Also I want the weapons to be valued, linked to their icons, and timed. Discuss and figure out how much effort it will take to have a mini driving game. Fill in the bosses with temp sprites to mess with their values. Test the cutscenes with random quicktime movies. Email Magy about Johnnie’s grades. Send Johnnie all the frames he needs. Fill in the rest of the empty sprites that you can.

Ching: Finish the street level (Tuesday night, November 27th)
Make the bullet for the police officer (Wednesday)
Frames to finish: (Tuesday night, November 27th)
Attack Left
Attack Right
Turning Left
Turning Right

Alex: Send the rendered frames to Darian (Tuesday Night, November 27th)

Johnnie:
Save the sewer level as a smaller format (Tuesday night November 27t)
Frames to finish for rat: (Tuesday night, November 27th)
Jump left attack left
Jump right attack right
Turning Left jumping
Turning Right jumping
Frames to finish for main character: (Tuesday night, November 27th)
Jump Left attack Left (1 frame)
Starting to duck left (1 frame)
Turning left jumping (1 frame)
Aim left falling back (12 frames, but only 2 new ones)
Descend Left attack left (1 frame)

Joseph: Finish the Cut Scene intro (Friday night)
If Darian says the other cut scenes can work in between levels, do those cut scenes (due Monday Night)
Record roughly 10 seconds of the game footage, put in .mov form (fraps is the name of the program) (due Sunday)
Send Terry the audio files (make sure he gets them)
Frames to finish for priest: (Tuesday night, November 27th)
Jump left attack left: (2 frames at most)
Jump right attack right:
Turning left jumping
Turning right jumping
Turning Left
Turning Right

Terry:
Do the invincible health bar (change the red to green) (Wednesday night)
Add in Time Up noise (Wednesday night)
Do the time up screen (Wednesday Night)
Edit the audio files we sent you into their own separate files for each line (Tuesday, November 27th)
- Label the files according to their intro and give separate folders for each character
- Add effects to the audio recordings to make them sound more scary, manly, and less like students, hehe. Keep the effects for each character different, but make sure all the sounds for each character sound the same (ex: slow down all the security guard clips so he sounds deeper, speed up the rat sounds so he sounds squeakier, experiment with them)
- Below IN GREEN is a list of all the files you need to send me organized in their appropriate sections and labeled appropriately so I can find them with ease and put them into the game: (talk to darian if you don’t know what’s going on)

Week 12

- what you have done this week for the project
- where and when you met with your group
- what you are going to do for next week

This week we just worked on our milestones as usual. We had more artwork done and we started tweaking the values of the game to try and make it more challenging. Next week we are planning on having the game done so it is a big week for work.
We met in the lab and dished out our new milestones and caught each other up on where we are with our current milestones. Here are the milestones for week 13:

Weekly Milestone, Due Sunday Night:

Darian: Just take in the sprites, mess with the values. I want the game to be fun by next week. That means I want the main bad guy done and valued, and the main boss to the level done and valued. Also I want the weapons to be valued, linked to their icons, and timed. I also want one power up done by next week (speed). Discuss and figure out how much effort it will take to have a mini driving game. Fill in the bosses with temp sprites to mess with their values. Send Terry the speed power up sprite template. Send Terry 3 lines to record for the inner monologue. Send Johnnie the main character standing frame. Send johnnie the climbing sprites. Find out what size videos will work in this game, send to Joseph. Send joseph the storyboard mock up.

Ching: Finish every frame for the police officer. Finish the street level (alex’s level is here: www.sfu.ca/~ating1/IAT410/ )

Alex: Finish the third level completely, finish the security guard completely.

Johnnie: Talk to Joseph about getting rid of those white blurs. Finish up the main character. Add those little pipes to the sewer level. Expand the ceiling and expand the end boss room significantly. Repeat the first sewer section a couple of times to expand the level. Do the one rat turning frame. Send everyone the first frame of the main character so we can check him out.

Joseph: Crack Grenade resize it again, fix the white halo around the priest. Send one sprite to Darian. Animatic the everything. You can ask Terry for help if you need it.

Terry:
Sounds: Gather SFX for everything.
Do the image sprites for the speed power up.
Fix: the health bar
Fix: the game over TITLE
Fix: the crack TITLE, change “Crack” to color.

Week 11 Presentations

Team Aquila:
This team’s game was a turn based, digital prototype. It mimicked their end game very well for they had all the main mechanics in there. Two users would battle head to head controlling a small army. The only problems were that the users had to guess how much health that they have had.

Aesthetics: Fantasy, Challenge, Submission, Fellowship
Mechanics: Click, move, kill.
Dynamics: Click with the mouse to move your armies into place and kill the opponent.


Legend of Chopstick Chung:
This team did a digital prototype but their game is hard to define because their game is a series of minigames. They had a few problems with the fly minigame because the chopstick box was hard to find and there was a lack of player connection to the game.

Aesthetics: Fantasy, Challenge, Submission
Mechanics: Different for each minigame (ex: kill flies, click with mouse)
Dynamics: Move the mouse and click on the flies to attack them with your chopsticks and build points.


Deep Field:
Prototype was done with people sitting in chairs coming towards the user who would hit their hands to deflect them. This did a good job of mimicking their end game but because there were people playing as the AI, it wasn’t real AI. This was designed to mimic a bear in the middle who must deflect enemies coming towards him while trying to open the gates.

Aesthetics: Submission, Challenge
Mechanics: Press up, down, left, right
Dynamics: Press the arrow keys to deflect the enemies coming from that direction. Deflect the enemies and then try to open the gate to win.


Synasty:
This project was a little unclear to me, but they did a paper prototype for their puzzle and it seemed to work well for them.

Aesthetics: Challenge, Submission
Mechanics: Unclear what the buttons will be or the actions that make up their mechanics
Dynamics: Solve the puzzle to win the game.

Week 11

- what you have done this week for the project
- where and when you met with your group
- what you are going to do for next week

This week we just did more presentations for our critiques in the lecture, but we got a lot accomplished for our project. The rat enemy is done, it just has to be sent to me in proper bitmap form. The third level is nearly done as well as the second level. We have more sound effects and are in process of gathering more. We have also written the story for our project but it needs to be refined and shrunken so it does not drag out for the user.

We met today in our lab and discussed what we have done and what we still need to do. We set up our milestones again for this week, here they are:

Weekly Milestone, Due Sunday Night:

Darian: Do animatic with Jo, place in all the sprites and UI elements, finish up the main character. Refine the script, send to all. Send everyone their milestones. Send Terry all the UI sprites to manipulate. Email Jesse Simko for the drug meter. Find out if you can save the game as an external application. Email milestones

Ching: Finish every frame for the police officer.

Alex: Send Darian the level to date. Finish the security guard. If time, finish off the level.

Johnnie: Finish up the main character. Booya!

Joseph: Crack Grenade resize it again, fix the white halo around the priest. Send one sprite to Darian. Animatic the everything

Terry: Sounds: Gather SFX for security guard boss. Gather a few SFX for whatever you can find. Interface: Game over screen: Paste your work overtop of the “winners don’t use drugs screen”. Do the in game UI screens.

Week 10 Presentations

Stick Ninja:
This group’s prototype seemed to mimic their mechanics very well, but I was a bit unsure because I did not hear anything about how their game will be played in the final form. They did a good job of representing the four levels and the boss bonus, and they also did a good job of assigning the random characters and random weapons to each level. They also mimicked the random attacks well with the dice.

Aesthetics: Narrative, Fantasy, Submission
Dynamics: Fight one enemy in each level using random weapons and characters
Mechanics: Click to attack and a your attack will do random damage to the enemy. Damage will be dealt out randomly as well.


Zodiac War:
This group’s prototype was a turn based board game, but there were some problems the group have foreseen such as their prototype only supported 3 basic attacks which the users did not like, and the AI wasn’t working in their prototype and they figured it would be hard to implement that in their game.

Aesthetics: Submission, Fantasy
Mechanics: Hit buttons to attack the other player
Dynamics: Hitting the other player will result in damage dealt and eventually will kill the opponent, making you victorious.


CrackQuest:
This was our presentation so I will let everyone else critique it.

Week 10

- what you have done this week for the project
- where and when you met with your group
- what you are going to do for next week

So this week we worked on milestones set out from last week. We added in the new character of the Rat Boss to the level as well as the crack grenade and syringe. The rat boss only has about half of it's frames done but this week we will work on the rest. We also presented our prototype presentation in class this week and got some good feedback from the class. The feedback we got that we did not include in our presentation was that we should add in Audio cut scenes instead of just text. This will create a new way to present the story to the user and keep them going throughout the game. We are also planning on adding in random audio bits into the levels to act as the characters inner monologue. We think we can have some fun with these audio bits and it will add to the replay value of our game because the audio bits will play randomly, and the user might not hear them all the first or second time playing the game.

This week we met after the lecture, before the lab, in room 5300. This is the usual spot where we meet when we have meetings outside of the class room, and we just discussed what we have done this week and we wrote out our milestones for next week.

Here are the milestones that we will accomplish for next week:
Weekly Milestone, Due Sunday Night:
Do critiques!!!

Darian: Take a look at Rat, decide if it needs more. Test the sprites that are sent and give feedback. Work on the storyline with Jo. Find out pixel size of the screen. Width 800 Height 600

Ching: Start on police officer, finish those walking frames, and the attack frames.
Add more to the street level, such as buildings.

Alex: Finish off the main room, start the security guard.

Johnnie: Mirror the Rat Boss frames, do the cheese projectile. Add more variation and length. Send the png sprite to darian to test.

Joseph: Crack Grenade resize it again, fix the white halo around the priest. Send one sprite to Darian. Work on story line with Darian, design the template and/or storyboard for the cut scenes.

Terry: Sounds:, Dying sound effects needs to be cut down. random hospital level sounds. Music for the sewer level and random sounds for the sewer level. Start gathering SFX for the bad guys and characters.
Interface: Game over screen: Paste your work overtop of the “winners don’t use drugs screen”

Week 9 Presentations

3rd Cloud:
Prototype:
3rd Cloud’s prototype was a digital prototype, their design is an exact replica of what their game will look like, just with basic features. All the mechanics are there, but with only a few examples. Great use of art to get it across and it seems like an original idea.
aesthetics: narrative, discovery, challenge, fantasy
mechanics: walk around, explore, pick up weapons, use them
dynamics: Explore the environment, pick up weapons and use them to fight enemies and gain levels and power.

Food Fight
Prototype:
This prototype did an alright job mimicking their game. The food fight was represented in a battleship style, taking turns to take shots. This proved confusing for the users in some parts due to the abundance of features and instructions, as well as no way to keep track of their hits and misses and the steep learning curve.
Aesthetics: Challenge, Submission
Mechanics: Throw food, hit the other
Dynamics: Use food to attack the opposition, first player to hit the opposition enough wins the challenge.

Drivethrough Tycoon
Prototype:
This group’s prototype mimicked their game very well, using paper cut outs as their graphics. Very original idea, but needs more variation in the cars and food types. The introduction was not clear to the users and the users felt like they needed an alert when new cars arrived.
Mechanics: simple, click and move, sell and buy.
Aesthetics: Submission and Challenge
Dynamics: Click on the burgers when cars arrive to make them their food, it eventually gets faster and harder, creating the aesthetics.

Circular Strife:
Prototype:
Prototype mimicked their game play very well. Very original way of presenting the prototype with a very “in your face” attitude. Design was well thought out and implemented.
Mechanics: Drive, collect bombs, blow things up
Aesthetics: Challenge, Submission, Fellowship
Dynamics: Players drives around and collect bombs and blows up stations, racing against time or other players, creating mainly a fellowship and challenge.

Week 9

- what you have done this week for the project
- where and when you met with your group
- what you are going to do for next week

This project we tried to take care of our milestones from last week as usual. Because it is the midterm bump this week, our productivity has been lower than usual. We did not complete as many milestones as we should have, but me, being the awesome manager that i am, planned for this and am not dissapointed. We are still on track and this week we met in the lab to discuss milestones for next week. Here they are:

Weekly Milestone, Due Sunday Night:
Do critiques!!!

Darian: Put the stuff in. Finish some more frames for the main character. Take a look at Rat, decide if it needs more.

Ching: Start on police officer, finish those fifteen frames.
Add more to the street level, such as buildings.

Alex: Enlarge the hospital level more and try and finish.

Johnnie: Add more variation and length.

Joseph: Crack Grenade, Crack Grenade Explosion

Terry: Sounds: Throwing sound effect, holy SFX for when priest dies, random street sounds, random hospital level sounds. MUST DO by Sunday.
Interface: We need a Quit game button. Instructions screen, credits screen and/or about us.

Week 8 Presentation Critiques

Ant Colony:
An educational game, but their prototype didn’t let me know if it mimicked their game play very well because I did not really comprehend what their game will like in the end.
Mechanics: Unclear
Aesthetics: Discovery, Challenge, Submission
Dynamics: Unsure because I do not know the mechanics, they should have made that more clear in their presentation.

Fins of Fury:
Prototype:
Mimicked the game well enough, but was much slower than actual game play, for the users had to wait to roll and move instead of instantly move around. Great idea, and very original.
Aesthetics: Fantasy, Submission, Narrative, Expression
Mechanics: Move around, fight, level up
Dynamics: Move around the environment and fight bad guys to level up and eventually turn into a frog before fighting the end boss. The more you fight, the faster you gain power.

The Adventure of water Element:
Aesthetics: Fantasy, Discovery, Submission
Mechanics: were hard to establish based off of their prototype.
Dynamics: find the gems in the environment and battle foes to get to them.
Prototype:
This game is a side scrolling action game with great artwork. Though it is an original idea, their prototype doesn’t mimic their game too well, only the fact that it is in a turn based system. They can’t reproduce the AI because they are people running this, not computers.

Untitled:
Puzzle Solving and Action Game
Prototype:
I am unclear to how well it mimics their actual game play for I did not get a sense of their game from the presentation. More artwork would have helped that out.
Aesthetics: Seem to be Challenge and Submission
Mechanics: Unable to determine from their prototype
Dynamics: Unable to determine because i could not determine their mechanics, so i do not know how the user will interact with the mechanics to create the dynamics.

Week 8

- what you have done this week for the project
- where and when you met with your group
- what you are going to do for next week

So this week we met in class, near the end of class time to discuss who has completed what and what we should complete for next week. We updated our milestone list and wrote out new ones to guide us for this week. Here they are:
Weekly Milestone, Due Monday:

Darian: Put the stuff in. Finish some more frames for the main character. Email team to find out blogs.

Ching: Add more to the street level, such as buildings.
Start on police officer, finish those fifteen frames.

Alex: Enlarge the hospital level more and try and finish.
Do the security frames.

Johnnie: Will have Rat boss done by next week.

Joseph: Finish the actions for the priest.

Terry: Interface: Instructions screen, credits screen and/or about us.


We have completed more artwork for this week and added in some more character actions. We seem to be on track which is nice, especially after i found out that most people are not on track in their projects.

Week 7

- what you have done this week for the project
- where and when you met with your group
- what you are going to do for next week

So this week we submitted our prototype and user feedback presentation to the teacher. We also worked more on our artwork to place into the game.

The biggest thing we accomplished this week was when we had our meeting. We met in between the lecture and the lab in room 5300 and figured out where everyone was in their progress and what we can do for next week. This finalized our roles for the team and really got everyone on the same page.

Here are the milestones for next week:
Weekly Milestone, Due Monday:

Darian: Find out what type of sound files it plays, send info to terry
Send out all the rest of the sprites for the bad guys

Ching: Shrink the streets level down to the right size and repeat them and elaborate if necessary. Start on police officer, finish those fifteen frames.

Alex: Enlarge the hospital level and try and finish.

Johnnie: Will have Rat boss done by next week.

Joseph: One more set of actions for the priest and the jumping.
Have done the walking and throwing of bible, and dying,
Terry: Interface: the whole first intro screen.

Weekly Assessment #1

Every week from now on we have to update our blog with the following information:
- what you have done this week for the project
- where and when you met with your group
- what you are going to do for next week


So this week we have worked on our prototype. We also had testers come in to play with our prototype and give us feedback. We had three testers play and each tester gave us different quality feedback. Following the guidelines given to us, we've compiled the information for the playtesting as follows:

Play Testing
- Wednesday, Oct. 10 at 11:30 a.m. in Room 3950
- 3 SFU friends, Steven Anas, Kevin Kao, and Jack Yeh were invited to do the game play testing
- the key functions of the play buttons were explained only to Steven and Jack
- Kevin had to try out all the buttons in the keyboard to find out the buttons assigned for each specific action. He took about 5 seconds to find out what his chosen character can do in the game.
- they all found similarities between our prototype game and another popular
game, Metal Slug

Suggestions For Improvement:
1. provide the characters with more extraordinary weapons and more varied types of enemies
2. add in more interesting cut scenes to enrich the storyline
3. try to get the players more involved in the game
4. make the game more challenging
5. allow the players to skip the dialogues
6. remove the feature - the elimination of the bullets effect when those from the protagonist’s weapons collide with those from the antagonists’ weapons
7. to make the game more interesting and fun, it is better to have enemies coming in from all directions such as from the back, the underground or from above the character.
8. add the instructions for the operating steps into the main menu


On top of the testing, we started to put in some artwork into our video game. We put in the background for our third level as a test to see if it would work, and it did. We also started putting in some rough character work. We loaded in some of our Priest sprites to see how they would blend in, and we realized that the anti-aliasing we used on our sprites created a blur around the edges that didn't look nice in the finished product.

We met this week during our playtesting time to figure out what else needed to be accomplished, and we also met after class on tuesday.

Next week, we plan to have all the sprites done for the main character and the priest, rough copies, as well as the other rough copies of the backgrounds for levels 1 and 2.

Crack Quest - The Setup

So we pitched our games to the class and, believe it or not, my game was picked. This wasn't a very big surprise to me because I was confident going into the presentation that the idea I had was original, simple, and well in scope for a four month long project. I found the biggest problem with the other presentations was that most of the designers forgot that everyone is taking a full course load with this class and we only have four months to make this project. This means that we can only spend 1/5th of our time, at MOST, on this project because we have 4 other class each. This means our projects can't be the biggest and most expansive games in the world like some of the ideas i heard.

So I pitched the game CrackQuest to the class and it was picked with three other games out of 24 presentations. After, we formed teams. I suggested while picking teams that we let the students decide which games they want to work on so they are not being forced onto any certain project, immediately increasing the enthusiasm for the game they are making. The groups were evenly divided and I am now part of a very enthusiastic team. Our team consists of:

Ching Hung
Joseph Yu
Alex Ting
Terry Chow
Johnnie Tso
Darian Grant

We have also assigned roles for the team which I will post soon. Next on our milestone list is that we have to start working with our game engine, understand it, and start filling in some basic pieces of artwork to get our game going. Also we are going to have to get our Paper prototype on it's way as well as the GDD typed up. I'll post again when we are closer to completing this.

Welcome to IAT 410 - Advanced Video Game Design

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