Our Work This Week

This week we met 3 times to continue work on the game. Gordon and Branan have continued working to implement mesh skinning on the GPU. Having finished implementing it on the CPU which caused major framerate issues, we knew that running it on the GPU was the only possibility. They are currently struggling to sort out the BVH files which appears t0 be missing joints, which is a problem on the GPU, as the joints must match perfectly.

Mack and I have began to collect Foley sounds for our game. We spent the day recording sounds in forest behind campus. We recorded our footsteps through the leaves, breaking branches, and a large stick hitting a tree, to simulate a sword hitting wood. We also recorded water running from the pond behind south village. We recorded a number of other random sounds to use as we need them.

Gary has been devoting his time to creating gameplay elements. Currently we are able to move and jump in 3D space. He has spent the week working on adding proper collision detection, as well as adding shadows. He has also been working on adding the combat system to the game. He has also been working with Gordon to ensure proper file parsing, and assisting with the problems Gordon and Branan have been experiencing.

Branan, Rachel and I have continued to produce Art Assets for our game. Branan and I have been doing all of the modelling, while Rachel puts the finishing touches on the assets, and paints the textures onto them in Mudbox. I have been producing all of the minor art assets, as well as working on level designs. Branan has been working on our main characters model, as well as rigging any models which require animation.

Overall our production is coming along nicely, and if we keep up our current pace we should have a quality game prepared for the Game Con in April.

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.

Untitled

Rachel made my map pretty.

Hey guys,

So on Monday we had a pretty thorough discussion on the world we want to create. Rachel took my map I created and made it a lot better, Mack had a few level designs and Branan had a pretty detailed outline of how he wanted the world to pan out from the player’s perspective. We still haven’t gotten around to fleshing out 100% of the world, but we have a really good idea of what we want to do, so we’re going to start from there and see how we do.

This week we wanted to start production. I personally was in charge of working on ripping out the RTS elements from SHFT among other things. Unfortunately as I mentioned in my other blog, I encountered some issues. Not going to go too much in detail there, but essentially I think I have things ripped out, but I can’t check to make sure. Which is unfortunate.

The android Branan made for Global Game Jam 2012

Branan has also been working on a humanoid model for a while now and it’s coming together. It looks pretty good. I don’t have a picture to show off, but he also participated in Global Game Jam 2012 this weekend and he rigged up an android model which he says is going to be a trial for our human characters in our GDW game. It looks pretty sick so I’m excited to see what we end up doing with it.

Mack and Rachel have been working on some concept art for the game as well and have hopefully started working on the preliminary artwork we need for our game. Alex and Gordon have been working on learning shaders that we may or may not need for our game. We want our game to be super pretty so we need as many graphical awesomeness as we can get.

Other than that there isn’t too much to talk about in terms of our group’s progress. We have the base game planned out already, we just need to start working on actually developing the game itself now.

Gary

The History of Team Overlord and of Things to Come!

Hey guys,

Team Overlord was a group founded by Gary Ng, Branan Sarveswaran, Rachel Fung and Mackenzie Sturrup in Fall of 2010 for our Game Development Workshop group. Starting off, Gary would be the lead programmer and the team leader, Branan would be the designer and story writer, Rachel would be the artist and Mackenzie would be the designer. That semester, we created the text based adventure game, Portal Puffs (Download) which was out debut game as a game development group. Overall, the game came together fairly well and it was well received by our profs when we had to present it.

The semester after that, we had to work on a 2D game where we worked as a team to create Reaper (Download), a 2D sidescroller. Due to time constraints however, we couldn’t do as much as we wanted to so when we came back for our second year of university studies, we recruited Chris Lee so that the group would have another dedicated programmer. Together we created the game SHFT (Download) which is a 2.5D top down RTS game that received immense positive feedback from our professors, TAs and even fellow students.

Unfortunately this semester Chris has decided to leave us. However we have replaced him with Alexander Best and are even in talks of adding a sixth member as well. As our roles have somewhat shifted over the semester with people discovering new talents and abilities as well as adding members, the current roles of our members are:

• Gary Ng – Lead Programmer and Team Leader
  

  From left to right: Mack, Chris, Gary, Branan and Rachel (Team Overlord Fall 2011)

• Branan Sarveswaran – Lead 3D Artist and 2D Artist
• Rachel Fung – Lead 2D Artist and 3D Artist
• Mackenzie Sturrup – Audio, Programmer, Artist
• Alex Best – Programmer

With the success of SHFT, our goal this semester is to make something even better. We want to improve on it and make the best game UOIT has seen. It’s an ambitious goal, but we have a talented team and it is something that is definitely doable.

Gary