so a few weeks …

so a few weeks have passed now and we are getting a little bit closer to midterms when, production of the game usually comes to a bit of a hault. fortunately we have a few concepts from paper that have started to take form and hopefully they can be integrated into a level soon. for the programming side of things there isn’t exactly much to show off. I know Gary has been working hard on the level editor and some nice progress has been made from that, unfortunately blocks of code don’t exactly make the prettiest pictures, so its not exactly the easiest thing to visualize. however for our other programmers, there seems to be alot of progress in the shader department. hopefully I will be able to get a print screen of some of the cool effects Gordon and Gary have been working on so we can show off a bit of what our game might look like shaded, but for now that will have to be something for the future.

in other art related news,  a few assets have been coming along nicely. For the better part of the week I know Branan has been working hard on getting some humanoid models looking nice and that will define a core for our game. meanwhile Rachel has some nice enemy designs going, that I personally think look pretty cool

So this is a really awesome wolf design, and personally I can’t wait to see this textured, rigged and in game. I’m not sure if this will be the final model but I really like it a lot, so hopefully we can keep it in.

some other things we have been doing are really trying to flush out design concepts. you will notice in last weeks post we got some nice looking world map concepts being created, and this week we are starting to focus in on each individual part of the world.

here is a sort of level design I created on google sketch up and have been trying to recreate in maya.

so as you can see there is quite a bit of elevation going on in this design of this level. hopefully the programmers will be able to do the collision detection for elevation because I really like this design, I imagine the trough in the middle to be a river flowing from a water fall and the highest area is a bright green meadow.

well that’s most of what we have to report for this week. hopefully for next week alot of this stuff starts coming together as a whole and we can actually start to see how it will all look in a level and maybe with some textures.
until then; thanks for reading and hope you had a good weekend!

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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

Pre-Production and Getting Started

Hey guys,

So this week we finalized our group. It’s official, Team Overlord now has six members. In addition to the members we mentioned last post, we’ve also added Gordon Tan, our group’s third programmer. So this semester, Team Overlord has already reached a few “team firsts”, for the first time we have six members and we have not one, not two, but three dedicated programmers. We’re excited about the things our team will be able to accomplish this semester.

So our final group will be:

Gary Ng: Game Director, Lead Programmer and Gameplay Programmer

Branan Sarveswaren: Art Director, Lead 3D Artist and 2D Artist

Rachel Fung: Lead 2D Artist and 3D Artist

Mackenzie Sturrup: Particle Programmer and Audio

Alexander Best: Technical Programmer and 3D Artist

Gordon Tan: Gameplay Programmer and Engine/Framework Programmer

A (rough) world map concept created by Gary.

Aside from finalizing our team, we also had a lengthy discussion on the design of our game. We haven’t finalized everything yet, we’re going to do that the next team meeting, but we’ve already decided that we will be redesigning SHFT into a third person RPG. We felt that with our new team we would be able to express ourselves much better in an RPG than an RTS, so we will be doing that instead. Since SHFT already had a first person view, we can merely just rip out the RTS elements of the game and re-design it around a third person view pretty easily.

We still don’t have a set story or world designed yet, but we’re most likely going to once again use Jack and document his adventures through Fantasyland. We plan on fleshing out Fantasyland a lot to make it a legitimate world. We had text  based descriptions of it in Portal Puffs and we had a brief graphical view of it in SHFT and we plan on expanding it to include a variety of areas.

As far as game play goes, we want our game to be extremely epic. We plan on having a ton of abilities that the player can use and a ton of enemies that you will be able to face too. We want this game to have as much content as possible. We’re aiming for at least an hour of legitamate content. It’s a pretty ambitious goal, but it’s definitely doable.

We also had a pretty lengthy discussion on whether or not we wanted to include a gunblade in our game this time around. We had one in SHFT but a few of our members advocate against it for a variety of reasons whereas one of our members really wants to put it in. You may have heard us arguing about it during our meeting last Monday. The decision isn’t final yet, but we’ll let you know!

Looks pretty good, but are we using it again????? Edit: "NOPE" - Branan -

After this Monday’s meeting, we’ll likely have the core design of our game finalized and we’ll be entering production. Hypehypehype.

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