BGP – Day 39

Working on the Report
During this day all my time went into working on my report and preparing for an early opposition of the report. There is not much to add here!
As the game stands, we did not get nominated for SGA, but we will keep on polishing the game towards GGC this weekend. This include some minor tweaks and getting a stable frame rate. That is about it, I will make another post if I create anything new this week. […]

BGP – Day 38

Swedish Game Awards – SGA
Today is the day that we will apply our game to SGA which included a lot of polishing. First of I added more feedback to the fires, then I changed a animation for the characters right hand. I also changed the base size for the larger oil fires. Then I stayed to get the game ready to be submitted to SGA. Sadly we had some issues, where some of the puzzles can’t be compleated, but only […]

BGP – Day 37

BETA
During this day we had a BETA play through with a jury consisting of two of our teachers and the response was overall positive. Where much of the critique was against having our animations communicate more clearly what can be done. I believe they have these issues since they are not displayed as intended. As when they have been added to the game they get mixed up, since they seem to cut each other off whenever you push a button.
This is […]

BGP – Day 36

Night before Beta presentation
This was a long day since I spent many hours adding small details to our level. During the day it started with creating a small mesh for a stone that I would use as part of a particle. The particle was a sand/dust particle that would activate when a player uses a elevator. Here it is:

Then I checked the different fires in one of my test levels so that they all looked different from one another and […]

BGP – Day 35

Continue to learn Houdini FX
Today I spent the rest of my time learning Houdini, which is great and I really like the program. Since it will enable me to render out nice smoke and fire textures to use in our game. BUT, the only free version that I can use is the Houdini Apprentice version. Which doesn’t allow me to render out pictures over a certain size, so it’s hard to make 8×8 grid texture without going over that size. […]

BGP – Day 34

Animation and back to fire
Though you might think I was done with the animations, well we left one since it required a prop. The lever animation, which has already been finished I just haven’t exported it for the beta playtest. And we had a discussion of not including the animation since it would have to lock the player into place every time they where going to pull the lever. Which we decided would make it very repetitiv since the players […]

BGP – Day 33

BETA
Time for beta and having some of our classmates play our game, but before the play test we had a meeting where we would receive feedback on our lighting and materials. This went well and we received a lot of help (note, never use point lights that cast shadows, since this will eat up your frame rate). One thing we discussed was how the silhouette of the level looked very square so i suggested adding some fabric/cloth that could be […]

BGP – Day 32

16 hours
During this day I spent 16 hours at the office trying to get everything into the engine also wanting to work when everyone wasn’t in the office. This is because we can’t add everything to our main level without the risk of destroying the project if what we add is conflicting with each other. This mean that only one can work in the main level at one time. Or we need to be very clear with what we are […]

BGP – Day 31

A day of everything
I started this day with adding all the games animations that are when the character is standing still. Since all the movement animations where done, other than that I only have one animation left where the character pulls a lever. This includes animating the character with a prop. But before I got to work on that one and after I had added all the other animations I got feedback to fix one of the running animations since […]

BGP – Day 30

Getting stuck
During the morning I didn’t go to the office where we usually start to work at around 09:00, since I had a seminar to attend at 10:00. Since going by bike to the office set up my computer, start the programs I’m using and then having to close everything to go to the university wouldn’t be a very effective use of my time. I instead did some errands during that hour and then I stayed two hours longer in […]

BGP – Day 29

Deciding what to cut, design and animation
During this Monday i continued finishing up the animations that is considered to be number one priority. These are prioritized by looking at what animations are required to play the game and communicate our mechanics. For example a walk animation may not be needed since you can steer a character in a game without a walk animation.
But since we are using whats called true first person*, a walk animation suddenly is important since the […]

BGP – Day 28

Friday and finishing the walk animations
I’ll just drop a video in here and you will get to see how the animations look like in first and third person:

That’s all for now folks, see you on Monday!