Off the Map: Back on track

So its back to working on Off the Map after an extended Easter due to presentations, essays and character project re-submissions. Anyway getting back on track after a long break and not a lot of progress Braden and myself have been working on engine stuff and after our presentation on Tuesday we have changed a few things; after getting good feedback from tutors.

Here is the main feedback we received from the tutors:

• Alice character needs to go into game ASAP! High risk of not having tested her in game, especially as she is a different style.
• Need to finish texturing
• Have Alice on a ledge at the start of the game, paused, don’t start with her falling.
• Piles of leaves don’t read well
• Put all elements in such as paper cuts, particle effects, work on lighting in last section.
• Love the interface, really helps pull everything together.

Stas: In the presentation it was evident that there was a broad range of interests in the design process. It is important to have the confidence to focus on the most unique and strongest of these keeping a coherent theme throughout. However the look and feel are very good. You need to work hard to keep the elements coherent and balanced. This does mean implementing the character ASAP and evaluating the overall feel and design.

As you can see there is some obvious things we were already going to do; such as get Alice in ASAP and texturing. However some things like having Alice starting on a ledge was not previously thought about; The leaf piles have also been redone now to look more realistic.

Here's the video we showed in the presentation; it has been changed slightly since then but I have some screen shots the show after:

After the presentation we decided to upgrade our level to 4.7.6 from 4.6.1 so that Luke's particle effects would import correctly so that he would not have to redo these. Here are the screenshot of the level in 4.7.6:

There is still a hell of a lot to finish but hopefully with everyone working on it now it should come together quickly. Here's a quick plan of what everyone will be doing up until the deadline:

I also recived an email from Game City about what exactly you need for the OTM hand in; here's what we need:

Documentation

5 – 10 page presentation document/powerpoint.
This should introduce your project to the judges and provide an overview of your project and process.

A longer document, either via blog or pdf format, covering your workflow throughout the course of the project.

Data

Please use the following folder structure:

Top Folder (TeamName_ProjectName)

/Documents

– Project Document PPT

– Project Document Detailed – Team Picture

– Project Logo

Game Executable (windows / OSX executable file/ installer)

Videos – 1 – 2 minutes long. First 3 – 5 seconds should contain the following information:

– Team Name & Project Name

– British Library logo

– GameCity logo

– Final 3 – 5 seconds should also contain the information above

We have a few of these things at the moment however there is still a lot to do and we still have not gotten the group blog done yet. Some of these things will just have to be done after the DMU handin.

Thats everything so far;

Cherrio for now.