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”