Week 11 of Midterm

This week I was placed in charge of completely finishing the Cemetery of Addition along with all of the mechanics that are going to be in it. Which are the puzzles and boss encounters that were going to have in it. Besides that I also had to create a Intro movie so that the player would know what is going on like most beginning of games do, they also have this in movies it is just a brief explanation of the setting.

I faced two major hurdles when completing both of these tasks. One of these hurdles that I had to face this week was one of the most difficult and annoying things I had to deal with for the entire project. On Friday of last week my flash drive that had all my work on got corrupted and I lost all of any progress I made for the week. So for this class and my other class GSP 340 all my work was gone. It was really annoying because I had started the Intro on Wednesday and by Thursday I had about half of it done. Then when I checked on Friday It wouldn't read my flash drive until I was able to get it to work some time latter in the day. That is when I saw that all of my textures and models were replaced with strange symbols and were around 500MB each. My entire folder got corrupted and it was 1TB big and my flash drive only is 4GB's. Thankfully I had a copy of a previous version of the Addition level but as for my Intro it was completely gone so I had to start that from scratch. It took me the rest of that Friday and all of Saturday to catch-up with what I had before everything got corrupted. I had to wake up early on Sunday and work until five in the afternoon to complete the addition level then I took a one hour break and started working on the Intro until ten at night which after I fell asleep and I have been working on the Intro ever since every time I get a chance in between other assignments.

I mentioned in last weeks blog that we outlined the Intro. The only theme I had to work around was fairly broad which was "Cartoony".Most of the scenes are animated in some way but there is no simple way to get the animations to look nice enough to present. I will give a short explanation of what the scene is going to be mentioning.

First Scene - Second Scene

The first scene is just going to tell the player that there located in a place were number live. The second scene is where there are told that the land is beautiful.

Third Scene - Fourth Scene

The third scene will say that people still enjoy jousting as a past time so it will set the time. The fourth will mention that there is a king ruling over the location and this will transition towards the main enemy.

Fifth Scene - Sixth Scene

The fifth scene we wanted to introduce the main enemy and explain why he is bad and that the player should stop him. The sixth scene is just some comedic relief that we added for the kids and to have a short laugh.

Seventh Scene - Eight Scene

The seventh scene we wanted to introduce the enemies and that this will not just be a one on one. We decided to add Uno and Esa all the way until scene eight because we wanted to have that mysterious Hero feel to Uno.

Ninght Scene

The Final Scene was when Ten beats Uno up and Takes Esa we waitied until the end to take Esa away from Uno because we wanted the player to say 'Oh, he took Esa away I need to get him' The player would feel this way because we made Ten to be the bad guy by explaining his story the most.

GSP 340 Week 3

This week I learned how to create particles, post processing, and water volumes. I learned a little about post processing volume when I was doing research on Cell-Shading but what I learned was a volume like a box and not a global thing. Something real cool I learned this week was how to make water in UDK, I knew very little about it. The only thing I knew about making water is that you had to add some special volume, but I didn't know how to add the actual water I knew there was a water texture in UDK so I thought 'Oh, you just make a plane and add the texture above it to show the surface of the water', but then I thought how do you get the water to splash around like real water. Well the answer to that is you need to add a surface actor that has those properties. This week I was also able to get some practice creating seamless textures for terrains. I also got some experience creating particles and also learned how to make the material for them. What I did in Photoshop was I created some clouds then erased some edges of them to get a poof, After that I had to work on the Alpha layer. The Alpha layer is the thing that makes the picture see-through and give the illusion of smoke. I created two different kinds of smoke textures. When I brought them in UDK I was able to make 5 different looking particles.

Here are the texture's I used this week. Anyone that is reading this blog is free to use these for whatever project they want, but I would just like to let them know that it took about less then five minutes to create each of them. So with a little reseach and practice you can create your own custom seamless textures. The dimensions might be wrong because photobucket might have srinked them but they should have been 1024x1024.

Seamless Dirt - Seamless Grass

Seamless Lava - Seamless Snow

Week 10 of Midterm

This week I didn't have a lot assigned, so I started working ahead towards getting our intro story into the game. We decided to do it in Adobe Flash to get that cartoon feel instead of having 3d models tell the story. We will have a voice over for our intro because this game is for kids and we believe that kids don't like to read long paragraphs. I do believe that we will also have this subtitled so that if someone does want to read what were saying or doesn't have speakers can still understand whats going on. The following are pictures that I took with my phone so the quality isn't the best, but it is a rough draft of what were going to be doing for the intro. I will include a description of what we were thinking about before each photo.

This is the First and second slide that were going to have in the intro of the game. The first slide says "This tale takes place in the land of Pythagorea. Where numerous numbers call home." What we were thinking of doing for the slide was to have a mountain appear when our voice actor says "this tale takes place in..." and then have numbers appear when we say "Where numerour..."

The second slide reads "Pythagorea is famous for beautiful lake Theorem." Then we were going to bring up a picture of a lake and maybe have it simmer or something so that it doesn't seem to plain and actually look "beautiful"

The next slide is very hard and burry to see. It says "It's legendary Jousting tournaments." and here we are thinking of showing two numbers jousting, We wanted to add this to give hints for the player so that if we decide to add these events to the game they would think back to the intro of the game.

The fourth slide will be a introduction to the main story unlike the previous slides that explained the setting the game takes place in. This slide will say ", and the most famous Cartesian Castle, home of King 100. King 100 is a great King and loved by all." for the slide it self we were thinking of just having the Castle show when the person says "Cartesian Castle" and King 100 would appear when he is called also to have something special when it says that he is a great king.

The main protagonist doesn't get introduced until slide five. We will say "but one. "Ten The Terrible" wanted to be King." We are going to show a big picture of Ten so that the player can remember him and know he is an important person.

Following that we are going to say "He tried to take over many times." While this was being read we will have all in one slide Ten trying to catapult himself over the Castles wall, Walking up to King 100 and asking him if he can be King and him holding a sign that says "Ten for King"

So after we introduced Ten as a bad guy in the previous slides we will open up the next one with "After many failures Ten decided to get help to execute a plan that will change the world forever." At the beginning we are going to show Ten and when we say that he will get help we are going to show his minions behind him. We choose to have this so that the player knows that this game won't be a walk in the park and he will have to fight Ten's followers.

We now come to towards the end. This is when we decided to show the relationship of Uno and Esa and that Uno cares about Esa. We will say "(short pause) Despite all the turmoil two numbers stand together watching a sunset." We were going to have Uno and Esa sitting on a hill watching the sun set in the distance and we also wanted to have it so that we show the kingdom and have it zoom out to them and have Ten lurking behind a tree.

For the last slide we were going to have is when Esa get kidnapped by Ten and thus giving the player a reason to rescue Esa. We wanted to say "Little that they know they would be part of Ten's plan." We were just going to show in the slide Uno knocked unconscious with stars above him and Ten carrying Esa away.

GSP 340 Week 2

This week I learned how to play sound effects, music track, advanced materials, and materials and meshes that react to the player as in if you walk on it or shot at it.

I had some trouble with re-spawning "enemies" when they died, but I was able to get it fixed with some logic and trial and error. I also had a tough time with my sounds and that is because I have some natural sounds like wind, light humming, and earth rumbles. I wasn't able to get them to be perfect because my sound track over powers then but if you pay close attention to it you will be able to hear it. Advanced materials were really fun and straight forward to work with. For one of my advanced materials that I created I did a puddle and when you shot it or walk over it you can hear the water splashing around. I was also able to get it to move around like it was real.

Another example of advanced materials that we used was that I created a tin can and when you hit it it would sound like a tin can dropping. UDK has it's own sound for metal but it sounds to generic so I decided to create my own. I created a volume that causes the can's to float. The volume can be used for other things instead of just floating them, it can be used as a turbine to shot objects out, it can be used a washing machine and just spin things in a circle. The problem with that is that the objects will spin so fast that they will go through the walls of the level, and it can cause the computer using it to crash and break.

I also learned some tricks with lights that I didn't know. My level and the level I'm going to be working in my group is going to be dark with little light. I have placed some lights thought the level to give it some mood. I was able to give it this mood by having the lights not be bright and having some of them flicker on and off. To give it a realistic feel I also attached the light to a object to follow it. However I still have to do some research on how to make the light emit from the material instead of having a strange light just come out of nowhere. With there being little light in the level I had to attach a light to the player so that they can see in the darker places.

This is a picture of the mood light I have in the level. As you can see the light comes out of nowhere.

These two screen shots are a comparison of why the player needs a light attached to them light the level.

Week 9 of Midterm

This week we did bug testing and oh boy bugs we did find. Most of them we already knew about we just haven't been able to find a solution to them yet, and other are because we either rushed them and didn't test them or we just didn't know that would happen.

A bug that the testers found out was that the 'death animation' of Uno broke the game. the 'death animation' that UDK uses is called 'physics asset' but it is referred to be other people as 'rag doll'. I purposely left this 'physics asset' like this because we don't know what we want to do if Uno dies. I was thinking of having him die like the normal enemies with some type of custom animation about him spinning the reason I didn't do this in the beginning is because I'm not sure how to do this for a human player I can do it to a enemy player but I wouldn't know if it's the same way for a human player.

Another bug that we faced and knew would happen is that we would get stuck in a river that we created if you didn't press nothing, and you could also go back upstream no problem. I wasn't in charge of the river so I don't know what went wrong but I do remember that the river work like a conveyor belt and that it moves you along the entire thing. So with that being said it might have to do with the game trying to pull you in two different directions at the same time. Another problem that we had with the river that I noticed but wasn't really worried about was that the water would go above your head, but one that we didn't know about was that you can go up the river and that if you cross the river then die and restart the river doesn't move you. I believe that the way we will fix this is by adding a checkpoint at the foot of the river.

(Uno Walking up River - River Fully Engulfing Uno (the blue random line is a wave from the water))

(Uno Stuck automatically - Uno Stuck after you die (invisible wall))

Another problem that we had was that in a event were we have boulder roll down a hill they would disappear for a short while then reappear and push you back. Some bugs that we didn't know we had were if you get hit on the corner of a rock and the wall you can see through it, but I have tried to replicate this over and over and haven't gotten any results so I believe that this is either a random strange bug or just a lie because no one else reported that this happened. One bug that people were reporting a lot was that if you get pushed by the rock at the end you would fall off the stage and be stuck at the bottom of the level. This can be fixed by adding a volume that would cause you to die if you fall beyond a certain point, unless our level designer want to fix it some other way. A problem that I forgot to mention that we knew was that we have three boulders falling down in a straight path right now they fall in a pattern but with certain computers the pattern can be disrupted with the hardware of the computer and it can get so bad that you will sometimes face a straight line of boulders with no way of getting around them, and some minor bugs that we can polish off is that currently the rocks spawn out of nowhere and are more squared than round.

(Rocks sliding in a straight line - Getting pushed off level with no kill volume)

Some other problems that I suspected to run into for everyone was that you would get stuck behind things in the world. Some places that people got stuck behind were behind logs and rocks. The reason they get stuck behind these are because they are circular and not square so it is easier to get stuck behind them. To fix this our level designer should put a blocking volume in the general area of the clumped up meshes so that the player doesn't decide to jump in and have no way to get out.

(Stuck behind rocks - Stuck between rocks)

Some other problems that we have that can be fixed with a checkpoint are multiple mini bosses spawning, the mini boss and main boss being to difficult, jumping off platforms to death and getting stuck in lower level platform, and some of the puzzles being to hard for little kids.

(This is were I believe we will place checkpoints marked by the big red 'C')

Other than documenting and replicating the bugs I started to work on getting the second level "The Cemetery of Addition" ready. So far I have gotten the main terrain done. I added some necessary models like fences, gates, special gates, and structures to like a 'church', mausoleums and a outline of the beginning area. I also began to add some of the mechanics and the mini boss to the level. The mechanics are simple switches and cameras, right now I have for the starting area when you activate a switch the camera would change and show you a fly by to the gate and show it opening. When you exit you would get a short in game cinematic of the camera flying around the entire outer level much like you would in any old kids game. After this cinematic would be over it will show you were to head next which will be the 'church' there you will see someone laying down on the ground I wanted to give this character some stars swirling around him to signify that he is dizzy. The story behind this character is that he is the 'Golden Ratio' he is the symbol PI. When you head over to him another cinematic will happen when the Ratio would tell you that Big Ten, the main bad guy, tried to make him get combined with Esa the Ratio told him that It couldn't be done so Ten got mad and beat him up, so Ten would head up to the mad scientist "Multiplier" to make them one. Another mechanic that I was able to get completed was the intro for the mini boss. There will be a puzzle before this that you will have to get keys to open up mausoleums to get pieces for another key. Once all pieces have been gathered you will be able to open a door when you do there will be a electric shock that will be sent to a enemy that is in a area of the level that enemy will then get up and start attacking Uno. I believe our Leader wants his mechanics to work like the first mini boss but I will have to double check with him however he works right now with the mechanics of the mini boss.

(Here is a special gate that requires you to hit with the Shield of Addition)

(This is the Fence I use to surround the entire level besides the Mountains)

(The Golden Ration (shines in game) - Mini Boss (has metal plates surrounding him))

("Church" - Mausoleum)

(The picture I use as a refrence for the Mausoleum)

(Some of the Mechanics im using for the Mausoleum Puzzle)

GSP 340 Week 1

Along with being enrolled to Mid-Term I am also taking GSP 340 which is Modification & Level Design The goal in this class is to get in a group and make a playable game just like Mid-Term. It has been said that GSP 340 is one of the hardest classes next to Mid-Term because of all the information you get and the short amount of time you receive to create a game. Unlike my Mid-Term I am with a group of students that I haven't worked with for a while. I had them in previous classes and they have worked together to create some interesting games so I am confident that we will be able to create the game that our leader has in mind.

Coming into this class I was really comfortable. Our teacher is the same as Mid-Term and a lot of the students in Mid-Term already took it and told me that I was going to be fine, because I already have been doing what we will learn in the class in our Mid-Term class. GSP 340 is now the class that is required to take Mid-Term the reason is just like I said in the paragraph above that GSP 340 is like Mid-Term but in eight weeks instead of sixteen.

What we did in our group this week was mainly paperwork for the game were going to be doing. The main theme of our game is puzzles. You trapped inside of a mansion and all you have is a candle. This will be your only "weapon" the main goal would be to escape the mansion so the player has to solver various puzzles in order to escape. You would lose if either you are caught by the monsters that were going to put in there or if your candle goes out. We are still not sure about what the puzzles will be but they will be interesting to program. I am confident that we will get this project done with minimal problems.

We also have to do little mini projects for the class. So we will have two games to present at the end of this class for this class. This week I decided to do a game about digging. You are a miner that works for a very cheap company. The entire game is about you collecting ore. I made this game simple because I believe that each week we are going to have to create a new game so I decided not to go over board and overload myself with more work that I already have. With that being said I will be posting pictures of what I did and also a screen shot of how to level looks.

(The Layout I am using for the Main Playing Area - The 'Crappy Shack')

(A cheap Light - The Ore)

(This is a quick picture of my level and how you will be doing the tasks that are assigned to you in game.)