Wednesday, November 20, 2013

Homework 12 - 5

This week I was working on getting the character from my last video working in the master floor plan from two videos ago. Originally I had done the logic for how the player (represented as a cube at the time) interacted with the camera (motion tracking) and walls (2d platforming element). In the below video I show the end result which turned out well. Our team still needs to decide on textures for the floor and walls so I can update the jump logic like you see in the video but overall no more changes should be made to the rig unless we decide on additional animations. The rest of the game logic should only be dependent on the players bounding box.



Next week I hope to finalize the transition system from floor to floor so the player may open and go through doors. This will tie our floors together to simulate the one level.

Homework 12 - 4

This time I was working on the character rig. We are using a character and armature from Blendswap.com.
The rig came with basic controls and only one walking animation. I animated the rig to jump and set up the logic bricks such that the animations/keys do not conflict with each other if the player decides to mash buttons. In the video below I will show off the character rig, animations, and controls:



Next time I will work on putting the character rig in the master file, and making sure that the character's jump logic (no double jumping for example) correctly interacts with the floor of the master file. I still need to add logic to the character to get the same results from my previous cube example on how the player traverses the floors.

Homework 12 - 3

I was working on the master floor file that everyone will be working out of. This weeks work was not particularly hard in any technical aspect but I essentially dealt with 4 people (my team) and their respective floors and ways to improve them such that the game will not lag from too many vertices. this took several renditions of everyone's individual floors. Steps included:

1. joining complex objects
2. decimating vertices until a noticeable decline in quality was seen
3. adding the edited object to a group
4. repeating steps 1-3 for all objects planned on being put into the floor
5. adding the object(s) to the floor through append
6. duplicate without copying the mesh data (things like multiple chairs)
7. add entire floor to its own group

From there I basically appended each person's floor to one blank blender file. For convenience purposes I left the player and camera in the blank floor files sent to my team mates but took them out in the master file. They will be replaced by a proper character and a camera that interacts accordingly.

Below is a video of me showing off the master floor file:


Next I will be working on the character rig for our game.

Thursday, November 7, 2013

Homework 14: State

Above is the state transition diagram I foresee for the diary-viewer. The player will press a button which will bring up a special inventory page where they can see the diary pages collected in the game so far. These pages include information on puzzles and plot which is relevant to the game. 

The diary viewer will start in the closed state, showing the first page or the front of some notebook where the diary pages are kept. Each press of the 'x' key will turn the page of the book. Each press of the 'z' key will turn to the most recently viewed page. The diagram will expand to a fixed amount as soon as we know how many diary pages there will be in total. For now you can see the diagram pattern continues until the last page is displayed.


The above state diagram is for the doors in our game. Part of the game includes unlocking doors to get to different parts of the level. This diagram technically includes 2 start states because there may be doors that are unlocked initially. This diagram is for locked doors specifically if we go by the start state. The player will have an inventory of keys collected throughout the game and the player pressing the action button near a locked door will decrement his inventory by 1 and put the door in an animated state of open or closed depending on the proximity of the player. If the player pressed the action button while the door is in the unlocked/open state then the player will enter the door and come a different door somewhere else in the level.