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Anas Azmi End-of-Quarter Update

Zedna eating the med student's brain.

Things I did last week:

• Modified the animator controllers to make it easier for programmers to read and use.
• Redid all of Zedna's animation.
• Textured the janitor's cart.
• Finished making the air freshener bottle.
• Textured the walls.
• Textured the floor.
• Textured the ceiling.
• Textured the counter.
• Textured the table.
• Made adjustments to the civilian's animation to make it look like he's struggling against Zedna, who's eating his brains.

In summary, what I did this quarter:

The air freshener bottle.

• Modeled, textured & animated Zedna.
• Modeled, textured & animated the civilian (and made a script for civilian customization).
• Textured & animated the neckbeard (he's modeled by Nathan).
• Modeled the siren that appears on top of the neckbeard when he's in alert mode (and learned to take advantage of backface culling in the process).
• Made a script to test the animators (although only I have real use of it for now).
• Modeled & textured the air freshener (although we did have a placeholder model that looks pretty decent, considering it's not textured).
• Textured the janitor's cart (it's modeled by Nathan and Brian and animated by Nathan).
• Textured the walls (they're modeled by Nathan and Brian).
• Textured the tables (they're modeled by Brian).
• Textured the floor (the model is just a primitive plane object from Unity; it was used for level design before).



Zedna pushing the janitor's cart, which is essentially an
infinite air freshener (until it breaks).

• Textured the ceiling (the same as the floor).

This quarter was a quarter of discovery for me. Even though I started out as a programmer who happens to know how to model, I eventually grew up to become, according to Cary, one of the key members of this team. Although I had experience modeling (mostly in Blender), texturing, rigging & animating, my animations were pretty horrible before. Throughout this quarter, I learned about

• UV sets (each set means different UV maps in Unity)
• transparency texturing (and how horrible that went)
• double quaternion rigs (which means that animating a rig wouldn't make some parts of the rig paper-thin; I took a whole day figuring out how to get around this problem using the default setting before I found out about double quaternion rigging)
• rigging an object only to some joints (before I found out about this, I had problems with parented objects stretching to creepy levels when it isn't supposed to)
• weight painting (which was originally found out as a way to do what double quaternion did before I found out about double quaternion)
• backface culling (and how I could use it to emulate glass-covered lamps)
• multiple materials on one object (allowing customizations of each instance of the object by code (although I couldn't make the customization show outside runtime))
• texture tiling (so I don't have to tile a texture just to make the size right)



The hospital cafeteria.

• art prototyping (it's to show Allen what I've done for this game, but I definitely learned something, because I've never been in a team as anything other than a programmer)

I'm looking forward to doing more work in this studio, even if that's as early as the upcoming Play Jam, which we're going to in order to present Survival Zombie.

Alpha Build

Alpha Build

https://www.dropbox.com/s/58167j9h88sagno/Zombie%20Survival%20Alpha.zip

Web Player

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/5319485/Alpha%20Build/WebBuild.html

New Build!

We have a new build up for all of you to start playing around with.  Try it here:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B9v8dTEFahq9UV93c0F1TmcyV1U/edit?usp=sharing

We've got the first half of the main level in, as well as Anas's animations, some stand in textures, and a fair number of our environment models.  It's still rather unfinished, but we're very interested to hear your feedback!

Anas Azmi Week 8 Update

What I did last week:

• Rigged the neckbeard
• Animated the neckbeard
• Integrated the neckbeard's animation into Unity
• Made a test file for the animations

What I'm planning to do this week:

• Make the Febreze model
• Resolve any art bugs
• Finish any unfinished model

I personally think that, due to the neckbeard being animated last, he might have the best animation quality out of the three characters, which might just make him stand out even more. I may remake the models of the other characters, or I may remake Zedna's texture, since I'm thinking that her texture is a bit bland.

Over the rest of the quarter, I most likely will take over the work of another member of our team due to complaints from the rest of the team. I'm not sure about next quarter, though.

Programmer Update - Rodolfo Gomez

For the past two weeks, these are the things that were implemented programming wise from my end:
-Particle effects for Zedna getting hit
-Particle effects for Zedna eating Civilian NPCs
-Particle effects for the Febreze bottle
-Interfacing the Febreze bottles onto Zedna upon pick up
-Helped Cary with trying to debug the Neckbeard/Civilian wandering AI
-Implemented the combo eating system for Zedna (She would move faster after eating a Civilian's brain and it would increase the more she would eat, the combo meter would go down after not eating)

Level Progress

With the help of the wonderful Andy Misek, I've been making a lot of progress laying out our main level - one full floor of Have Mercy Hospital.  This will be the first playground-style level, after a few tutorial levels.

Anas Azmi Week 7 Update

Things I did last week:

• Textured the neckbeard
• Made a script to customize the civilian's colors (Want an alien civilian? No problem!)
• Added Zedna's name tag (which I forgot before)
• Animated Zedna (save for one more clip)
• Made an animated siren model

Things I'm planning to do next week:

• Animate the neckbeard
• Make the neckbeard's clothes customizable
• Make a model of the Febreze bottle
• Extend the civilian's customization to include textures

Possibly because the neckbeard's textures are the most detailed out of the characters so far, he became easily the best part of our game right now. This came out of a need to make him wear a plaid shirt and jeans pants, while I took shortcuts when texturing Zedna, and skipped texturing altogether when making the civilian. I'll keep this in mind, although the civilian's customization extension will be secondary to animating the neckbeards and making the Febreze model.

When making the siren, I made use of backface culling, which in most graphics engines is used to lighten the graphics workload, since I had problems with transparency before. When making the siren, I reversed the normals of several faces, namely the faces of the inside parts (although the lights were made separately, and so don't need to have their face normals reversed) and the red glass. The result is a siren that's not completely see-through, but still has its insides visible. I got some good feedbacks from it.

While animating Zedna, I ran into some problems. Due to my loath of the zombie genre in the past, I couldn't picture how a zombie would normally move, or even stand for that matter. This is despite me having watched several zombie shows and played some zombie games. The result is animation that I think is a bit wonky and unnatural (although the latter may be caused by Zedna being inhuman but still looks human). I'm thinking of making changes to it, but that's also secondary, since I did get the feel of Zedna having problems moving across.

Cary Update #2

I added the change so there is a lunge range now.  The player can also stop eating by pressing a button.  The AI got improved a bit but still buggy.  There is now a eating duration instead of instantly eating a person.  The models for neckbeards change if a hunger point is reached.  The neckbears now stop a player from eating if they collide with them.  Added sound code is now sounds play when they are supposed to.

Andy Update

After this week, many more sounds were added and there is more of a variety played at random. Also I did play testing on multiple mechanics and was able to come up with what people find fun and tedious about our game at this point in development.

Next week I want to get in the other sounds I have record, record a female to be zedna (right now we have a male, and it sounds funny, but I think to say true to making the character female, we need to record a female), and more play testing with revamped testing level. Also it was talked about starting to move assets into the level block out.

Neckbeard is textured!

Anaz finished off the Neckbeard model, and he did a wonderful job!

Shoutouts to Bob over at High Voltage!