Post-Milestone 2 and Post-Reading Week

               Both the second milestone and reading week have come and gone (well, almost) and WASD has achieved a little more since my last post, but progress is coming far slower than any of us would’ve liked this semester. We have been finding it difficult enough to juggle regular homework from our classes, so we haven’t been able to find a whole lot of time on top of that to work on our game, which we would really like to do by now. I am also ashamed as a gamer that I have not played any new video games in the longest time because of homework, and so I still don’t have a whole lot to blog about besides my group. Hopefully we’ll get enough of a break soon that we can get some real work done on our game, and maybe even take some breaks for ourselves too.

               Since my last post, we have mainly accomplished 2 things: making our pitch documents including sell sheets for our game (though I don’t know if that counts as progress on our game), and planning out more aspects of design. We have been brainstorming ideas for power-ups and special stats for our raptors, though we all have slightly different ideas of what we should end up with. We have made a list of sound effects that we want to make and ones we want to find, and we have given this list to the newest member of our group in the hopes that he will have sounds for our game after the reading week. We also have lists of shaders we are considering using (cellshading/toon style shaders, fog as a full screen shader, and using Mudbox to change raptor models), and what kinds of textures and lighting we’re thinking of using. Our only issue with lighting is finding a light we can use that moves with the camera, but we’re still working with ideas.

My sellsheet on Raptor Racers

               As for my loading screen, I’m becoming unsure as to whether I should scrap the idea. It was something the group originally wanted, but it is turning out to be more trouble than it’s worth to get it working. The program still crashes if I attempt to load in a specific 3 models, despite having worked before, and it still freezes until I click the window, and I can’t seem to resolve these issues. On top of that, a loading screen is more of a luxury, and I feel that my time would be better spent working on menus, so I may switch gears and try to program a menu system instead. Hopefully I can return to the loading screen in progress and fix it later, though I may just scrap the idea entirely by now.

               Altogether, our group is frustrated, tired, and just hoping for a chance to fix up our game a lot more than we already have. I’m just hoping that after midterms, things will slow down, and we will have a chance to go hardcore on our game and make it amazing like we want it to be.