Level Up

Hey guys,

Our setup, showing SHFT and two SHFTeds.

Sorry about the delay in this week’s blog post. The reason why I delayed writing this week’s post was because we actually went to show our game off at Level Up yesterday and I wanted to blog about some of the things we did there. For those that don’t know, Level Up is an event that was sponsored by a whole bunch of places like Microsoft, Rockstar, UOIT, UofT, OCAD, etc where student game developers can go and show off their games.

At first we were hesitant of going because we weren’t sure whether or not our game was going to be good enough to show off at Level Up, but on Friday we talked it over with some profs and they said we should go, so we decided that over the weekend we would work a lot on the game and then show it off on Monday.

So over the weekend we ended up doing a lot for our game. We literally spent the entire day, and some members the entire night, in the Game Dev Lab just working. In terms of programming, we took Dr. Hogue’s advice and implemented a non-photorealistic shader into our game to give our game a different feel, so I ended up writing the algorithms for that. I also ended up making it so we could have multi-pass renders in our game since I had to split up certain things into different frame buffers to get things to work properly. In addition to that me and Gordon just did a whole bunch of changes to the code to fix things up and to tweak stuff as well to make sure they worked as intended.

We got a lot of stuff done on the art side. Branan finally finished his character model, it’s fully UV’d and textured now and we have a few animations that are already in the game including running, attacking and jumping. We decided to change our level based on the feedback we got from talking to Dr. Nacke, so Alex changed up the level as well and used updated models when necessary and all the first level is essentially done and in the game. Mack went ahead and changed his song up as well because there were complaints that his previous song wasn’t that good, and actually ended up making a whole new level that we might be putting in our game for Game Con. Rachel on the other hand went and did a poster for our game as well as changing other 2D elements like the buttons on the HUD.

Some people playtesting our game.

We worked a lot on the game, and yesterday we showed it off. There were a lot of people at the event; a lot more than we though. Our “booth” wasn’t the most impressive display, but we had a lot of traffic and a lot of people played our game and gave it feedback. The biggest thing we got was that people were impressed with our game technically since we wrote the engine from scratch instead of cheating using Unity. Gameplay wise we had some pretty good feedback as well as to how we should improve the game.

Some people said that the game wasn’t “fast” enough so we’re planning on making it so you move faster. We noticed that a lot of people focused too much on killing the big soldier instead of exploration so I think I’m going to tweak the soldier so he’s easier to kill since people couldn’t really kill him. We also noticed just a whole bunch of other things that we could change that would essentially be minor tweaks like having our potions heal more, having our attacks deal more damage, etc. But at the same time we noticed a bunch of things that we couldn’t really change that easily like our camera clipping through our level.

Overall though it was a fun event and we managed to get some solid feedback on our game. We’ll have an even better build for Game Con, so hypehypehype.

Gary