Weekly Update (yet again)

Respond to "need more direction from PM comment":
Yes our team has not been the most organized bunch and it is almost just us picking what we want to do. It should change though since now we are more organized and the workloads (of individuals) are being decided by the team.


This week (or last Tuesday to be exact) we finally got ourselves organized and people were assigned clearly on what to do. The wiki that we have is a cool addition in our arsenal of tools to keep ourselves organized and several pages has been done/updated to remind us of what we need and our overall progress.

In the team meeting on Tuesday we eliminated a few units to keep a tighter leash on our scope and the environment doc has been updated to the point that numerical values of the effect can be inputted to prepare for implementation. There is however another set of terrain pieces that needs to be discussed first (the city ones).

The shooting system (2 out of 3) has been implemented and seems to be bug free. Both Stephen and I fried many brain cells over the weekend crushing bugs. One surprise gain from the troubleshooting was that I found a loophole in the infantry (normal gun) damage that allows it to deal many damage (and thus render the anti-tank ones somewhat useless). After the fix in the damage formula now 5 infantry units (with first strike) against 2 tanks(team2) will end with all infantry dead and 1 tank still standing with 58% hp.

This seems to be a good result of what we want to achieve as we don't want the normal infantry unit (also our only infantry unit in game) to be too versatile while still able to do some damage to tanks so tanks don't just steamroll them.

Next week:
Will discuss the supply system and fix global.elevation variable. And start implementing new units into the game while testing for balances. Lastly will talk about switching weapon mechanisms.

There weren't enough time to go over the supply system in the lab so will do so next week (it isn't discussed immediately because it is of less priority than other stuff).

The global.elevation variable was hard coded to 0 during a debugging session on Sunday to fix the shooting system (cause all grounds have the same elevation atm so less variables to worry = good). We will try to get that fixed so we won't be wondering why this thing doesn't work sometime down the road.

With the damage system in place all the addition of other units (minus the airplanes... they require much more work) so we can put in lots of units.

Another problem(or feature; as the 'problem' is how we implement that) that surface during the damage system implementation was how we should deal with units that got more than one weapon. Stephen thinks it should be better if the game mechanic will do the deciding of which weapon is better against what instead of the user doing the decision. I on the other hand has something more complex in mind... Guess we will just discuss it more on Tuesday (the problem/feature was first mentioned Sunday night during debugging so not much time to think over things).

/End

p.s. The team complimented on the docs I set up has enough info to become a full feature game =P
p.s. Can the TA/instructor that reads the blog post some feedback? I realize that there are ~77 blog posts and writing even a 1 sentence comment is 77 sentences long (enough for a good report) but it would help very much.

Critiques on Game Prototypes Presented (part1)

This is my critiques (format = MDA) on the presentations of game prototypes on Tuesday Oct 23rd:

#1, Antlion

Aesthetics: being a "paper" prototype makes it quite limited in terms of modeling and art, but since it will be improved drastically for the final game it should be ok.

Dynamics: concept of ant lion is cool but might need something new to distinguish itself from other stretagy games. The education aspect is a neat idea but require polishing.

Mechanic: Nature is a complicated system, which contradics with the goal of the mechanic of keeping things minimal.

#2, Fins of Fury

Aesthetics: It is quite nice to engage people into wanting more from the game because it meant they like it and the models look quite nice! Due to its nature I agree with the conclusion in that having more random collectables/achievements will make the game much more enjoyable.

Dynamics: I kinda like how they have variable odds for the enemy, even if some players are a bit annoyed by it. It keeps the game fresh.

Mechanic: Although its only a dice, I think there is quite a bit of potential here in their way of portraying the A.I.

#3, mizu

Aesthetics: The art seems to be very nice and will help the immersion of player in the game's universe.
Dynamics: Although the dice-chance system is probably in place due to the need to stimulate A.I. in the paper prototype, it'd be nice to see it go in the final game because as the testers responded that they feel it takes away the choice element of the game.
Mechanics: Not exactly testing for final game mechanic but the side scrolling element is somewhat there.

#4, Untitled

Aesthetics: based on the description it reminds me of beat-'em-ups like Golden Axe or Street of Rage; those were fun times indeed. I think in these types of games puzzles should be limited or easy to keep the flow of the game and more enemies + coop should work great.

Dynamics: for the puzzles (it was not actualy told what the puzzles are) I think they should stick with a particular kind of puzzles (e.g. Zelda vs Resident Evil puzzles).

Mechanics: Balance is the key (ya everyone knows) so making the characters more unique would be top priority.

Weekly Update

This week has been chaotic for our group; the re-organization and scheduling of assets are just not there.  There is a conflict of scale (squads combat vs companies combat) and we are going to do a vote on Tuesday (tmr) on which one we should go with.  Even with that our progamming portion of the game is still coming along nicely (at the expense of Stephen who reprogrammed the paper prototype to the updated version).

Supply system draft is done - It is of a primary part with many secondary components that the team will vote on tmr.

Stephen and Moh set up a wiki and I have been contributing (mainly the development/progress, of which i created).  Hope this will make our teammates have better communications

Team Meetings last week:
-Had one at the lab, but didnt do much cause we were trying to finish the Torque Example
-Had 1 msn meeting with Moh and Stephen (and briefly Phil).
Now my exam weeks are done (minus the final... ugh) I should have more time now.

Next week:
Apart from the critique; balancing and updating documents to changes and perhaps a short "experience" document.
Implemementing the damage/hp/soldier into the game.

Update on last week

Update on last week's progess:

I was not able to make it to the play testing session (had a lab) so what I learned from it is strictly based on what my teammates told me.

First thing; it seems that people had fun playing our multiplayer game, that is alwasys a plus. They were slightly confused as to what each unit's strength, hp, and movement are. We will improve the interface so it will show in the newer prototypes.

Secondly the bug of stacking units together became very popular as it is a dominant strategy. It should be ok once we fix the bug.

Last week Tuesday was the only time I met with the team. We spent the entire class doing the XNA, which is interesting but I think it might have been better if we were given time for team stuff.

I've done the initial layout of the weapon stats and equation for dealing damages. At the end of that there were blatant unbalances so I had to do a first round of balancing to make the stats work. Armor piercing values are added to normal guns don't do more damage to vehicles than tanks, as well as balancing purposes.

Next week I will probably work and finish the supply system that was discussed earlier and start some interface thingys. Also I hope we can get a more detailed production schedule so
we know whether we are ahead/behind and how to take advantage/fix that.

Have a good day.

Tuesday Lab

Got a big praise by my teammates on my unit designs =D

the art team has began working to get things and the programmer (stephen) is hard at work in figuring out how to do turn based strategy based on a tutorial we found.  It is somewhat funny (and sad at the same time) that he bought the pro version of Game Maker 7 and his activation key doesn't work, hope it will work out soon.

I did a mini presentation and discussion with moh (team leader) about the unit designs I came up with and they seem to like it.  Some modifications were made to make things more balanced and things are looking well.

I do feel bad for not learning Torque as well as I could have in comparison to game maker.  I guess the fact that I know I won't be using Torque has a significant impact on my learning attitude, plus torque has a much less appealing interface compared to game maker.  Either way we got quite a bit of work done from our last weekend, and we even decided what our paper prototype is going to be (it obviously isn't completed for those interested).