studio-gameOn

Another week draws to a close … apparently!

This week’s aim: to have completed a perfectly playable movie 1, level 1 ready for Tuesday’s visit by our honoured Industry Board (Monday being a public holiday as we celebrate our beloved nation).

The programmers were mostly divided into two subgroups this week.  Josh and Alex revamped the prototype, particularly the player object, and incorporated sensors into the map, allowing the player to activate and deactivate barriers by triggering locations, and enabling the incorporation of a wider variety of object types that can be used in the game world, such as simple objects like barrels and tables, to more complex entities like enemy cowboys and the hilarious stagecoach (great job art team on that one!).

My primary role this week (well assisted by Christina on her studio days), was to take the basic player state system from crude animated prototype to a polished, responsive, fluid avatar motion.  The more states the player has, the more complex the linkage between states, as players can suddenly employ new moves and courses of action on a whim, all while expecting no animation or unexpected activity breaks during each transition.   Producer Rory kept us honest, by repeatedly attempting to break the animation sequences.

This task was made a little easier by the art department; particularly the character’s animator, Abbey, who, despite a seemingly endless schedule, efficiently delivered several crucial transition animations upon request.   But fine tuning the player states to a flawless level, such that under absolutely no circumstance would player action/animaiton illogically break, is no simple feat … particularly when executive design decisions take more backflips than the game’s protagonist.

This shouldn’t be a problem down the track … there was a heated little discussion when it was finally revealed to the programmers this morning that a feature one programmer had just finished investing hours implementing had been dropped earlier in the week.  The impact of the incident steeled the design team’s resolve to lay down the final movement set for the game (which was readied by the afternoon) and ensured that all design documentation would be very strictly monitored and adhered to.  This incident reminded all members of the team of the importance of strong communication, and will likely result in a greater sense of teamwork and cooperation from here-on in.

Today, Alex’s main focus was on the audio aspects of the game, which he hopes to have ready before Tuesday.  Josh was busy preparing the majority of the animated objects for placement and player intereaction into the level as they became available.  Once the art team delivered a new background for the first level, as well as more animated objects, all 4 members of the programming team worked on merging previous code into a new build, and re-establishing the player and camera boundaries to fit the new level.

But the week doesn’t end there …

Tomorrow, Christina and I (maybe other programmers, along with several artists,and the designer Pixel) will be going in again.  That list of animations and states I previously mentioned, while finally set in stone, now invalidates the current settings.  While I suspect this is not the final backflip (Q&A will likely dictate more tweakage) we will modify the system as required, and ready it for a final push on Tuesday morning, where all the latest objects (prepared by Josh) with all the latest states/action sequences (finalised tomorrow) will be incorporated, with Alex’s sound, into the final version of Movie 1, Level 1.

Colin

This entry was posted on Friday, January 23rd, 2009 at 2:45 pm and is filed under Development Blog, Programming Team. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.