New monster picture, Quest Mode and Lightwave

Hello again,

  I hope you are all well.

Well this week has been a bit of a stop / start week for me.  The day job has been pretty busy this week and then I’ve been getting call outs from family members to sort out their computers.  It can be a real pain sometimes been the computer geek of the family.

On the bright side, I finally got my nice new copy of LightWave installed and working Thursday night.  So I spent the whole night and a fair bit of the following morning playing with it.  The hair plug in is great fun and I seem to be getting the hang of it pretty quickly and the speed increase from the old version is huge.  Saying that, I’ve spent about 4 hours tonight trying to get the monster to render out again, I don’t know what I did, but I kept causing LightWave to crash every time single time I rendered the hair.  I got it sorted in the end, but I’m been really careful now as I don’t want to lose my work =)

Weekending 16/1/09

Lucky Seven:

  When I have been able to work on the game, I’ve mainly been doing the menu gf/x for the Quest Mode level selection and lots of little 2D animations and icons for it.

  You know the stuff that you don’t think twice about until you have to do it.  It’s actually a lot harder to do icons (well meaningful icons) then I expected and to be honest I’m not sure I’ve totally succeeded.  For example I’ve got to do an icon where you can match the same coloured blocks, which sounds simple enough, but when you only have a 32 by 32 pixel square to work in and you can’t use text.  It’s a lot harder then you think.  I’ve ended up doing an animation where you see a group of three red blocks been selected and then removed and replaced by a set of yellow blocks, which are then selected and replaced by a group of red blocks and the animation is replaced.

  I’ve also been playing with my nice new copy of LightWave and the fun hair plugin for it so I can finish off the new monster from last week.  I’ll attach a picture of it so you can see what it looks like.

  I’m still not totally sure about the colour for it, but it’s basically there and it just needs a bit of tweaking to get it right and I need to finish off the textures for the finger nails and the eyes.

  Isaac has been busy getting all the underlining structure for the Quest Mode scoring system sorted out so that each level will have its own personal best score for each players profile and the total overall score for the player.

  I’m not sure if I’ve really talked about the Quest Mode before with you, but I’ll give you a quick explanation about it now (sorry if I’ve already talked before abut this).

  The idea behind the Quest Mode part of the game is that we have come up with lots of various ways to play the game and to try to cram all the different variations into just a single mode would just confuse the player and that would hurt the overall fun of the game as it’s really important to gently let the player get use to the basic game flow of the game before you start throwing all the different elements into it.  At the same time I don’t want lots of different game mode selections for the player to pick from when they first start the game as I think that could be just as confusing for the player.  I know myself from other programs when you have 10+ options to choose from, you don’t know which one to pick and if you find one you really like, will you be able to find it again?

  So the Quest Mode is our way of gently adding new features slowly and separately to the game so you can get the idea of the new feature by itself all nicely self-contained, so you understand it.  It also allows us to explain the basic game to you in the first couple of levels as a kind of tutorial so you are making progress through the game as you are learning the basics.  The game is easy to play, but it’s still best to explain it so everyone starts out with the same information.  The way the Quest Mode works is that once you clear a level, it will unlock the other levels around it so there should always be another level for the player to play if you are stuck on a level.  At the moment we have room for over 100 levels and we can always add more levels if we need to.  This style of layout also allows us so much freedom in adding new features such as achievements that the player can actually see on the map and go after but, must clear the levels to get that achievement.  We can also unlock game modes (which can be played straight from the main menu) when certain levels have been completed, so after a certain style of game play has been shown off (puzzle style levels for example), that mode can then be played straight from the menu. 

  So basically, it’s just a really neat way of been able to combine everything into a nice neat package which allows us to add new features all the way through the production cycle of the game as and when we need to without too much extra work on our part and we have a much better idea of when to release new modes for the player, which will feel like an added achievement for the player because you have earned the right to play it.  The only down side is that it’s going to be a lot of work grading all the levels so we can place them on the map in the correct position as it’s possible for the player to go off in a totally different direction then what we would expect.

  Tommy is now starting to go through the sound effect list for both the games and it’s a pretty big list to be honest and I know there’s going to be a lot more that we didn’t think about.

I think that’s it for this week, as it’s getting really late and I’ve got to be back up again in just under 4 hours, but you have any questions, suggestions or comments, please feel free and get in touch.

So have a good week and I hope to see you next week

Thanks,

Mike.

www.badbumble.com

This entry was posted on 17/01/2009 at 01:37 am and is filed under Current Game Development, Lucky 7 Development Diary, Blogroll. 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.