Game Design and Plan Week 12

So.. last blog this year guess I'll just get down to this then...

Firstly the game isn't finished... not a prototype nothing but good enough to show off. We will be working on it over the Christmas break, hope to release to the fans as soon as possible.

We had a presentation to do before we were finished for this year and it went... kinda badly... We thought we had to do a 20 minute presentation but turns out it was only meant to be a couple of minutes... so we had prepped a huge presentation talking about where we are how we got there and where we want to go in the future... Our presentation was also poorly practiced, so it went horribly, by the end john was looking quite bored, but once we had our game on screen he perked up a bit, Andrew was unable to say what he had to say attempting to focus on moving the character around screen, reading what he had to say then actually saying it, so I took over and talked randomly about the game mechanics. unfortunately we were unable to talk about where we wanted to be outlining our plans for Late Panda Studios and future games etc...

Well that's all I have to say for this... I'll see you in January, have a good Christmas and new year, hope I will. 

Thanks for reading, Stephen out...

Game Design and Plan Week 11

Right so we have made some progress but it was mostly Andrews coding that has advanced the game, I was able to create a menu screen that actually works and isn't just an image. It has text that links to the game and the credits, but the text for Level Select and Instructions don't do anything quite yet, as these screens have not been created.

Calum was able to make more awesome artwork, that includes the guards, and civilians each with spritesheets.

So yeah... the game is looking graphical great, not as good as on of the other groups but we build with the bricks we are given.

Best news I guess we are over 100 fans on facebook, so now we have to release the game to our fans next week... although I am unsure it will be in much of a working state for that.

Thanks for reading, Stephen out...

Game Design and Plan Week 10

So... The game was come quite far over this week... Told you last week I would have a better update so here it is...

Our game now has a working main menu which leads to the game itself, our Facebook page and Twitter page, which I completed myself, turned out quite difficult to do. I will continue to work on teh menu screens the credits is next on my list should take too long, I am waiting for Andrew to add a death function or something so I can start on the Gameover screen but I may be able to do this beforehand but we will just wait and see how things turn out.

Our main game code now has quite a bit of advanced code, our guards now chase the player until they have ran out of his line of sight. The civilians will be alerted by your presence and when they find a guard will alert them, we hope to advance this when we make the actual game with the civilians running straight to the guards  and when they alert the guard he would run to your last known position and search for you. I would advise checking out Andrew's Blog as he handled the majority of the harder game code, therefore he can rant on for a while about what he did.

We have updated the sprite it now looks awesome thanks to Calum, he will continue to work on the other sprites for out game for the rest of the characters. (sidenote cannot wait to see how they turn out!!!)

Justin was working on the artwork but now that Calum has provided artwork which looks slightly more fitting to our game, Calum will take over this task. I have asked Justin to look out for some sound FX we can use for our game making sure they are free to use.

I will wrap up here because I need to get back to the game heheh... 

Thanks for reading, Stephen out...

Game Design and Plan Week 9

This week there was not much done for our game, there was advancements made such as simple game mechanics have been fixed or added, but the majority of this week we have worked on our Rights and Creative Industries module as the assessment is almost due, once this has been completed we plan to work hard on the game until the prototype release date.

Our Facebook page still does not have enough likes for us to release the prototype to our fans, which is something we really want to do to keep them interested in our little studio, but it is getting difficult for us to keep our fans interest when we have nothing to update them with.

I have considered making an advertisement for our game but if we do this then we would need the basic artwork finished as soon as possible.

I will wrap this up here I am sure i'll make up for lack of detail next week as nothing else should hinder my spare time.
Thanks for reading, Stephen out...

Game Design and Plan Week 8

This week there was not much work done on our game. The class was cancelled as there was a trip planned for Dundee this week, which I attended alongside Andrew. I'll chat about that for a while because what else is a blog for!

Anyway I arrived at Glasgow Central about 9ish and met with Andrew, we then went to Glasgow Queen street to catch the train, we assumed others from the class would also attend the talk but no one else turned up between Glasgow Central and Dundee so it was Andrew and I alone in a new city, which was... great! So Andrew and I had arrived in Dundee and we had no idea where we were going so... we followed Dr. John Sutherland for a while then asked him. after a little walk about Dundee we arrived at Fat Sams and sat down for the conference.

It turned out better than I thought but I would have preferred to spend the time working on our project. We had someone come in during the talk who owned a game studio, which he had started with his friend. He talked about how he started and the problems he faced most of which where business errors. He finished talking about the merge between his company and ninja kiwi which he is now part owner.

After this talk Andrew and I talked about making Late Panda more official but it was agreed that we should wait until the first game is made then we will talk about taking it further over the summer and in spare time making games for Late Panda Studios.
Thanks for reading, Stephen out...

Game Design and Plan Week 7

Over this last week I was able to book the train tickets to get to Dundee next week, I will be attending with Andrew so hopefully we can have some kind of team interaction if not we will have a double class the week after or something.

After we arrived in class we had a short presentation of all the teams current stand points, the other teams seem to have some parts better than ours but I still strongly believe we have more work done.

We have less artwork but Justin is already on that, our game is not currently solid with no basic HTML5 or anything but this is something we are leaving until all the documentation is finished which by Friday it will be.

We had a meeting with Dr. John Sutherland later in the day and talked about risks again, and again we couldn't think of anything that we may face other than our fans losing interest.

Once we got to the labs we started discussing risks in more depth thinking about all the things we may or may not encounter, but still struggled to think of anything. I will leave this here for not because I could not get as much work done because I idiotically forgot my USB, i'll update soon.
Thanks for reading, Stephen out...

Stephen back in... (Marked Friday 09/11/2012 17:03)
Quick update I was unable to do anything until today been working the past few days and just been FAR too tired to bother, but today was my day off so the design document was finished YAY!!! Final draft is done, I am waiting on feedback from my team but once they are done with it I will post a link to our website with the document on it...

Speaking of which by the way... lots of stuff happened over this week forgot to mention some of it above we named our studio late panda and as a result of changing all the URLS and page names broke ALL of our links on all of our blogs including mine... : ( I was going to fix them all today or at some point but it would be better just to link them here again so...
Website home page
Website development team tab (or just go via site)
Website game updates tab (or just go via site)
Website assessment tab (or again just go via site)
Joker team fan page (now late pandas page)

er... think that's all... we have a group page but it private.. that's details people don't get to know yet.

Lots of things were changed as well images included on the site Andrew overhauled the whole site gotta say looks WAY better now, we now have no images owned by anyone else all images are drawn or royalty free such as the text used on the fan page.

We also go another fan burst Andrew linked our page asking for likes again and now we are up to 49 fans hope to get more and more we are trying quite hard to get a good fan base of out game.

I was looking at Andrews blog today... he added Justin images saying he had added the text and stuff, I was going to add them as well but I didn't do anything for those pictures so I am not going to bother... if you want to see them they are on the site links above enjoy : )

Anyway Thanks for reading the update I'll come back and link the document at some point today.
Thanks for reading, Stephen out...
Here you go link as promised, never say I let you down!

Game Design and Plan Week 6

Leading on from last week I looked over some HTML5 tutorials attempting to learn the code behind how something works, making the development easier on us, this went quite well as HTML5 is easy enough to understand once you have a firm grip on it.

Andrew sent me a compressed file of a game he had made using HTML5 tutorials online and after looking at the source code for this I believe our game may fall into place rather easily until we go beyond what we need.

After some time Andrew and I where talking about SDK (Software Development Kits) we decided that some may prove useful but until we begin to struggle we may just hard code it with pure JavaScript and HTML5.

During our lecturer we were told of a conference taking place two weeks from now in Dundee, which I would like to attend, if I can get the money and time together for a train ticket.

During out lab session we updated our design document with some minor things that had to be added, this will be added in depth over the next two weeks.

We also found a site with royalty free music which we could use in our game, we will have to credit Kevin MacLeod for the music when we develop the game but that is fine it saves us some time.

During out meeting with Dr. John Sutherland this week we talked about the risks we will face during our development we had to think long and hard on this and the main one was time... is there enough to make the game we want?

By next week we want to have a final draft of the design document and will attempt to upload this to the website.

Andrew will work on the technical document which will be handed in at the same time.

Justin and Calum are also going to work on the level design concepts which will be included in the document.
Thanks for reading, Stephen out...

Game Design and Plan Week 5

We have continued gaining support for out game with our Facebook page up to 41 members as of today 24/10/2012.

Andrew managed to get more fans by posted a link onto a university related Facebook page aimed at game students.

These Facebook fans will have access to the game for free and will also be the first to criticise the game and give us advise on how to improve before proper release.

Andrew and I have been working on the game design document for the most part while Calum and Kieran work on the level design and the game planning document respectively.

We have a current working title for our game Spy Green, this came from the character's name being Carter Green, and the fact that he is a spy, but this title is merely a working title and may be changed at a later date.

We have decided to change the prototype for our game as the first idea didn't seem like much of a prototype, this will instead be used as a introduction to the game and its story, instead we will attempt to make a very basic version of one of our levels.

We managed to convert the Microsoft Project document into a PDF and uploaded it to the website which you can find here under the game planning document.

After our weekly meeting with Dr. John Sutherland we were able to plan for our next week, giving a task to all members to attempt to research HTML5 development and possibly attempt some tutorials, we also made plans to draw our own interpretation of the main character and pick out the best parts from each persons' opinion of him.
Thanks for reading, Stephen out...

Game Design and Plan Week 4

On Tuesday 16/10/12 we had a team meeting just after out Advanced Flash Production module, we managed to allocate tasks to each member of our team and discuss where the game should go from here until final production.

You can find more information of what we discussed on our website in the updates tab here.

Andrew and I also updated the development team tab of our website with some personal information, which you can find here.

Andrew was also able to make a Facebook group page, Google+ and a Twitter page.

As of today 17/10/12 the Facebook page has 15 fans. Andrew and I also decided that it might be best to promise everyone our first game for free if our fan page gets 100 likes, giving us a little fan base before we have even started.

We were unable to have a meeting with Dr. John Sutherland this week as he was unable to take our class due to other pre-set plans in his calender.

Thanks for reading, Stephen out...

(Update: - Our Facebook fan page has now gone up to 23 likes, I'll try keep you informed of its progress.)

Game Design and Plan Week 3

This week I spent my time concluding the final draft of the target audience and competitor analysis document.  It was originally going to consist of 6 games to compare too but Andrew and I decided that 3 would be better as 6 would just over cumber the rest of the document, halving the competitors also meant we could dive into more detail with a full analysis.

We were going to do the strengths, weaknesses, threats and opportunities but we decided that the threats and opportunities were just repeating the strengths and weaknesses of the games as we weren't going to analyse the game companies themselves.

Once this was completed the team started working on the development of the project plan spreadsheet which was completed up to the production stage of the prototype.

I am quite pleased with the workload that the team produced this week as all the members tried to
contribute as much as they could.

We have the game audience and competitors document in a finished state but we don't want to hand it in quite yet as we can still add things or remove useless information.

I don't have much else to say without repeating myself over and over, it was the two documents we got done wasn't much research needed as all was already done, all we had to do was shorten the second draft of the game audience and competitor analysis doc, and that's it.
Thanks for reading, Stephen out...
(Update: - Final draft has been posted onto our website in the assessment tab you can find it here.)

Game Design and Plan Week 2

During this week I arrived into class late, missing the lecture, but I was able to get in contact with my group to discover they were talking to Dr. John Sutherland about our game.

Once I got to his office though the talk was done, so we all left and headed down to the labs, once there I asked the group what they managed to do when I was not available, and they said they came up with new ideas for our game, such as setting the game between the cold war and 20 years in the future.

Kieran went on to say that he is planning on leaving once he has finished his weekly blogs, Calum looked in agreement with this, I told them that we should try to finish off our document for competitors and target market, but they only replied, "It's for next week, do it then", this kind of attitude isn't for me and I can foresee some trouble rising from this.

I decided I was not going to do my blog til the document was 1000 words or more and had information that John recommended adding. The document is now in a finished "draft" state but I do not see it going any further unless other members of the group start to work harder.

We also have a completed website created for our team giving us a place to store our assessment documents and a place to come together as a group you can find this website here.
Thanks for reading, Stephen out...

Game Design and Plan Week 1

First blog entry for my game design and plan module, I'll start with the obvious, I was placed in a team consisting of myself, Andrew, Justin, Kieran and Calum.

After the lecture we got together in the labs and discussed potential ideas for our game just to get us started, we agreed on a top down espionage game, where the player must sneak through the level and avoid the guards line of sight radius to reach a goal made with HTML5 and Javascript.

We have discussed many possible levels the player could play through some may be implemented others may prove too difficult.

After this we met with John Sutherland to discuss items concerning our group. Once the meeting was done we sat down in the cafe area near the labs to further discuss ideas for the game, such as adding a more overarching difficulty and giving the player access to items such as a gun, knife or traps to kill guards.

We then went into the labs to start the document about our target market and competitors, the other members of my group researched possible competitors checking several different websites and informed me when they found something similar, once they had I examined them and compared them to our game, and put relevant information in the document I was typing. I pushed the document to 860 words before I ran out of things to say then handed it to all the group members giving them the chance to read over it and change anything they don't like about it.

After all this was completed I moved onto starting the website which you can find here http://jokerteamdesignproject.weebly.com/ it is very very basic right now but eventually we will change things adding new pages etc etc but for now it will do.
Thanks for reading, Stephen out...