Abnormal Creations at Dare 2010

08-07-10

8th July 2010

Graeme (aka Audio) here, after suggesting the whole team should contribute to the diary to stop 2 week gaps in entries happening, I was elected to write this one. 

So, as you can imagine we've come a long way since our last post. We actually have a playable prototype of the first section. YAY! I will post a video of this later today.

We lost Ryan for a week or so as he had to go back home to sort out some issues. But he's back now and is close to getting Nybb (main character) fully functional within the game. He has also been working on the perspective switch which is one of Nybb's powers. It basically involves being able to switch out of the 2D view into a 3D view and allows Nybb to walk along two planes not just one. This will allow him to pass certain obstacles that are un-passable in 2D.

Despite being down a programmer Dean seems to have managed to do almost 2 peoples worth of work in this time. As well as working on enemy A.I and putting all the artists' work into the game he has managed to get the following powers working in some sense:

Line Drawing, in which you can draw lines which can be walked on, block enemy fire and even box enemies in. Rubbing Out, in which you can erase obstacles from the game. Giving/Taking away Colour, in which you can activate (e.g colouring part of a machine to make it work) and deactivate (e.g de-colouring fire so it doesn't burn you) objects.

All the mentors that have come round seem impressed as are the rest of the team. Nice one Dean!!

Obviously we wouldn't have a level without a level designer and Oscar has been firing on with that. You'll see from the video that Oscar has finished the terrain for the tutorial section and has been polishing that. He has nearly finished the City section too. As well as this he has finished modelling the Para-Creeper (air-borne grunt in the tutorial section). He has been brushing up on his 3D animation too so he can help Hayley a bit on that front. On top of all this he has designer our team poster. 

Hayley has been animating at high speeds and has now finished all Nybb's animations, the Creeper (first grunt) animations and will be finishing the Creeper King's animations by the end of today and the Para-Creeper by the end of tomorrow.

As for me, well I'm audio so I just sit around getting drunk. ONLY joking! I have finished the ambience for the first section which includes wind, birdies and waterfall sounds. I've nearly got all my footsteps sorted and have recorded most of the character sounds for the first section. I'm currently working on the music for the first section, but the whole game is probably just going to be kind of one long tune that changes depending on where you are in the game. As well as this, the main theme music is finished. Most of my effort for the first few weeks went into getting FMOD Designer audio events working within Unity. This has caused me huge amounts of hassle and I've learnt a lot of C# in the process. But it works and does what I want it to now so I'm happy!

Anyway, it feels like we've done huge amounts in the last week. But we've still got a long way to go. Our game feels like it's gonna be a big one and it's only going to get harder. Which reminds me, I should probably stop writing this and get on with some work............