week 7 and 8

Better late than never.

Week 7 was a hard working week. Everything head to be done that was going to be in the game and we were going to have our beta testing. Much of the work I did was to create props for the indoor and outdoor environment. I started by making a duzin different kinds of bushes that was needed for the level. It was important that the bush was cost efficient and was able to cover the player ass the player would be able to hide in them. And of course they also needed to look good. I tried to different kinds of way to make a bush. I tried by using alpha plans and by creating several identical in a pile rotated in different angles I was able to create something that looked like a bush. This is a common way to do vegetation in 3d environments as it is cost friendly and still looks good. I had to tilt them up a bit in order to cover over the player. I also made bush meshes with the shape of a umbrella to really make sure that the player is covered up completely. I also tried to combine the two together in different ways and shapes. When I was done I showed what I had done to the lead artist to get some feedback. I liked the way I had position and tilted the alpha plans in to the shape of a umbrella. And by copying that group of plans 2 times I created a 3 layer pyramid like umbrella bush. I then prepare it for texturing.
On Wednesday it was beta test, people played our game and have a lots of interesting feedback. It was clear that the tutorial needed some more work and that more feedback was needed.

I then started working on some more decorations for inside and outside. This was all kinds of things from drawers and sword stands. But it was as important to keep the models low detailed as that would allow for more props on the map at the same time.

After I had done some models and they had been textured by Anna on of our teams artist who did most of our texture work. Me and Anna started working on the sound effects and music. This was complicated as free sounds and music that is of good quality is hard to come by. We mostly used freesound.org and music from independent composers on the internet that gave away their music for free. In order to edit the sounds we found we used the free program Audiocity.

In order to do as much as possible before week 8 when the GGC was going to be held we worked thru the weekend almost day and night.

Week 8
Monday and Tuesday was what we call crunch. We did not add anything new to the game but concentrated on making the existing content playable. Most of the work I did at this time was to decorate the levels and create screenshots for the level view.
when decorating the level it was important to create areas that had its story and was unic with the small number of props we had. It took some thinking there I had no better way to do it then try what I felt was good and ask the group how they felt about what I had done. Sometimes I had to rethink my decorating but work went forward and was finished on time.

On Wednesday we created the logo/sign for our game that would hang above our table at GGC. It was done with carton and photo paper. Our producer presented our game for the judges and then we proceed to bring your game to the GGC so that the jury could play it.
And so from Wednesday to Friday we showed our game at GGC to all kinds of people and received lots of great feedback. We received feedback about the tutorial that needed more work, the animations, the user interface and ideas on how to improve it and so on.

We then meet up later and talk about what to do for the future. We all agreed that we should create free version of the game with more polish that we could use in our portfolio. I we can we will put the game up on the android market. Otherwise we will make it a free web browser game.