Week 2 Collaborative Game Summary! (Week 23)

Change of Plans:

When we talked to our tutors about our game plan, we where told that our game idea is weak and won't go very far in terms of a good grade, so we decided to have an emergency team meeting to discuss a new idea for our game to work on.  The team made a decision to change the game idea from a tower defence game to a soap box racing game, like with the last game idea, we voted to keep the neon lights theme inside the game, and have the setting in an dystopian city environment with neon lights (similar to a blade runner environment).  The story is that the player is an underground street racer and they race against enemies in a time trial battle.  The level begins with a countdown, then the player is pushed onto the track by a ramp, the player has control over the mouse moving it left or right to move and the car will follow the on-screen cursor.  There will be pickup boost items that give the player an extra boost for going uphill in some areas, you can use the left mouse button to activate it, following the one-button theme.  We intend to make this game compatible for PC, as a free to play game on the internet.  Another one-button element will be that the player has to reach the giant button at the end in the quickest time to win. Depending on how much time we have left will depend on how much race tracks and levels we make.

Team:

No change to the team.

Mechanics:

The track layout will be big enough so the car has enough room to turn and not go flying off the edge, I'll either incorporate the settings so that if the player falls off, it's game over, or there's an invisible barrier protecting the player from falling off.  When the player reach's the end of the track the level will be finished.

1. The vehicles have no engine and no way to move forward without the use of gravity. This blueprint seems easy enough, I use a sphere, attach the car mesh design to it, and stimulate physics on the sphere, and a few other keys and the sphere (with the car attached) will roll down the hill, picking up speed in the steeper areas.

2. A speed boost gage, this is simple enough, it's basically the same as the sprinting gage but making it so instead of holding it the player only needs to press the button once.

3. Vehicle follows the mouse cursor.  This will either be really difficult or really easy, I'll need to research how to get the actor to move left or right depending on the position of the mouse cursor.

4. Beginning countdown to lift ramp up when the race begins.  This mechanic tilts the platform the players are on to give them a starting push, the design should be simple for the lift, the tricky part will be getting the countdown are making the ramp lift when the timer reach's zero.

5. UI and various other pieces of information that will be on the interface.  This shouldn't be a problem, create widgets and set them to correspond with the events happening on screen.

Replay Value:

There will be a leader board with time trails that the player completed it in, so the player has the option to try again and get a better time score, the faster they reach the goal, the better the score.
If we have enough time at the end of the project, I will attempt to include various mini-challenges for the player, such as collect as speed boost's, or clear the course in under 3 minutes.

Research:

My role was to create the vehicles so I decided to focus on getting vehicle designs done and given to the 3D artists then move onto the interactivity side.  I began with getting moodboard research into various car designs that I thought where 80's futuristic, looking at games like wipeout and 80's movies like Blade Runner, as well as thinking about how I would incorporate the neon theme into it.  I gathered image research on vehicles and car designs for beginning sketches.

I looked at 80's vehicles.

I looked into off road vehicles.

And Podracing vehicles for engine designs.

Development & Progress:

After completing my image research I moved onto drawing quick sketches to get an idea of some of the car designs I mainly focused on them having podracer type engines with the 80's vehicle layout, using the off road vehicles to get an idea of the shape of the car. I considered making it so some of them hover, I plan to go into each one adding detail to make them look more dytopian themed.

Using the first sketch, I decided to make a coloured asset sheet, and thanks to a talk with the tutors, knew exactly what to make. To hand over to 3D artists I made a back view, top view and overall view of the vehicle, I started with a cleaner colour, but then looked into more vehicle designs to give it that dystopian look, (Mad Max).  This piece, for me isn't finished I intend to go back to it and clear some areas up making it left soft and more hard around the edges to give it more of a vehicle look as well as adding the neon theme to it, I will return to this piece after I have finished with the interactivity side of the project.

For this next piece I decided to see how far I could take it knowing that I could do better than what I had drawn in the previous piece, I started with the shadow under the vehicle and with help from tutors managed to figure out where the shadows and lights would hit the vehicle.  I intended to make this the best car because it's the shiniest and the fastest, so it's design would have to be different from the others.

Next up using a reference image I found online to see how to do the body paint better, I added more shadow down the bottom, and softening the highlights at the top of the vehicle, expect for where the sharp highlights are, I then painted the chair and window, again using resources I found on the internet, I followed that by designing the vent at the front of the car, this wasn't to difficult thanks to the earlier vents I drew on the first design.

Once that was done I started working on the engines, this was one of the harder parts of the drawing, mainly for the wires because instead of using a texture to save time I drew them in (but gives me experience), but also for the circular vent at the front of the engine, I kept struggling with it, but like the others thanks to plenty of research I was able to fix that problem and make it look decent enough.

Adding the back engine highlights and shadows, I still need to add neon lights to it, but I will do that next week.  I feel like with this piece I have improved slightly because while it does look better than the previous car I made, it took me way too long to draw it, however this does mean that now that I have done it, I know I can make the next one faster and better looking than this one.

The group uses Facebook to connect with each other and make sure everything is going in the right direction, We have also created a Facebook group as to post our work progress and see where everyone is, As the team leader, a copy of all of our work will go to Georgia for backup and to make sure everyone is on track on things.  However I did notice that only a couple of us where coming into the media labs to work together on the project, I hope that in the future the whole group can come in a majority of the week to work on the project.

Strengths & Weaknesses:

My strengths this week was the overall design on my work, it defiantly improved since the beginning of the week, hopefully I can improve to get better results as the weeks go on.

My weaknesses was that I wanted to get everything done immediately because of the week delay, so I rushed the first piece and mad it look bad.  While I do need to create assets as fast as possible for the 3D modellers I would like to get better at showing that I can draw assets other than characters.