A Few Updates - Paper Samurai, Umbra

Paper Samurai:

I'll start off by talking about Paper Samurai, our second Game Jam idea. We ended up only having two people doing the coding for the game, which uses the HTML5-based engine Construct2 . Since the code(Which consists of setting up events, not any 'real' coding) should be pretty easy, we figured we could handle having two people. Bryan Harlow is tackling the menu system, as well as a character customization system, which he has almost done. I've been working on the combat system and getting it to the specifications of our creative director, Michael Otten. All I have left to put in is the adjusted enemy AI and set up the animations, once I get some actual images I can use. More on that in a second... Also, we are setting it up for touch so it can be played on phones, tablets, etc. The code team is moving pretty fast through the features we want accomplished, I just hope the art team is working hard so we can keep on schedule.

Back to what I was saying about giving team members assets they can work with. I was given an document containing the line drawings of the character for the Jam. I was expecting to get either sprite sheets with animations, or at the very least a cropped image that I could just drop into the engine. While it is not that hard to crop them out of the original document and put them into Construct2, I shouldn't have to do that since I'm helping with the code. That's like a team working on a big game and the the art team giving the programmers 3DS Max files with the assets in them instead of exporting them and importing them into the engine. Then when the programmers open the Max files they find that not only do they have to export the asset, but they also have to unwrap it too. It is each teams job to hand over assets to the other team that are ready to be used by the other team. For instance I wouldn't give the art team a list of events that need to be in the game, in some random order, and expect them to do your job for you. Anyway, enough of my rant...It's just something that's been bothering me for a while now.

Umbra:

Since I was already making a post, I figured I'd throw up the models I made for this week. I did some cliffs that (hopefully) will be able to be used in lots of different areas, as well as some rock clusters. Here they are:

Here is one cliff set with two pretty rectangular cliffs.

Here is the same big cliff with a the smaller one more sloped.

Here is a rock cluster that will probably only be used as ground detail, it is pretty small.

And finally we have a large rock formation with a big slanted rock.

All I have left to do is make a some collision meshes for the big rock formation and do a few more concepts for tonight's class. After this week I should be able to start working on specific assets for our level.