Development

Well, a lot has certainly happened on the development side with which I have completely failed to keep you up-to-date. We have had some excellent feedback from all over. Our mid-project presentations went well and were certainly a good opportunity to raise awareness for the game, and then more recently our testing sessions.

Feedback has been invaluable, especially to the development process. Areas that I might have thought needed more attention (such as the AI agent's actual "intelligence") were shown to be far less important than, say, how the player might be able to leave the track or get stuck in an awkward corner. The main aim for this game is to be fun, so it is extremely important that nothing annoys the person playing and fluidity is maintained. I'm learning a lot here.

Sometimes things don't always go as expected...

Game Play testing begins :D

At the end of last week we held our first play testing session here at the University. This was the first time the game has been tested with people other than ourselves and was really good to see how others played the game and hear what they thought about it. We set up Wiimotes for the testers to use and the game was available to play in single and two-player modes (with AI opponents). Here are a few images of the session and a demonstration of a two-player race using the Wiimotes (please ignore the video quality and the commentary!)

Phase 1 down!

Having finished modelling all the structures, level decorations (doors, windows, etc), and most of the vegetation I thought it would be a good time to put another environment post up. All the structures are in the level along with a few decorations and vegetation assets. The lighting and terrain colours have been adjusted to make the place a lot brighter too. I'm now about to enter the vast world of texturing and set dressing!




We are now ready to start play testing the game properly and will be conducting feedback sessions weekly here at the University.

Piggy Preview

As well as helping Ian with some aspects of GUI I have now moved on to modelling the pig. We still have few things to iron out with the Aristocrat and Cow but these are now things which will be done more easily in bulk when we have all the character assets created.


This fella is about half the height of the cow but a similar width, creating a nice chunky feel with a low centre of gravity. The saddle looks particularly precarious on the top of his bum so I added handles on the back for the rider to hold. I am hoping to generate a more wobbly effect with the pig and have asked to have control over the swing of the belly.


I also popped the aristocrat on the pig quickly to test the size of the saddle... loving the look of it!

Booooost

The boosting and crashing mechanisms are in place, the animations blend nicely between the different gaits and we're now in the process of putting the rider on his mount.

We have Wiimote control and, with a quick trip to Maplin, a home made sensor bar to polish it off. The level has a map, lap counter and timers, a boost bar and tokens to pick up around the track.


It has taken a lot of tweaking to get the AI system to work for recent additions since each mount might tackle a corner at a different speed. In light of this, it was a good move to develop AI alongside the other components of the game. New additions to the player controls can then easily be merged with the AI logic.

The AI system itself sits on top of the mount controller. This means that the AI agents have the same access to controls as any player. This was done to keep the game fair but does mean that the agents must be fairly clever to provide any real competition.


In other news, we are soon to add our first rider which ultimately means we can start working on attacking other players. I can't wait!