Cappin' Stones (9/24/2016)

A shorter update this week.

Things this week have been progressing smoothly. All of our prototypes are in a position to "challenge" and go forward with, and the majority of the week for people has been spent writing documentation or hashing out fine details in things. 

Quite possibly the biggest piece of the puzzle was a meeting the whole team had on Wednesday. In this meeting, we hashed out a plan to get everything on track by this Monday, but not to be too afraid to let it slip to next Monday. In the meeting we decided what game to go forward with (the Rhythm Stealth game, now tentatively titled Rhythm of the Night), and our team name (Zamboni Dreams).

The VR platformer prototype is now in a somewhat functional state. Dan took over the programming and was able to create a prototype that is a combination of real perspective physics, as well as fake perspective physics in order to get the prototype up and running.

Meanwhile, Dan has been working on the Zone of Chalk prototype. The Zone of Chalk prototype was another incredibly tricky one, as both it, and the VR platformer contain ideas that are very hard to program, and thus got the axe. As much as we loved both ideas, the thought of going forward with a game we can actually make and finish is more appealing than bashing our heads against trying to ray-cast physics from a VR perspective.

Zone of Chalk, in prototype state.

Going forward, we plan to work on a game, currently titled Rhythm of the Night, which I don't believe I've fully explained.

Rhythm of the Night is a top-down, 2D stealth game, based on rhythm movement mechanics. This means that you can only move from tile to tile on a beat, and cannot on off beats. You must navigate a house, bank, or other locations and steal as much stuff as you can (stealing may be done on off beats), while also going from your entrance point to the exit without being caught. In addition to you moving on Rhythm Mechanics, so does the rest of the game, guards will patrol paths, moving one tile at a time on the beat. Lasers switch on and off to the beat. Cameras swing around to the beat, so forth and so on.

The game is non-combat oriented, so being detected by any of these causes a fail state for the level, so it's imperative to sneak through a level while remaining undetected. Players have powerups, that can slow down the beat, turn it off entirely, or get away from being detected by throwing down a smoke bomb that can help them navigate through various levels of all sorts of security systems. How many security systems? It's too early to tell, but the design document currently has 2 pages worth of security systems and numbers of how they all work. This prototype gif should be able to help illustrate the point (I keep getting caught by the laser)

Speaking of design documents, every game has their own 4-5 page full design document planning out early thoughts, and things to go forward with for the vertical slice, as well as things for next semester. These documents are living, allowing me to go into them at any time and add and remove ideas so nothing is set in stone just yet.

On to challenging!