The last week on Carnage has been very exciting. The game now has AI Bots active in the playable game, this gives a real sense of what a massive multiplayer game will be like. It’s great fun as you run for your life with a sword hacking manic chasing you down the narrow corridors of the arena.

At this stage the AI is fairly simple and will be improved and tweaked as we play test it and suggest improvements. Yet even with this simple implementation it feels real and dangerous – these enemies mean business and don’t offer any mercy as they relentlessly hunt you down for the kill. I like fooling them by making them engage in battle with another AI bots, leaving me time to pull out the missile launcher and take them both out!

Here’s a screen shot from the game showing the Carnage. I’m in the gun turret on the right, about to be blown up by an AI bot with a rocket launcher. On the left you can see a battle between two AI bots, one with a flame thrower and one with a chainsaw;

The game’s level is almost complete and our art team have vertex lit the level as a test – here’s the result of this rendered test;

The character animation is stil being worked on. When they are all complete we can move the playable game over to use the new high quality character.

The game’s logo has also moved on. It’s an important image to get right and we have moved through a few designs so far. The current design is shown below;

We’re now into March and have to start to prepare for our next production meeting in two weeks time. I’ve had a quick review of the production plan and I see we need to focus our efforts on the voice announcer script this week. Everything else seems to be on time and the results are looking great.

As a developer of PC games and technology we are not so sure about multiplayer coding on the PS3. So we have Google searched and found a solution with a company called Quazal (www.quazal.com). We are in the process of evaluating their middleware solution. If possible, it’s best to use middleware if it can save you a lot of time in development. You will need to consider the cost of it, the time it saves you and how successful it’s been used in the industry already (don’t be a guinea pig to some new tech).

And BTW, we have released our March newsletter over at www.thegamecreators.com

Rick Vanner

The Game Creators

www.thegamecreators.com

This entry was posted by The Game Creators, on Monday, March 2nd, 2009 at 11:04 am and is filed under Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.