Gameplay Video

Here is our First Playable build.

Current Build: First Playable

Team: Frozen Shoe

Year: Fall 2010

KDR focuses on four different player classes possessing two abilities each.  The team is currently going in a futuristic games tone, where new art assets and a focused look will attempt to present how physical games might look and perform in the future.

[Link to Game Website]

Gameplay Video

Here is the First Playable that was turned in.

Current Build: First Playable

Team: Dead Pandas


Year: Fall 2010

Incandescence takes place in a city that never sleeps, surrounding itself with music-based elements like speakers and music-based street-signs.  Fast cars, fast roads, and fast-paced gameplay drive this game home.

[Website in Progress]

Current Build: First Playable

Team: Trainwreck


Year: Fall 2008

Orb-o-Bots is a simple demo that tests multiplayer and graphics, as well as physics, resolution across a large number of objects on screen at a time.  The goal is to take down other opponents with your orbs, and different colored orbs will disperse different effects on other players or the environment.

[Website in Progress]

Current Build: Gold

Team: Shortbus All-Stars


Year: Fall 2007 – Spring 2008

BLT takes the traditional classes that RPGs have cherished for years and creates a turn-based strategy game based on this parody world.  Every class has the ability to either move, attack, or defend, as well as gear up for special moves that results in combination multipliers.

[Website in Progress]

Third-person puzzle exploration with eye-catching crystals.

Gameplay Video

Here is the final Gold build that was turned in.

Current Build: Gold

Team: Ragequit


Year: Fall 2009 – Spring 2010

Lux creates a quietly intimidating, dark world of caves for the player to explore and conquer using light crystals.  Each crystal can bounce light that is initially fed in from lonely ceiling cracks scattered across the scene.  To finally break free from the darkness, the player must light up the world by using these mysterious crystals advantageously.

In-Depth Analysis

Here is a more detailed look on the creative process that went throughout Lux‘s year-long development cycle.

Technical High Concept

Lux is a third-person 3D puzzle exploration game for the PC where you are trapped in a brilliant but completely pitch-dark crystal cavern and must solve light-based puzzles to light up your surroundings.

Design

The motivation behind this game stemmed from numerous design discussions over burgers and fries.  The core team was as such:

Ben Gast – Technical Director, Base Framework & Sound Programmer

Jessica Nam - Producer, Graphics Programmer

Evan Lesh – Graphics Programmer

Leon Han – Physics Programmer

As you can see, there was no dedicated “Gameplay” Programmer or a Designer that we could gracefully lean on in times of detail-oriented gameplay madness.

Due to these limitations, I pitched for a short and sweet game; in turn, Lux was the first game that I had truly designed and put into play.

Game Design Document | Project Planning Document

Technical

These are early screenshots from First Playable.

One of the key features to attaining a consistent look and feel was volumetric lighting and working light rays.

Getting volumetric lighting into play took out one of our graphics programmers entirely, as developing known, but more work-intensive procedures like deferred rendering and volumetric lighting under a tight school schedule was a hard bargain.

Each team member having around five to six classes not including this game project class for what Lux was for, I divided the task list like this:

Ben Gast – Framework & Sound


Jessica Nam - Graphics Engine & Design


Evan Lesh – Animations & Shaders


Leon Han – Physics & Gameplay

The convenient thing about this setup was that everyone was still doing what they asked for, and Leon was able to tackle Gameplay with more polish during the second semester in Spring. In the meantime, I added four artists with the help of Professor Rachel Rutherford–one of our game instructors–and Professor Chun Lu.  This strategy was formed out of an experimental class structure for CG350 that incorporated artists specifically working on game teams.  The following was the artist setup:

Aaron Wong-Weinreib – Art Lead

Zack Fenelon – Animator

Blake Goral – Character Artist

Joe Towns – Concept Artist

Links

Playable Demo | Game Website

People are distinct, difficult, and interesting.

It’s not all about “work.”

It’s about people.

Being able to copy/paste with standard CTRL+C and CTRL+V into command prompt (and Visual Studio’s command prompt, for that matter,) is amazing.

That is all.

It’s kind of a long, unique process that, fundamentally, is hard to describe.  For the purpose of this post, I’ll just go over some of the things that seem to work where I am.

Compared to being at school, it’s a stricter environment.  It’s not strict in the sense that you have your head down, you’re working, and you don’t feel like you can speak up.

It’s the kind of (pressure?) that aligns you to a more focused environment.  Understanding the responsibility behind your position, where you stand, what you can do to enhance and support the project.  You are more aware of what you are allowed to do.

It also means that you have to participate whenever given the opportunity.  Don’t ever look back, don’t ever hesitate.  It’s those kind of moments where you should shine, tell the team or management what you want to do or change during meetings to avoid them being a waste of everyone’s time.   Keeping everyone up-to-date is harder than I thought in a bigger company, so if it takes an extra email or a conversation at the water tank to do it–you should definitely, definitely do it.

Also, just because it’s a bigger company doesn’t mean the project won’t grow and evolve conceptually.  People in charge of brands or big names in general need even more reason to figure out something fresh and interesting for a growing market like video games; even if the design changes for one part of the game, don’t freak out.  Getting a handle on fast prototyping and general iteration will increase your grasp of what you want to keep, and what you want to throw out.  Even if you have a promising feature, if there’s something better, embrace it.

Currently searching for a way to properly integrate the lslua-0.6.5 module into my LiteStep configuration.  Not sure why it’s not accepting the downloaded module, since the path is correct.  It may very well be a Windows 7 compatibility issue, which may have been solved in the 0.25 LS Alpha build, but I haven’t gotten my hands on it just yet (forgot all about LS for a good three years or so..)  Needless to say, I’m a bit out of the loop with the LS community.  Nabbed a few more modules that are more current, like the newest jdesk.

I’ll update this later with a Most Useful Modules list and/or Installation Packages for Litestep at some point once I’m done questing.

For those who don’t know, Sunbird’s the loner Mozilla calendar program that doesn’t get enough love.  It’s pretty much like Desktop gCal or iCal.  I stopped using the old Sunbird release after I realized how nifty gCal was, but after coming back to Mozilla for the newest release, I haven’t regretted it.

First off, the layout has been modified so that it looks … a lot like gCal.  The labeling, the task list on the top, the main calendar right below it.  There’s a day, week, multi-week, and month view.  Lifehacker’s probably gone over this app enough times though, so I’ll get to the point.

Like the rest of its Mozilla brothers, Sunbird has an error console that spits out warning/errors whenever you do something not so great.  The problem is, sometimes Sunbird will complain with the usual helpful pop-up, saying that you’ve done terrible, terrible things.  Other times though, it will just silently log whatever you tried doing and mark an error in the error console.

The error that I replicated a few times was when I was trying to copy a repeatable task onto another day, because one thing that Sunbird doesn’t do (as far as I know,) is do multi-day repeatables, i.e. having the same event repeat on both Monday and Wednesday.  It also doesn’t seem to have an ending date for when the repeatables should stop either, but that option might be hidden somewhere else that I haven’t looked for yet (which is still a bad idea, since options like that should be in the main event window anyway.)

What I do like is the user control, like being able to drag events from time A to time B.  The interface itself is rather smooth, and if you’re interested in a desktop calendar, Sunbird will quickly be one of the best ones out there.  Here’s to hoping they come out with another solid release.