Anas Azmi Week 6 Update

Things I did last week:

• Made minor physical changes to the civilian model
• Removed transparency from Zedna's model
• Rigged the civilian model
• Animated the civilian (in progress)

Things I'm planning to do this week:

• Finish animating the civilian
• Texture the neckbeard's model
• Animate Zedna

Yesterday's class, we got some positive feedback thanks to the whole game progress having sped up by a lot this last week. For that, I can say that I'm glad.

Regarding the civilian's animation, I've finished most of it, but I haven't exported it to Unity. Therefore, this, along with setting up Mecanim (and possibly a short script to change the civilian's material texture/color), will be part of finishing the civilian's animation.

Last weekend, I, who have been avoiding anything remotely gory, tried playing Left 4 Dead 2 for the first time with my housemates. To be honest, it was a fun experience. I was certainly repulsed by the amount of gore I created (especially when using melee weapons like a katana), but the fun I had, thanks to the feeling of teamwork (and the fun in pretending to be a samurai, to be honest), made up for it. Although, in my opinion, this game can't really be called a zombie game, just because there are zombies who, although admittedly made the game more fun, resemble monsters more than humans, when zombies were technically human before. Because of that, the game felt less like Counter-Strike (in the sense that you fight against humans rather than cannon fodder) and more like Doom.

Anas Azmi Week 5 Update

Things I did last week:

• Fixed texture problems with Zedna's model
• Made the civilian's model
• Made the Febreze bottle's model (in progress)

Things I'm planning to do this week:

• Finish modeling the Febreze bottle
• Make some adjustments to the civilian model
• Animate the character models

Apparently the problem with Zedna's texture mapping is that, if you have multiple UV sets in Maya, you can't select which one to export, and Unity only reads the first one. Also, transparency seems to be working differently between Maya and Unity, so I'll remove the transparency in Zedna's model.

As for the civilian model, I made him to have separate materials for each of his components. This is so it's easy to customize him in Unity, so that we can make what you can essentially call palette swap. In addition, during yesterday's class, I received feedback on the model's shape, so I'll be fixing that this week.

Another component of the class was the feedback we got from our presentation. We were told that it's not clear yet what makes this game fun, so we should make that clear in two weeks. After some discussion, we decided that, along with implementing the blocked-out level in Unity, we would animate the character models, as right now, the level feels lifeless (although, admittedly, it's a barebone sandbox). I'll at least start working on that. I may pass the Febreze modeling to someone else, though.

This week, I didn't watch or play anything zombie-related, but I might as well elaborate on one particular game that caught my interest, which is Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc. The game is best described as a combination of Persona 4, Ace Attorney & Battle Royale. It's about a group of high school students with extraordinary talents who are trapped in Hope's Peak Academy by a sadistic robot bear named Monokuma. In each chapter (at least, those I've played), Monokuma essentially forces the students to kill each other by providing motive. Each chapter starts with the player having free time, which is used to socialize with other students a la Persona 4. Then, once a body is discovered, the player will take some time investigating before being taken to the courtroom, where all the students debate to decide who's guilty. After all, voting on the wrong guilty party would cost them all their lives except the real guilty party, who would then be released from the school, and if they voted right, only the guilty party would be executed. 

I like Danganronpa for its strong detective mechanic, which would feel like any Ace Attorney game, but thanks to a well-written plot and a time-based gameplay during the trial session, you would definitely need to work your brain in order to solve the case. Unlike many mystery media though, this game, courtesy of the sadistic Monokuma, shows just how the guilty party is executed (each execution is specially made based on the guilty party's personality), and that makes this game stand out from series like Ace Attorney or Case Closed. In short, this game makes fun of the mystery genre by not giving the reader/player satisfaction from solving the case, and instead blames the player for voting on the guilty party (although the player would die otherwise). I think that this is one way Survival Zombie could have made fun of the zombie genre, which is by not providing the player relief after killing all the zombies.

Finding the Fun

Today was our milestone for a first playable build.  You can play with the sandbox level here. 

Controls:
WASD - Lurch
Tab - activate mouselook
Left mouse (on NPCs) - Charge at and eat an NPC
Q - Febreeze yourself to blend in with the humans.
Feedback is appreciated!

Our faculty advisor, the esteemed Allen Turner, observed that right now we don't have quite everything we need implemented to begin playtesting for fun.  A lot of what makes our game fun relies on jokes, which aren't present in this level, and our 'chase' mechanic, which isn't quite recognizable as a toy yet.  In the coming weeks we're going to A.) Get the game to give enough feedback for players to engage with it as a toy, B.) Get crazy (Things like spawning absurd quantities of Neckbeards) to figure out what the most engaging mechanics are, and C.) Adding in some of our humor in the form of sound effects.

Its Hard to move when you're part of the floor

Added Map limitations to the wander search

Febreze Working/ Wandering Working (may be buggy go test for me)
Look in inspecter for variables for designers to edit all relavent variables are there
THEY MUST BE SET OR IT WON"T WORK (no prefab built yet if needed ask).

Fixed and made chasing and targeting work

Fixed the chase
Added Chasing paramaters
Neckbeards chase when they can see her or shes within a distance(distance is changeable in inspector, Default is currently 10)

(╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻

Current State of the Game

Current state of the game as of 2/14/14.

Andy's Late Update

Hello all,

Don't want anyone to think I'm slacking, only forgetting to post blog posts. Since last post I was able to do a few hand drawings of the level design. The first one didn't meet the needs we needed so after talking over the idea with the group, went with a new design. In our last meeting, a few things were changed and I was able to get into Unity and do a 3D block out of the level. The 3D block out is now on Trello to take a look at.

Also, after looking at the level design, as a group we sat down and came up with more level oriented jokes. This is because many of our jokes were post hospital jokes that we weren't able to use in the hospital. A comedy game has to be consistently coming at you with new jokes and witty banter in order for the player to continue playing the game. This way helpful because it gave me more of an idea on how we were going to use certain parts of the level to teach the player as well as make a joke of the situation.

Recording for sound is beginning now as well. It was originally going to start before class on Monday, but due to illness, I had to bail on a couple friends. In the end this works out, because in the meeting, we talked about more audio jokes we would be able to do. My list of sounds I need to record quadrupled as well as giving me many ideas on where I want to go with it. Music is very soon to follow.

Rodolfo Gomez Update - Hunger Mechanic Implemented

Things I have done this week:
-I worked on the hunger mechanic for the game
    -Player gets hungry over time
    -Once player has reached certain threshold for hunger mechanic, they die.
    -Player can eat civilians to restore their own "health."

-Uploaded all of the models that were on Trello onto the Perforce server

Anas Azmi Week 4 Update

Things I did this week:

• Contributed to brainstorm meetings (which resulted in, among things, a female main character)
• Suggested ways the team would split its workload
• Made a generic humanoid model to make it easy to make other character models
• Made Zedna's model (with some issues)

Things I'm planning to do next week:

• Fix problems regarding Zedna's model
• Make models of:
• the med student
• the civilian (not sure if we'd have multiple civilian models)
• Make a model of the air freshener
• Get everything art-wise ready for our first playable prototype

This week, we focused on getting our gears moving after 4 weeks of planning. Since I've volunteered myself to become the 3D artist for this team, I was elected as the lead artist of the team. This week, I was tasked on making Zedna's model.

I got everything done for the model (except rigging and animation), but I had an issue with UV mapping. The image on top (which admittedly isn't perfect) is the render image of the model in Maya. I used one texture for the body, and one for the eyes. Here, the textures are nicely mapped save for a few places. However, the same model imported into Unity (this is a test scene for my own use) didn't get any texture mapping through. As a result, the model simply tiles the textures as if they're not mapped. I speculated that the issues came from either me using GIMP instead of Photoshop, or from the model's normals being not properly set. Regardless, I'll solve this issue throughout the next week. Hopefully, I'll learn some pointer I'll need to keep in mind when making other character models.

Neckbeard Modeling

I'll be working on the model for the Neckbeard, the main antagonist in our game.  I'm tweeting my progress over on my personal twitter.  Check it out!

Rodolfo Gomez Update - Chasing Mechanic Implemented

Today I worked on creating the chasing mechanic for our player zombie. The player would have to click on a civilian NPC where the player would then automatically move towards the civilian NPC and "eat" them.  Our plan was to have the player click and automatically goes towards civilians in such a fashion that it turns into a sort of "pinball game" effect. Adding to the humor of our game.

The video below demonstrates this mechanic.

Week 4 - Pitching and Production

After shaping up our design, we gave our pitch presentation (available here).  After that, I set up our tasks on Trello, and everyone's gotten down to business on producing content for Survival Zombie.

One of the more interesting problems we talked about was gender.  Our original design called for male Neckbeards, and left the gender of the civilians unspecified.  We won't have time to make multiple civilian models, so we were faced with a tough decision: do we want all the women in our world to be helpless zombie-chow, or do we make the civilians male and have no women whatsoever?

The 'answer,' as such things often are, was that we were asking the wrong question.  As such, I'm proud to announce Zedna, our new, female protagonist.

Anas Azmi Week 3 Update

Things I did last week:

• Helped suggest changing the game's camera perspective from first-person to third-person
• Suggested Kingdom Hearts-like camera perspective and/or HUD (we ended up going HUD-less though)
• Suggested grim background music to go along with cartoony sound effects suggested by Brian
• Brought up ideas to bring innovation to the game, none of which were agreed upon (although we did look into Is This a Zombie?, the anime series I watched last week)
• Made concept art for the player zombie (thus helping the team make the pitch presentation for today's class)
• Started watching Highschool of the Dead

Things I'm planning to do this week:

• Present the pitch (specifically the art aspect)
• Get input from the class
• (If needed) change our game for something better
• (If our game went through without problems) Start making models if everyone agrees with the concept art
• Start making the art prototype
• Get as many art that I need to do as I can
• Continue watching Highschool of the Dead
• Watch Warm Bodies & Shaun of the Dead

I've been talking about making models since the first week, but I figured that making models without a clear direction is pretty hard, and I also have to think about the possibility of the game getting scrapped, since we're still in the pitching stage.

I mentioned watching Highschool of the Dead (shortened to HOTD) because, first and foremost, I'm an anime fan (it should've been obvious after reading last week's post though). Secondly, it's because HOTD depicts realistic zombies and a zombie apocalypse setting. I think this is the only anime series with that setting, but I may have been mistaken. The only problem I have with this particular series is the fact that it's Not Safe For Work because it has nudity.

Also, I plan on watching Warm Bodies due to the fact that it's a different take on the zombie genre, and also due to the existence of comedy elements in the movie, something we're aiming to achieve in Survival Zombie. Since much of the focus in the movie is on the zombie main character, who knows, we might get some inspiration from it.

In addition, I also plan on watching Shaun of the Dead because it's a parody of the zombie genre, and also because we got some inspiration (particularly the looks Tedward/Zedward, the protagonist, has) from it. We might even get some gag inspirations from it, thanks to it being a parody.

Rodolfo Gomez Update - FPS View for Player

    I wrote some code that dealt with the player view. It is in a first-person view (we might however change it to have a third-person view instead) where the player can move around with the simple WASD keys and can jump using the space bar. I also added a limit as to how far the player can look up and down without the camera being flipped upside down.

Player view as the zombie (WIP)

Added a limit as to how far the player can look up from the camera

Andy Update

Last night I was able to type up my idea of the game in the format of the pitch. I suggested some hiding and movement mechanics as well as the art and sound style of the game. It appears we will be using the art and sound style I suggested as well as keep a few of the smell mechanics. Nate came up with a much stronger movement mechanic that would make the game more unique and enjoyable that we are to go with.

Our pitch was written and agreed upon by the entire group which we nailed down a cohesive image of what we want the game to be moving forward.