Crunchtime is coming…

This week, the team has gotten some decent headway for the game. Gordon’s mesh skinning is looking better than ever, with just a few steps away from being perfect. In addition, we’ve now began merging more of the code together, and now have a working shell. As far as core features go, were only a few shy of being ready to go headlong into gameplay. In Modelling news, the main characters are coming along well, with the enemies in tow. As well, several side assets have begun cropping up as the team has divided them up into small portions to be done in free time. One looming factor still hanging over is us is our deadline.

Time is running out.

On the positive side, compared to where we were last semester at this time, were miles ahead. The bad news is that this semesters game was originally planned to be much larger in scale, and with cut-off in slightly over 3 weeks, it seems like some features may need to be cut.

we'll just cut this...and that....and, oh dear...

There is  small reprieve however, in the fact that our classes are barebones this week (Thank you GDC) and we will have alot more time to focus on assets. The goal for the end of this week is to have the primary art assets completed and a working demo version of the game up and running for testing. See you next time.

Productivity

Howdy all, Its Blog time with Team Overlord again 😀

First and foremost I’d like to say I hope our beloved Team Member Rachel Fung had a wonderful birthday this past sunday and we all send her our best wishes. Rachel has been a powerful driving force for Team Overlord’s art since the very begining and has progressed very far along the way.

Hope you had fun Rachel!

Now for the last little bit, we’ve been a wee bit worried that we werent spending enough time on what we REALLY wanted to do, the game. We’ve kind of been distracted by work for other courses (*cough* shaders! *cough*). To circumvent this issue, we decided that over the weekend we would have

(*drumroll*)

THE TEAM OVERLORD GAME JAM!

What is the Team Overlord Game Jam? (think people might get mad if we called it TO Jam? :P)
It’s US, locking ourselves in ONE room, for TWELVE staight hours, to do nothing, but PRODUCTIVE WORK FOR OUR GAME! (lunch breaks included). And productive we were, as it allowed us to hammer out alot of he basic stuff for getting our game going nice and smoothly. One place this helped huge amounts in was the programming department. You see, our lead programmers (Gary Ng, and Gordan Tan), both being fabulousin their own right, had been doing a fair bit of work in the shader department for Dr.Hogue’s class (Gordon being the FIRST student with a full 65 exp!). As such, they both had different frameworks with different pieces tha were better than the others. For instance gary’s camera class is ridiculous and could give autodesk a run for its money, while Gordon’s OBJ loader can theoretically render 2 million pollis on screen with little to no trouble. SOO the entire session last saturday was devoted to merging the best elements of both and figuring out what else needed to be made to form a super Framework. It was a grueling task for the two entrepid programmers but they were able to trudge their way through the grit of it.

A few texturing issues, kinda looks like modern art

Why yes, that IS a beatiful wireframe shot with GPU enabled particles.

Meanwhile, over in the art department, we were able to get some serious work done in the art department, with myself, mack and alex knocking out alot of issues in terms of game and level design. Rachel was not able to make it this time but she assures us she’ll make up for it the next time. (OH WAIT, DID I JUST MENTION WERE DOING THIS MORE THAN ONCE?!?)

Yes, the Game jam was so productive we’ve decided to attempt to do it on a bi-monthly basis so we can really just stuff as much razzle-dazzle in as we can. Back to the art department, Mack and Alex were both able to finish up a base design of a level each, while I managed to get a little down and dirty with mudbox to produce an example level for Gary and Gordon to practice with.

120k polies, no big for us. (note: we're not actually using in game....IM AN EFFICIENT MODELLER!)

Here’s is a gorgeous version I mocked up with baked in lighting and textures.

Mmm I love Turtles (ha, ha, because i used the TURTLE renderer....in maya...ha?)

Add to that the crazy amount of work we got done on our main 3D assets (including our main characters, enemies, and various props and you have a productive weekend indeed..
Heres looking forward to the next time.