Week 13 – Finalizing the GDW game and GDW presentations

                For the past week, my group and I have been working very hard on completing our GDW game, Bloody Mary, and preparing for the presentations on Tuesday morning. Our whole team is trying very hard to have everything done by 8am Tuesday, and it could be a long night tonight…

Newly added zombies lying in the hallway

Dead zombies in the second last room

                For most of my time working on our GDW game, I added several zombie models into the second last room, and the only problem was that the pivot point of the model wasn’t the same as the position of the node, so there was plenty of trial and error in order to get it working properly. I had also worked on fixing the rotations for all the doors in our level, so that they rotate properly, and in the proper direction. I also fixed the final door in the grand room that leads to the exit, which requires the player to have all 4 weapons in the game, 2 swords and 2 hammers. After tweaking around with that code, the player can now collect all 4 weapons to open that door properly. Our programmers also worked on this, in order to ensure that the code works for the player to pick up each of the 4 weapons, as well as for the HUD art to appear in the player inventory section of the screen after picking up a weapon. The weapons will also ‘teleport’ to the corresponding knight statue after being picked up by the player.

Zombie type2 lying in the hallway

                That’s all for this week, and this is the last blog of the year for Game Engines! Thanks for reading through all my blog posts!

Week 12 – More GDW work – creating an installer for our game, and combining all our code

View of the grand room from the cinematic camer

                For the past week, my group and I have been combining code to form a “master copy”, as we finally got some shaders to work with the game, and a particle system that consisted of many small textured cubes imported from Maya. I also learned how to create an installer for our game with knowledge from the previous lab. This made it much easier to transfer our game to one another in Drop Box. After several days of hard work, we have nearly completed our GDW game, Bloody Mary. Almost everything is functional now, with the exception of a win state and some additional sounds. When the player starts the game, he/she can choose between a boy or a girl to play with, which will change the sound the character makes whenever he/she is hit by a ghost. The player can then view the grand room via a rotation cinematic camera we had set up. The player then spawns in the first room, and can listen to the knight statue who will give the player a map and instructions. The player can then progress through the level, gathering the required keys and weapons to open the locked doors. We also made it so that whenever a ghost is near the player, he/she will hear some eerie sounds, signaling that a ghost is chasing them. There are also sounds for footsteps, picking up and interacting with the objects and doors.

The knight statue at the start of the game, who gives the player a map

                I was also working on the hard exp question that involves making several AI’s, and the majority of my code was taken from our GDW game, which already had a simple AI working.

A view of the grand room with the knight statues

                That’s all for this week, stay tuned for more updates next week!

Week 11 – GDW work continued…

One of the keys the player needs to get

                For the past week, our group has been working hard to get our GDW game up and running, and currently we have some progress compared to the previous week. We have all the doors functioning now (can be toggled using the action key, “E”), and we have basic AI and movement for one of the ghost girls, and we currently have a fully functioning health bar and light bar (which gets depleted while the light is turned on). The movement and camera systems are pretty much the same as before, and we plan to fix the glitch involving movement using the WASD keys. We also added a light that can be toggled using the “F” key, and are currently trying to make the screen turn red when the player is low on health. This is temporarily done by adding a red hue to the lighting, and we plan to turn that into something that only triggers when the player is low on health. We also added a map for our game, which can be toggled by pressing the “M” key, and as the player moves to a different wing, the map will change to the corresponding map of that wing (the only exceptions are the neutral rooms, which don’t really need a map as they are pretty straight forward). The map works in real time, with a blue dot representing the player’s current location, which moves as the player moves around the level. 

One of the doors opening

All the keys, which are used to unlock the door to the next wing, are working properly now, as well as the sword and hammer, which are used to unlock the final door to the exit. The player also uses the “E” key to pick up and interact with any objects, such as the keys, weapons, and health and oil powerups. We plan to put 2-4 statues of a knight in the large room, and the player will have to place each weapon on the corresponding statue, in order to unlock the final door to the exit. We’re also currently trying to figure out how to put in skeletal animations, particle systems, shaders, and sound (using FMOD), which are only partially done at the moment due to our programmers getting stuck at some point for each requirement we have yet to do.

One of the oil bottles that will refill your lantern (bottom right)

That’s all for this week, stay tuned for more updates on my game engines progression!

Week 10 – Creating a Havok tank, and working hard on my GDW game: Bloody Mary

                For this week, we did not have class due to MIGS, so most of my group and I decided to meet up every day to work on our GDW game, which is called Bloody Mary. I also got 40 exp last Friday after showing my final medium exp question to the TA.

The room that the player starts in

                Our GDW game has gone a long way, as I managed to figure out how to import our entire level from Maya into the Ogre engine during the last tutorial session last week. Once the entire level was imported into Ogre, our programmers worked on the camera and movement system. They had managed to get that working well, and now the player can rotate the camera using the mouse, and to move the character using the WASD keys. The player can use the space bar to shoot a cannon ball (using code from medium question #2), which is used to test the rigid bodies in the level. They are also currently working on rotating the doors, which went well except for the double doors, which rotate in both directions rather than opening towards or away from the player.

One of the hallways in the first wing

                The last medium exp question that I did was #2, where I had to create a tank in Ogre using Havok and Maya. I had to create all of the objects in Maya and turned them into rigid bodies in order for the Havok content tools to export them into .fbx and .hkx files. I then took code from my previous exp question, the one about cameras and merged it with code from the Havok tutorial, and also code from the Ray Picking sample. The player can control the tank itself using the arrow keys, and rotate the cannon on top of the tank using the IJKL keys. Pressing the space bar will shoot a cannon ball, and if it collides with any of the cubes set up around the area, it will knock them over. 

One of the keys needed to get past the first wing

Stay tuned for more updates on my game engines progression!