So I was finally able to get a gameplay video of our final project game(Super Power Surge Spike) up on the internet. Check it out.
embedded by Embedded Video
vimeo Direkthttp://www.vimeo.com/3963816
So after a long 5 months Team Booty Rock has finally finished our amazing game Super Power Surge Spike. We are very pleased to present our game and always appreciate any feedback. You can send feedback to philip@philipfox.com. Enjoy the game.
DuskJacket:
Alice is a malicious computer virus. As the player, you must help her to infect machines, thwart the defensive efforts of security software, and ultimately seize control of the system. Due to her unique programming, she is able to absorb elemental energy from nearby power sources, such as electrical, liquid coolant, heat, and air. Using these powers alone or in devastating combinations, you must eradicate any traces of security before Alice can complete her infestation. It will not be easy, as Alice is designed to infiltrate extremely secure systems. They are hostile towards any intrusion, and will retaliate with extreme force. You must balance attack with evasion to ensure Alices’ survival.
Features:
16 different attacks with different effects
-Electric attacks: Stun enemies for a short duration
-Fire attacks: Will put a damage over time effect on enemies hit by fire
-Ice attacks: Slows down targets hit by any ice effect
-Wind attacks: Gust of wind knocks enemies away when hit
4 different types of enemies each with unique abilities.
-Electric enemies: Teleport to flank and avoid attacks
-Fire enemies: On death will sap your primary and secondary energy
-Ice enemies: Increased health and resistence
-Wind enemies: Ability to jump for a quicker path to the player
Multiple levels
Multiple Game Modes - Survival and Main Game modes
Multi-stage Boss
Profile system supporting unlimited profiles
Achievement system
High score tracking
Post process effects
Download
So ever since Alpha our game has been plagued by a second playthrough crash. This crash has caused us to waste precious manhours attempting to hunt down this elusive crash. With less than a week to go we have officially stomped this crash into the ground with the help of a program called Ensure++.
Ensure++ is a memory profiler/checker made by Parasoft. From what I can tell by watching my teammate Justin use this program is it compiles your code through their program and then profiles the code and the memory your program is using during runtime looking for any errors. It took us two hours last night of using this program to locate where our elusive crash was happening.
I’d like to thank the amazing people at Parasoft for giving us the opportunity to trial their amazing product in an attempt to find this crash. This has truly brought much needed morale to our team during the push to a final build of our game.
Thank you Parasoft.
We had Beta presentations yesterday and it went amazing. The game is looking great and we ended up pulling an all nighter on Sunday to get all of our features in for Beta. Our Beta build is up on the site now, the biggest current issue though with our game is that it does in fact crash on the second playthrough of the game. It’s a crash that has stuck around with us since Alpha and we are still looking into the cause of the crash.
So last Thursday Vicarious Visions, a studio underneath Activision, came and visited Full Sail. Vicarious Visions has made many console and handheld games, Guitar Hero is one of their main IPs that they make games for. They also make alot of ports from different consoles to consoles.
My fellow teammate Tyler Keenan, myself, and Ten other Full Sailers got the pleasure to sitdown with Claudia Franco from Activision, Kerry Allen a former student from Full Sail and current programmer at Vicarious Visions, and Christina Nichols a recruiter at Vicarious Visions. All three of them had amazing information about both Activision and Vicarious Visions, got great information on how the interview process is done at VV, got some information on Demonware which is a middleware api Activision is starting to use.
So after the 1 hour sitdown we went to final presentations where my roommate and some other friends were presenting their games. At 5 o’clock that night VV put on a presentation where they took in many questions from Full Sailers that were very curious about both companies.
Early the next morning I was able to interview with VV for a possible job with them. I think the interview went amazing and wanted to thank Kerry and Christina for making it a very relaxing atmosphere. VV seems like a company I could really see myself fitting in at and I look forward to following up on the interview.
But just wanted to give one final thank you to Claudia Franco, Kerry Allen, and Christina Nichols for taking the time out of their schedules to come down and visit Full Sail. Wanted to also give another shout out to our amazing Career Development Department at Full Sail for giving us an opportunity to meet amazing companies like VV and Activision. Rob Coble continues to do an amazing job of getting these companies interested in Full Sail.
But about to do Beta presentations, so we will have our Beta build up on the website this afternoon….
So this past Wednesday I was able to sitdown for an hour with about 10 other fellow Full Sail students and talk to Mike Mumbauer, the Senior Manager for Visual Arts Service Group at Sony, and Melissa Banks, the College Recruiter at Sony Entertainment. This sitdown was geared very heavily towards the Art and Animation side but Mike has about 15+ years of game and film industry experience so it was great to hear all of the knowledge he has gathered over the years. For being an animation guy he knew a lot about programming as well so it was a great experience. So just wanted to thank Melissa and Mike for visiting Full Sail and giving us the opportunity to sitdown and talk with some experts in the game industry.
So we had our Feature Fragment 2 turn in and presentation yesterday. It went amazing, our presentation is pretty solid we just have some aesthetics to fix with our slides. The game is looking great as well, one of our teachers said he is really happy with where we are at as far as gameplay goes. One of the big things I think our team really needs to focus on from here until Beta next month is on a lot of polish. We have a lot of features implemented in the game but they’re not extremely polished. We need to add a lot more player feedback to the game as of right now.
But anyways the build is up now so check it out under the projects section.
So this holiday season there are a lot, I mean a lot, of great games coming out. Last month we had Fable 2, Farcry 2, Fallout 3, STALKER 2(I know that’s not the name but it’s easier to reference it), Spiderman: Web of Shadows, Dead Space(Which is scary as hell), and Silent Hill: Homecoming. So that was just October for great games coming out.
In November we get Left 4 Dead, WoW: Wrath of the Lich King, Gears of War 2, COD: World at War, Mirror’s Edge, Banjo Kazooie: Nuts and Bolts(Which looks phenomenal), Tomb Raider: Underworld, and Sacred 2.
In December we get a couple of games, the new Prince of Persia game which looks insane, and a new Destroy All Humans.
So as a gamer I am insanely pumped about the games coming out this holiday season. Also if you are a former WoW addict and haven’t checked out Wrath of the Lich King yet I highly recommend you give it a shot. Picked it up last night and I have to say I am really impressed with the polish and changes they have made to WoW since I last played in April.
So if you’ve never played video games in your life then you probably don’t know who Blizzard is. But if you’ve been playing games for more than 3 years then Blizzard should be a name that tingles parts in your body. They’ve made small games such as Diablo I,II, and working on Diablo III. Starcraft I and working on Starcraft II, Lost Vikings I & II, and the small franchise of Warcraft I,II,III, and World of Warcraft.
So Blizzard stopped by Full Sail to talk to students and give a presentation about Blizzard themselves. A lot of the presentation was about how to get a job at Blizzard as a programmer,designer, or artist. They also discussed how they are making their local internship program national now and how they are starting to hire a lot more entry level positions. So it was a great presentation and you would think I would be plenty satisfied with them just giving a presentation.
But I was 1 of 7 lucky game development students who got to sit down with Blizzard for an hour and talk about many different things. I was also part of one of the lucky final project groups who got to sit down with the Blizzard people and have them check out our game and talk about how things are done at Blizzard. That was great and they seemed to really like our concept, we also told them that we got a lot of our abilities from WoW and Diablo. They seemed surprised by that.
Oh but it’s not over yet, Rob Coble the head of Career Development for the Game Development program here at Full Sail called me earlier this week end informed me I had the rare opportunity to actually sit down and interview with Blizzard for 20 minutes. This was amazing and I was very excited to actually get to sit down with them. The interview itself was a lot of fun and I really appreciate them coming down and checking out how great Full Sail really is and how passionate we are about games here.
So to end this I would really like to thank the two employees from Blizzard Entertainment University Relations who stopped by and visited out school: Choua Her and Sumer Ortiz.
Check out this story on CNN, this guy is amazing and is the reason I’m proud to be American. There is a statement in the article about how this guy is an endangered specie. Very touching article.
So went ahead and added my resume finally. I also added all of my final project documentation for the two projects I worked on: Ghostly Manor and Super Power Surge Spike. So if you get bored check em out.
So our Feature Fragment 1 was on this past Monday. Feature Fragment 1 is essentially the first core features we aim to implement into our game. WE did amazing, we actually had alot of our FF2 stuff almost done as well so we are ahead of schedule as of right now. I didn’t want to post the FF1 build though mainly due to a couple rare bugs we found in the release mode of the build, but FF2 will be complete a week from Monday so i’ll get that build up as soon as possible.
As far as the team synergy goes, we are doing great. Everyone on the team seems to have become alright with how the team works and we have discovered most of everyones limits and how far to push them. We do have the occasional fight but the fact we are so productive really balances that out. I am very happy with Team Booty Rock so far and can’t wait to show off our final product.
So last week we had our first milestone for the new game i’m working on. This milestone is called the proof of concept. The whole point of this milestone is to prove to our investors that we have the ability to build the technology for the game we pitched a month ago.
So what we ended up pitching was a basic menu in place with some menu music playing, a simple animation playing for our avatar in game, the ability to shoot a fireball and collide that fireball with enemies who are just a bunch of spheres set up around the level, and finally some simple platforming in with a mix of simple gravity. Notice how I mentioned simple alot, we really wanted to focus on gameplay elements since that’s what most of our game is truly made up of.
So we ended up doing really well on our POC, our External Producer Brian was really happy with what we came up with.
I am currently in the process of uploading our most current build were working on up to my website, but it shows what we had for POC with some more tech added as well. Feel free to leave me feedback on the build if you’d like.
You can download the build in my projects section or download here.
Ok so it’s been a while since i’ve posted. A LOT has happened since last post, our team ended up failing our first class so i was reshuffled back into a new group. So far the group is great, we have a bunch of passionate guys which can be good but also has it’s downfalls. We do argue alot but it’s always about our game which is great.
So my graduation date is now pushed back to Febuary 2009, but it was for the better. But been busy designing our Asset list, Gantt Chart, and Tech Doc these past few weeks. We are very eager to start programming in the next upcoming months.
So we are contemplating using Google’s Sketchup program to make the smaller content in our game because of the abundance of free models out on the internet that are made in Sketchup. This plugin allows you to take a sketchup model and export it out as a DirectX x File format.
Ok so we had a team building exercise yesterday in our Public speaking class. In this exercise we were given 250 something toothpicks, a bag of small mashmallows, and a bag of big marshmallows. Now what we had to do was build the tallest freestanding structure in twenty minutes. It was a grueling task but we came out victorious(wink wink).
Heres a picture of the winning structure:
And of course Caseys soon to be famous I LOVE RENDERING picture:
So it’s been a couple weeks since i’ve last posted a blog. I have been really busy working on the game that was selected for us to make. Last blog i mentioned we had two games going into an arena, one game gets to leave alive. The two games we had were basically a top down sort of Devil May Cry type of game or a FPS MegaMan set inside of a spooky house. Well the FPS was the game that was in fact chosen, we have further developed this game and the name of it is Ghostly Manor.
So in this game you play as the character named Jim Howler. You just recently died and you are sent to the after life where you end up in Deaths basement for “judgement” essentially. But before Death can judge you, you must make it up to the attic where Death is lounging around, but throughtout his house there are angry spirits who for now want to stop you from getting there. When you defeat these enemies you gain their abilities and a special secondary ability.
We have 5 levels already planned out with 4 boss encounters in the game, we will be busting our butts from now until December to implement all of this. I’ll keep you updated.
So last week i announced we got our groups for our final project. Well after a hard week of designing two game ideas, we actually get to pitch them to our classmates and to our teacher tomorrow. It is going to be a stressful day since one of our ideas is going to be picked and the other is going in the trash.
So very excited and also stressed about tomorrow, but hopefully we give some good presentations and we end up with a game that each one of us will be happy making!
So it’s been a long day, starting off with a lot of laughs mixed with tons of stress, lunch was a subway sandwich while we sat in anticipation wondering who we would be stuck with for the next 5 months. As we returned to school we sat down and slowly were given our groups by Liam Hislop.
I have to say i am extremely happy with the group I ended up with, i really think we can come up with a great game. We already have one solid game idea that everyone seems to like and the other idea we have is coming along really well and we should be ready for our game pitches, where we must give 2 back to back presentations on our game ideas and then our instructors one of them for us to do it on.
Our group:
Casey Flach
Luke DeLaet
Winston Miller
Michael Kofman
and me, Philip Fox
So like I mentioned earlier i am really excited for this group and i can’t wait to get something amazing up on this site.
So at Full Sail the last 5 months of the Game Development Degree program is a final project in which you are teamed up with usually 4-5 other people with the goal of making a finished 3D game. Well tomorrow our groups will be picked and I will make a game with these other programmers for the final 5 months of my life. The groups are randomly chosen so that’s what makes it so stressful I think. But to tell you the truth I’m actually really excited about this, mainly because I am 5 months away from finally graduating.
So wish me luck, I’ll try to document the crazy schenanigans we get into on my blog as much as i can.