This week that has just passed has been very hectic and full of work on our game. In just one week we’ve come across a number of pretty big problems, as well as finding solutions to existing problems. The biggest problem that we’ve come across is assessing the feasibility of using Mudbox at this point in creating the game. Our artist has edited a couple of models using Mudbox already, but now we are beginning to question whether we will be able to implement the results of Mudbox editing in the code of our game. If we are unable to figure this out soon, we may need to scrap the whole idea of using Mudbox, which would be a big disappointment to everyone. However, we’re going to try our hardest to figure everything out and get it working with our game.
We have made a big improvement with sound recording this week, since the sound guy of our group has shown us a few sounds he has recorded, and we have recorded a few additional sounds as a group. However, these have not been edited or implemented yet, so we are hoping this group member will come through for us and get these sounds polished and into our game.
HUD pictured in the bottom left corner with timer and space for placing and power-up, but placing has not yet been implemented
So far, we have had a good deal of progress on menus and a heads-up display. We have a couple of menus mostly made and implemented by now, and the HUD is implemented though not completely functional since we don’t have some required features in our game yet (placing and power-ups), which the HUD will show. However, a timer works in-game, and is implemented to show on the heads-up display. In addition to the main menu, we now have the beginning of a character selection menu, and our artist is currently working on designing more.
Character selection screen so far, missing a title and picture of chosen raptor
A new level has been created which contains more curves and a longer track than the level in the trial version of our game, and we are still working on implementing obstacles, collision boxes, and all other aspects of the level onto the track. However, most of the collisions are done for this level, so we have made good progress with it. We are hoping to have multiple levels to choose from in our final game, but we are not entirely sure if we will have time to implement this.
We have also had progress with shaders recently, since our group member working on those has figured out the solution to some issues we’ve been having. For one, the normals on the raptor models appeared to be very screwed up, but it turned out that somehow, our model had six normals for every vertex, though we had no idea how this happened. To cut down on time, we averaged all normals on a vertex to give us essentially one normal per vertex, and this appears to work fine visually, so we will stick with this for now in case we do not have time to fix this properly. Our cell shader doesn’t work perfectly in our game yet, but we’re getting closer to having it fully functional every day.
There are still a couple of issues that we are having that we are eager to fix. For one, “alpha” in our game still does not work with our particle systems and I have been working on other things (mainly user interface implementation and other assignments) so I have not yet returned to trying to figure out this problem. However, we’re boggled because everything seems to be set up correctly in our code for it to work. We are also having issues with the AI of our opponent raptors, which are currently still following Dijkstra paths, though we may end up changing this and completely redo the AI. We have been having some minor problems with lighting that we are eager to fix, and we were worrying about bump mapping until we learned that it is no longer a requirement, which is a relief.
This week, we’re planning to add some more focus to written elements such as game design and business, as well as graphics and sound reports, which I will be dedicating a lot of time to personally. However, we’re still going to work a great deal on improving our game, and are hoping to finish all requirements, as well as make our game look appealing, by the time it is due. Hopefully we’ll have luck on our side and finish everything we intended to do, including Mudbox, by working on this for the rest of this week.
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