First Alpha build

Last week we worked on the first alpha build. Basic mechanics such as eating berries, interacting with wolves and fishes are in. Graphics are coming along pretty neatly as well.

Early screenshot of the content of the game

The ai for the wolves and fishes have been a bit sketchy and will have to be iterated this week. We also have to exchange the hitboxes to raycasting, it is so much more reliable and efficient.

But all in all I feel that we are on track for now. Next week will be a bit more work than this one because of the ai iteration and implementation of a territory system.

First Week

The First week is done and we are ahead of schedule. I have worked on shaders and some lightning and the basic ai for wolves.

Have been working on shaders all day today in order to meet my enviromental aritists wishes. I have not been able to fully reach it and now we are looking at other solutions for shadows. We wanted dynamic real time rendered shadows but were advised to bake shadows. The problem for the dynamic shadows is that the transparency does not works fluently. It is possible to do, my experience and knowledge of shaders is however very limited.

 

This is how it looks at the time!

Pathing and smelling

Now the bears can move! Also the fishes look great but Jesper made those =) This post is a day late so, yesterday I made a smelling system! Which is basically making all the animals two trails of particles. One is faded and one is not. The one not faded is in a layer usually hidden but can be shown by (for now) pressing the x button. Works well, wind makes it look good and makes the mechanic quite realistic.

Today I’m working on Berries. Won’t take all day so we’ll see what I do after that.

 

Shading

The big game project is now on! Bears are already being pumped out and soon they will be moving!

I have worked on a custom shader to have the leaves of our trees rendered on both the front and backside. Looks pretty good, stole a lot from a pre-built shader script in unity for the transparency.  The shadows are not being cast as I want them to (not at all in fact) but getting lit is working fine.

Also started on the path-finding and found that unity had a system to help with that and I actually got a simple follow behavior to work. Will have to work more on it so that it chooses a path instead of going back and forth when the destination is behind a sphere and is moving back and forth.

Spent the morning setting up the coffeemaker, our network and the server for our asset server. Now all the syncing is working and the internet is stable and much better than the eduroam we otherwise have to work on.

All in all a successful day!

Serious games boardgame start and Advanced game design Continueation

Today we got a assignment from the serious game course, to make a serious board game about a up to date topic. Me and my group came up with a basic concept about the homeless in Stockholm. We needed it to be small and precise in order to be able to convey the message through a board game.

We then started thinking about what the best way of conveying this to the player would be. Being shown from the homeless perspective make it easier to sympathize with the homeless and then draw the conclusion that the player should try to help them. But we thought that this kind of sympathy would be easier immersed into by people from lower wage family’s and we stated the assumption that those people already knew and sympathized with the homeless so the one actually needing to be enlightened are the ones of higher standards.

With that conclusion we then started to design mechanics for a game where you play a volunteer worker at a charity help organization. The lack of resources available leads to the player having to choose which homeless person is getting supplied and which one is not.

Still very much at concept stage, we must research in order to be able to proceed properly.

Advanced game design gave us a assignment in which we are to make a board game and we are supposed to have a prototype this Thursday (10/17). We had a concept and some mechanics for it but this morning Adam had a short presentation for the few people attending in which he pressed the matter of designing mechanics alone before putting a game on them.

So we scraped what we had and started over in order to do that instead of trying to make what we had fit into that. So we concept-ed a couple of ideas but did not really come up with anything. It really is hard making mechanics without a context to fit them into. But then I remembered the “Garden” technique that Marcus talked about this morning. A technique where you play around with a couple of possible mechanics until it is fun.

So we did this and it resulted in a system based around spin able cogs which will move objects around on a board. The board is a square with pins on it in order to be able to place cogs on these pins. So when there are multiple cogs connected to each other he player can move objects around the board by spinning these cogs.

Still just a concept for a mechanic which we will have to work more on before we can have a prototype and play test it but it’s a start. So far I’m quite happy with it and the possibility’s for it are interesting.