Project Blend - Coming to an End

So. This is it. Project Blend shall be in and over on Thursday. As such everyone is going into hyperdrive this week, so we can hand in something we are proud of.

As only level 5 is going to end up completed the rest the story is going told through a series of pictures and narration, informing the reader what happened from levels 1-5. There will also be a similar thing once the player has completed level 5, telling them the events of level 6 and the epilogue.

Two versions of this have been written by me, a short and a long version. The short version does not give much of the actual story, just the premise. K is drawing the pictures that I suggested to go along with the narration, and the narration shall be recorded tomorrow. Then Martin shall take these and create a scene which plays them together.

Additionally everyone has played through the build, and have been posting their impressions of it on  their blogs. My impression follows:

First a few bugs/ annoying things found that I shall report:

• Blueberry  health slightly to high.
• Hard to know what lane the fodder is in if there are only a few.
• The fodder runs away from you.

Now a few impressions... as I had thought may have been the case when it was first thought of, the aiming thing for the attack feels horrible. It feels really just added on and in the way. The game feels like I should simply be slashing whatever I am facing, as similar games do. But instead you end up clicking away frustrated, wondering why you are not hitting the enemy,  simply because the aim thing is somewhere else. I have talked to the others, and it seems it is unfortunately too late to change this. Although I still think it should be changed, as it makes the game feel clunky and broken, a state I am sad to see the game.

On a more positive note, the game looks amazing! I am very grateful to K, Alan and the others who put lots of work into the 3D and textures. Thankyou.

The sound, is also very very good, so thanks to the sound students, and the sound effects by me, Ben, Naomi and Sam.

Lastly everything else apart from what I talked about above, has been programmed very well. The enemy AI is occasionly a bit buggy, but other from that everything is superb.

Oh also I have been collating the Story and Characters part of the Operational Document.

Final sprint.... GOOOO!

Project Blend - It's been a while

Sorry for the very belated update. Dissertation has overtaken my life.
Anyways, here's what has been happening with Blend.

Before Easter the group decided that due to time constraints we shall only endeavour to get Level 5 to a fully finished, polished state. There is simply not enough time for anything else.

We then all had break over Easter, at Stacy's orders. We needed to stop focus everything on blend, and now get on with Dissertation and Marketing.

On that note during Easter I got my dissertation game finalised and started testing. I am very glad to have been collecting data.

We have all returned from Easter and work on Blend has been going slowly. I am to work with Daryl on an opening cinematic, contextualising the game. I shall also separately implement the Dialogue into the triggers.

Also here is my list of deadlines


9th of May - Marketing
10th of May - Preliminary Dissertation Presentation
12th of May - Dissertation
19th of May - Project Blend
20th of May - Final Dissertation Presentation

D:

... I can do this! xD

Project Blend - Implementing subtitles and slight balancing

Annoyingly because of other work and social reasons, I dropped the ball on blend this week, and did not have a redraft of the Level 2 dialogue done. This was completely my fault and I must make this up to the team.  The silver lining I guess, is that it turns out the dialogue is not needed yet as we are to prioritise level 5.

This week I worked on three things.

• I implemented the Level 5 dialogue into the game through the use of Daryl's text manager.
• I worked on textures.
• I looked at balancing with Ben.

The balancing included playing through the level with Ben and telling him what I thought of the combat, and what I thought could be changed.

Project Blend - balancing and dialogue

So I've been working away on the level 2 dialogue now. I have done a first draft of this which is basically giving what needs to be said. I now need to do a redraft of that including the character voice concepts. Then I will get together with a small group to make it better, before finally doing a final redraft. I will then have to find some people and do some voice acting.

We were also all assigned to look at the latest build of the game, and look at errors. The main errors I found were the pears could walk through things, and sometimes the jump stops working when on ramps. Balancing wise the jump has been changed and now feels alot nicer. There are also a few problems with the gore, as it messes up when it hits corners, and the amount that spawns needs to be balanced.

I shall now go sort out the level 2 dialogue and test toonshading on the character

Project Blend - Voice tasks

So the tasks I assigned last week were for people to give a short examples and descriptions of what the characters sound like. The were 9 tasks in total, which shall be detailed below.

Alan – Helon and Tomato

K – Captain Fennel, Physalis and Pear

Daryl – The Grapevine and Cherries

Adam – Orange and Guava

Sean – Blueberries and Blackberries

Remis – Strawberry

Ben – Logan 

I shall update this later to show who has done this or not. Also when these are all done I shall collate them into a document and post it here.

Project Blend - Texturing

I've pretty much just been texturing since the last post. A few of the things I textured are below:

Awesome spike pit of death!

A generic Pepper pot

A half eaten slice of pizza.

Project Blend - 3D andTextures and stuff

Ok so from last week I have been working hard, helping K out with 3D. I even did one of the first object textures for a can.

No one has actually replied to my forum topic, so i'll either have to get people to talk about it in a physical meeting, or just do it myself... or I guess as a coordinator I could actually assign a character to different people on the team, and make them write some stock dialog for the character and short description of this.