Here are our first visualisations of the surgery space, promise that this is not a photo

AI killers

For the final pitch in April we want to demo how we feel full on multiplayer battles will be. We don’t have the time to develop multiplayer code and have it tested within the prototype time frame. So the aim is to create some basic AI bots that can battle in the game.

In the picture below, it shows a large number of waypoints, linked together by line of sight (i.e. if a waypoint can see another waypoint, they’re linked together). These waypoints are placed in such a way that from anywhere in the level an object can see at least one waypoint. This means, no matter where an AI character is in the level, it can always get onto the “network of travel”.

The next step is to use a propagation algorithm to teach each waypoint where each other waypoint is, how far away it is, and what route to take to get to it. In essence, the waypoints all talk to each other, creating a comprehensive map of paths through the level. This map allows you to work out the shortest route through the level from any point to any other point, instantly.

In the second image below we see two characters standing far away from each other. The white line shows the quickest route through the map between them. This instant route calculation allows us to get AI BOTs chasing you down at all times. Unless we choose to give you breathing space, there is nowhere to hide!

Art

On the art side a test animation of the main character running has been exported by the art team and tested by the programmer. This test went perfect and so now the production of all the various animations can begin.

The level art continues to be developed, with extra props fully textured (crates, oil tank, sandbags and a dumpster). More work on textures, including railings, shelving and flooring. The current level has incorrect shadows – this is because balancing these will take time and it’s best to do this lengthy job when the whole level is completed. Here’s an updated image;

Music to die to!

We also thought about the music for our game’s pitch. We decided it had to be a hard rock type sound. In the past we’ve used an online music store called www.shockwave-sound.com

The benefit of using this service is you can quickly find a track that can be a place holder for the type of music you want for the game without having to go to the expense of hiring a musician. The track we selected has just cost us $30 and fits perfectly with what we’re doing. If we then get full funding we can brief a professional musician who then has some reference music for what they have to produce.

Bubble on your iPhone…

One final note, we released our first ever iPhone app last week. It’s called iBlow! and let’s you blow bubbles on your iPhone. Check out the video demo on You Tube here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=u4H650q4KdQ

Rick Vanner

The Game Creators Ltd

Another week flies by in the world of game development. As mentioned by Ivan below, the companies in this process had their first production meeting at Sony’s Liverpool offices. It’s always interesting to hear what others have to say about your product. Mainly because we can get so close to the product we can miss some obvious areas that need attention or defining. We learnt that we needed to be very clear about the whole scope of the game and to be more certain of our target audience. Luckily, the game seems to be well received so far, so we don’t need to back track and change things.

On the development side, our main hero character is now textured;

The process of animating him will now begin. With the player’s hero being them main focus, there’s a long list of animations to do. How the player reacts to the user’s input and what he does on screen has to be the most important aspect of a game. You can have all the wonderful “Triple A” graphics but if the game play sucks then so will your game and your reputation, and ultimately sales of the game. So a lot of attention and refinement must be spent on this.

The level continues to be worked on, with the final floor texture added, box, toilet, and furnace props added and the inclusion of a prototype wall texture. Here’s a new render;

Coding time at the start of the week consisted of making a demo video to show at Sony and to also make a two player playable demo. After the meeting we decided to work on the game design document and production plans to further crystallise our ideas.

Rick Vanner
The Game Creators Ltd
www.thegamecreators.com

I am new to the Get in the Game project, in fact I’m new to Northwest Vision and Media, starting last month as a Project Co-ordinator. I missed the initial workshops and arrived on the scene just after 5 different companies had been granted 10K to develop a game to pitch to Sony.

Up until this week I’d been involved from an administrative angle, chasing project plans, getting contracts signed, etc. Although I’d read the project briefs it was great to be able to attend the first product development meeting, which was a real eye opener in terms of just how exciting an opportunity this was for the companies in question, who were all really embracing the challenge and the chance to present their ideas to Sony. I really like the way the project has been set up so that there is a definite framework, the ideas are being sold to Sony and Sony are already listening. From my experience even to get the attention of such a major publisher is pretty exciting.

Content wise it’s been especially interesting for me, as my background is largely in film and music (in that I’ve studied film and played around with several bands). I have had some experience of the processes involved in getting UK Film Council or Art Council funding, or trying (in vain!) to get a record deal or a publishing deal with a band. But the world of games development was rather foreign to me.

Hearing the creative feedback from Matt from Sony was really the most interesting part for me, seeing games as culturally important, referencing music, film, TV, pop culture. Identifying audiences. Marketing. These guys are working with designers, artists, programmers, all of whom are really passionate about the finished product. Some are coming from an art angle, others from a programming angle. The design element is really interesting, I would have thought that a ‘story’ or a concept would come first in games design, but it’s so much about technology too, that you could start with this and work backwards into a storyboard.

There is so much potential for each of these 5 projects, but working within a 3 month framework is obviously putting a time limit on the creative thought processes and brainstorming. It is important that each project start honing and refining their ideas. Yes your game could do all these things, but deciding on one final ‘angle’ for the pitch is now the key focus for each of them. Watch this space!

The last week was sent preparing deliverables for the first GITC Executive Production meeting. This was a one-hour meeting, at which the current status of the project was discussed, milestones checked, questions and issues discussed and goals for the next Executive Production meeting confirmed. This was a really interesting meeting and I really enjoyed it. The first draft of the COD is complete and I’m fairly happy with it. One thing that came out of the production meeting was that this document probably needs to be a lot tighter and focused. It currently contains images of inspiration and tone, however without a detailed explanation to go with them, these visuals raised many questions and confused the direction of the game. Other outcomes I took from the production meeting were -

• To consider reducing the number of themes and just have 1 overall theme to act as a wrapper for the 10 levels.
• The need for a ‘gameplay’ movie were the action in-game and the player’s inputs and shown simultaneously.
• The game’s viewpoint still needs further investigation, as do the style of play and the game’s name.
• More of a Marketing point of view is required and less of a Producer’s vision of he thinks is right [although everyone in games knows the Producer is always right] )

Laters

Ivan

Our talented art team have started work on the main Hero character for Carnage. The first high polygon image of a first draft character has appeared and we’re pleased to be able to share his cleft-chinned look;

Personally I think we’ll have to add more material to the arms of the character to help distinguish which team the character is on.

The level artist (who is equally as talented) has spent more time texturing the level’s floor space. With the top down view it’s time well spent to ensure a high quality finish. I really like the smashed door that litters one area of the level.

This week we have a production meeting with North West Vision Media and Sony. The team are pulling together some videos and hopefully some playable code for me to demo at the meeting. I think the game has already made significant progress in such a short time and we have identified other areas of the game that we want to work on during the prototype stage to ensure our best chance of being signed up for a full production of the game. The first of these videos shows how the game is likely to look with multiple players in. I was really surprised how cool this video is at such an early point. We don’t want to make the videos public at this stage – maybe later when things are more complete.

We chose the voice over artist for the commentary last week too. In the previous blog entry I mentioned we auditioned over 70 voice artists using Voice123.com We whittled it down to about five finalists and ultimately chose one of those. Hopefully we have chosen well – if it doesn’t work then we can always go back to another choice or start the whole process again. Many things in development cannot be certain until you give them a go.

Rick Vanner

The Game Creators Ltd

www.thegamecreators.com

We have finally cleared most of our other work and can start to think properly about the Surgery project.  We have already made a Rip-o-matic (short visual illustration of game idea) and given that we grossed everyone out with it, it is probably time to move forward to think about game and visual design.

We are currently big into Motion Controllers so are hoping that the rumours of a PS3 Motion Controller are true.

We have accidently managed to model a beating heart so will move forward on visual treatments for either that or Brain surgery!

Hello,

Work began this month on putting together the first draft of the concept overview document [COD], it’s been a while since I actually created one of these. I must have read nearly a hundred of these but only actually written about four of them. In writing a COD, the process helps raise many design issues. Things that you think you had sorted and are well design appear loose and poorly thought through once you put it into words. The game idea requires different themes and locations for each game level. I wanted to decide on the final 10 themes and create moodboards for each theme. Careful consideration was needed in choosing these themes as I wanted them to appeal to a wide mass-market audience. A quick focus-group around the office, along with a few raised eyebrows, confirmed that a few of the suggested themes were to specialised and required a re-think. It still makes me laugh that what you think has a broad appeal, has a completely different meaning to other people. The lesson here is put your ideas to people that know nothing about games [game industry marketing people included here J] and gauge their reactions. Ask these people, would you play a game based on X or Y?

I contacted a few video companies that are capable of creating a ripomatic movie for me. Of the ones I contacted, two are available and have the bandwidth, the third unfortunately are too busy. Before providing these video companies with the brief for creating the movie, I needed to get them covered with a NDA. Once I received the executed legal paperwork, I’ll send them the brief and wait on their feedback and costings. From a development point of view, a list of potential developers was drawn up with 7 teams making the short-list. A scope of work list required was also created covering motion library requirements, physics, audio specifications, renderer pipeline and graphical feature set.

Overall pleased with the progress this month but would really like to devote every hour of evey day to this project. The stop-start nature of doing this project coupled with a full-time day job can be frustrating at times. Oh well better to be too busy than watching daytime TV and playing pitch and putt.

Laters,

Ivan

Carnage takes shape

Arise Sir Reaper!

Our freelance character artist has started work on the project and we’re now able to show the progress he’s made on the Reaper character.

We started with a very high poly model of Reaper, here’s that first un-textured image of him;

After a lot of email discussion we realized that we would not end up seeing much of his skeleton because we’re viewing the game from above. We also wanted the reaper to fly quickly through the level scything player’s down, so it was not necessary to see his feet. After this a new un-textured render was created;

The classic image of the Grim Reaper is of him with his hood up. So we have put the hood back up but not so that it covers his face totally. At the very end of last week we had our first textured version of the Reaper;

Level design

You’ve seen it start from an early layout plan and now we have a partially textured environment. More props have been created and the floor area is all textured ready for a player’s spilled blood!

Still to be worked on for the level design over the next two months are;

• Texturing the warehouse props
• Finishing the upper floor textures
• Texturing overhead items
• Replacing the placeholder props in the upper level

The floor textures are critical because it’s what the game player is looking at all of the time. So it’s been important for the artist to spend lots of his time and detail on these.

Voice Actors Auditioned

There’s a superb online service called Voice123:

It’s where you can post voice over jobs to the world’s largest market of voice over artists. We have used their service a number of times before with great results. Last week we posted a job for Carnage. Our aim is to find a voice artist who sounds like a typical American sports commentator. I set the number of auditions to 70 and within just three days had filled up my in box with 70! What’s great about the site is you can log in any time, listen to the voice and then rate it immediately. The best auditions are then easy to find when you have to decide who to hire. There’s no cost to using the service, just the payment you make to the artist when they’ve done the job. For more details visit www.voice123.com

On the coding side we’ve had a productive week too

• Some changes to the sound system were made to add proper panning and volume control based on the player’s distance from the camera (this wasn’t necessary on the original single screen game).
• A new shell casing engine was developed so that bullet casings can litter the scene as the Carnage kicks off
• The Reaper power-up has been added. For now the player can pick it up – which then triggers the haunting music and the slaying can begin!

A solid month of development with all areas progressing as planned.

Rick Vanner

The Game Creators Ltd

www.thegamecreators.com

P.S. Our company released it’s latest Newsletter, take a look here;

http://www.thegamecreators.com/?gf=newsletter