Space Pirates Music

Alright so I have been trying to figure out what to go with for the music of our game. So my choices are to go with a more Rock feel to the sound for a more badass sound or a more techno feel since we are in space.

So here is my rock reference it is a small band called Alestorm, literally a Pirate Metal Rock band, with their single "Captain Morgan's Revenge".

And here is the techno version of the Pirates of the Caribbean theme song, which I will add is an awesome twist.

 

ARGGhhh Choices!

Sprint 1 begins!

Here is the class on the 1st day of real production.

Warhammer 40k Mod Design Team

Hey everyone here are some pictures from this Thursday Morning where me and the team are testing, discussing and writing our content for the Commonwealth of One (or Boundless not sure) faction for Warhammer 40k.

Design Pow Wow go!!!

Had a great Saturday, I feel the my design team is stronger, has a way better grasp on what we are making and where we are going. Between the explanation from David Staats and Ed Kaczynski and the 4 hr talk of cards and abilities we know have a way better plan to move forward with our design and seal the fate of anyone with extra cash in their pocket

Paper protoryping

Here we are developing our game play and ai design..sorta.

Today I Learned 1

That I need to do some more research on feature driven projects. I keep going back to a Meta based theme in terms of how I run things. I thought I was getting it right but I guess not. What I finding out I am trying to build a house without the blueprints and I don't have enough people who are suppose to be giving input present at the design aspect of things. This again is my doing because I am noticing I have this tendency to think in terms of meta. So in order to fix that I am going to have to make sure as we are designing things to include those involved in their production in order to get the right input, give people the sense of what is happening, and make sure they all know the project. I thought I was doing it, thanks Teach for correcting me.

This is either going to work or....boom!!

So after much blood spilled and sweat excreted I outlined the design for the prototype. Why would I need to do this...SCOPE!!!! The original design is way to big and an impossible thing to make under a year. To give us a more manageable goal to shoot for so that we have something to show at the end of two semesters. Enjoy!!


Prototype Build:
https://docs.google.com/a/gmatc.matc.edu/file/d/0BxVG_6W6T4_DVUF6Sm4xNXE5ZGs/edit

Prototype Design notes:
Designs should be geared what the combat will be like as if the player was 50% done with the game.

We are building this prototype to test the Combat elements in the game

• Not including Story
• Not Including the Larger Universe (Including factions, economy or an exploratory elements)
• Only including the Scoundrel Archetype
• Leaving Unnecessary Combat Elements out

Prototype Objective: Provide a combat oriented proof of concept.

Prototype Structure:
Disable a Cargo Ship
Board Said Cargo Ship and find the Target Cargo (+ extra goods for bonus)
Leave Cargo Ship to engage a Military Ship in Space Combat to the Death
Thank Player for Playing

Ship Comparison

I put this on here to help determine the size of space craft that we may want to go with. Some of these ships are just HUGE!! so I don't think  I want to go with them.

Massive Battlecruiser Ship

So as I was driving for my job and looked to my right and saw these beautiful array of clouds that was  flowing and shifting in the magestic twilight of the sunset. So I came up with a concept of a battlecruiser. RAWR!!!

Here..we..go

Hey everyone!

School has come around again and boy what a doozy of a couple semesters we have. I am in the capstone class this year, which is the final class to show we can make a AAA game using the Cryengine. Those who had the iniative and the fortitude (trust me it takes a good amount of fortitude) to make a design doc could submit a design to the class have a chance to be selected to be made in this class. Well about seven different projects were submitted and after a rigerous voting process, my project was chosen to be made and the theme of it...Space Pirates!!


Here is the presentation for my submission....there is no audio and obviously I need to be talking during it, but its still pretty easy to understand. Just take into mind that I am wearing an eye patch and making a fool of myself. I had fun doing it though.

So what we did yesterday in our class for CSG Production. Looks like we have a TON to work on. PPFFFFFTTTTT!! 
Post Mortem

• Effort in making a game.

• Good Agile practices are required. Learned Agile, Kanban, Scrum

• Better understanding in Unity, better confidence.

• Constantly strive for improvement, cannot become stagnant.

• Learned our skill sets

• Learned mobile, internet, touchscreen, GPS, Kinect, standard controller, and collaborative development.

• Sprint 0-most important sprint

• Learned to work through our differencesA

• Heavy communication

• Time management

• Learned definition of ARG/AUG

• Defined technology first and fit story into it.

• Lean practices

• Importance of project management

• Hype machines for AUGS and ARGs

Sprint 5 RetrospectiveBad

• Not enough hype

• Scope

• Infighting

• People slipping through cracks, ie; Silcat, communication, and production was poor

• Poor asset management

• Too many redesigns

• Too lenient with certain individuals!!!

• Technical requirements not followed or changed

• Attendance!!!

• Planning

• Too much time wasted on certain assets

• Poor leadership

• Low morale

Good

• Came together

• Finished product

• Improved our communication

• Improved Silcat usage

• Better metrics for performance

• Used outside sources when needed

• Dedication

• Leadership improved

• Overall less infighting

• Improved transparency

Improve

• Follow pipelines, hierarchies-Determine what pipelines are. Define hierarchies in visual form. Follow both.

• Stand-ups and communication-What you've worked on, what you're going to work on, and problems you've had. Also share work. No lone ranger "crap".

• Determine work agreement earlier-Determine in Sprint 0.

• Technical requirements-Spikes and chores follow them literally, no changes unless everyone agrees upon. Determine in Sprint 0.

• Leadership quality-Pick leaders based on merit rather than what have they done. All areas

• Updating Silcat-Handhold, establish rules of using Silcat. Estimate time better

• Attendance both in class and meetings, leads need to dig, don't schedule events during meetings. Put in that extra effort and find work-arounds

• Tempers-Leave at the door, breathe, count to 10

• Egos-Leave at the door, team>you

• Conflict resolution-Involve leaders, seek it in person not online. Compromise

• Ask for help-Speak up, speak up when you don't have anything to do

• More over seeing-Leads take a look around every now and then to check up on production

• Planning; do more of it. Sprint planning, spikes, chores, and longer periods Understand our velocities and capacity!!!

• Morale-Give kudos, share positive experiences, work more faster

• Visual Build-Better lean practices

• Collaboration-Pokerplan, user stories,share work, and meta meetings Use a forum

• Everyone, especially Mario makes a FB

Well Portfolio Night was kind of a bust. We ended up not having anytime to get the Radar done properly and get any bug testing done. We ended up pumping and extra 2.5 hrs into trying to get it together while we had our Larpers sitting upstairs waiting. BAH well we gave it a really good shot being 1st semester students. Well here is out Burndown chart.

We did better this time around but I know we can do better.

AGGH last minute redesign for the radar...BAHH!!

Objective: Get the player to travel across the portfolio night floor to retrieve codes for riddles we provide. We also intend to make it an environment where employers are encouraged to talk to the portfolio presenters for clues and information on the game itself. These will get people talking and providing networking opportunities.

Gameplay: When the player selects the radar button the radar appears with a map of the 6th floor that has ten blinking lights flashing. The map is a static map the doesn’t move and isn’t attached the email but does share several distinctions 6th floor, such as vending machines, arches, doorways, and rooms.  The lights indicate the location of a machine part and also doubles as a GUI button. When pressed a pop up appears with a riddle. When the riddle is solved the light ceases to blink.

Playthrough:
Player enters the radar through the main menu
Player sees the blinking lights/buttons
Player presses one of the blinking lights/buttons
The riddle scrolls up in from of the radar.
Player then walks to those points to find the riddle answer.
Once they find the answer and input the code into the decloaker the decloaker sends a signal back to the radar to stop the blinking of the light and dim it slightly.

Functionality:
GUI (exit button)
Blinking GUI
Riddle scrolling with close button
Script from decloaker to Radar to change the state of the gui button.

Things to change: take out GPS functions.
Turn blinking lights to selectable GUIs
Insert map into radar
Increase size of radar background
Link Decloaker to for single to turn off the blinking gui.

Optional gameplay elements if we need to without coding:
Provide a less detailed map with a list a coordinates for the player to figure out where each location is (using alternate GPS app)

So what fun, dealing with the Marketing at School. They don't help us but when it comes us advertising the yell at us. Well I guess I better prepare for stuff to happen Monday. Well here is the invite for your enjoyment.

Design Layouts

I have completely forgot to get my designs up here for the AUG, the best part!

Here is the main screen layout

This is the start up screen for the Decloaker, you basically enter in the number code from the card you receive in the hotspot

The 1st image is what you see after you enter the code in and the 2nd is what you see after the transition effect happens.

And this is the wrong answer screen.

Here is the control scheme for the Kinect system

And the redesign after the Kinect was thrown out

and the layout of the machine parts in the final product.

Here is the final design for the shadowrun scenario.

The Scenario

The Brewmaster Vigilantes gang leader, Tiny Short, is looking his shipment of free booze but with the Milwaukee Ale Alliance tightening their security on their trucks he has been unlucky. So he hatches a plan to get drag security back away from the trucks and back into the buildings. On top of it all he takes this plan a step further and is going to guarantee that is doesn't change by involving his arch enemies the People Against Alcohol, a magical group who insist their prohibition need to be adhered to. Tiny looks to the shadows for help.

Contact

The Team gets contacted by a random person on their contact list. They are instructed to meet the Johnson over a matrix meeting at a shadow friendly bar with a secure node. They are treated to drinks and a meal. After about 30minutes the team is given the signal the Johnson is ready. Any matrix users will notice that the node is now locked down with another node across the world somewhere. A Dwarf appears on everyone hub, he is dressed like a ganger and looks as dirty as one. He begins the conversation with an unsure hello and begins setting up to run.

"Uh Hi, I have an extraction and a plant job for you to do, I'll be paying the group 10000¥"

Once the team accepts their are vetted in on what they are doing.

The plan is to take a recipe from the Milwaukee Ale Alliance chem research facility and plant it into the People Against Alcohol headquarters with and to leave a trail while doing it. They are given old blueprints of the two buildings and locations of safehouses and a small list of contacts there. 

The team is then given two weeks to complete the job since they have to make arrangements to get to Milwaukee in the UCAS.

Options for traveling:

Airlines

Train Smuggling

Drive via car

Part 1

Once in Milwaukee the team can shack up in a safehouse in order to create a base of operations. They can then study the complexes and formulate a plan of attack.

See Milwaukee Ale Alliance for info. 

https://sites.google.com/a/gmatc.matc.edu/shadowrun-mod-team/milwaukee-ale-allliance

Part 2: The Chase

If the team manages to get out of Milwaukee Ale Alliance without being detected run the cold version of the chase sequence. 

If the team leaves the Milwaukee Ale Alliance when they are on the run then run the hot version of the chance sequence.

IF the team steals the helicopter bypass the chase sequence all together.

Part 3:

The team now needs to get into the People's Against Alcohol's headquarters

See the People Against Alcohol for info:

https://sites.google.com/a/gmatc.matc.edu/shadowrun-mod-team/people-against-alcohol

Part 4:

When the team leaves People Against Alcohol after the plant, they may either return to Seattle or find the Brewmaster Vigilanties drinking and having a party over their new heist of a tanker filled with Pabstmillerweiser. Either way they get paid. 

ARE WE READY TO RUMBLE!!!

Well It looks like my fears have come true, Connie and Mario are at on how the design of the Portal Model is done. BAHH. This is frustrating because what I see is that Connie is not being the leader she should be and blatantly calling Mario a lair about everything he says. I am hesitate to jump in this because I'm just know its going to throw things in more disarray. Guess I have to solve this.

This the redesign for the decloaker since we couldn't get the qr scanner working.

Decloaker Objective:

To determine if the number sequence the player has picked is the correct one as well as to display its corresponding model and transform it to the machine part using alpha channels and a particle system. This system will also register the machine part is in the inventory so the player can go and view the item.

Playthrough:

Activate the decloaker from the main screen using the Decloaker Button
Screen Appears with a 10 digit keypad and an enter button
Player then enters a 6 digit number indicating the number of an answer model.
Model appears after hitting enter
Player hits the Decloak button.
If the answer is correct the machine part appears, and is registered into the inventory
If the answer is incorrect the model disappears and the a text gui appears saying ”Wrong Answer”
Player can then enter a new number or return to the main screen using the exit button.
Elements Used: 
Number Gui keypad
Alpha cutoff script (Edit; change it scaling scrip that shrinks the answer models and grows the answer model)
Particle System
Script to move Particle System
Three gui buttons
Script to insert items into Decloaker

YEA MORE SHADOWRUN. Here is Little Pink Bunnies Bio and Link to Character Sheet.

Name: Elizabeth Homgun
Street Tag: Little Pink Bunny (LPB)
Race: Troll
Height: 2.3 meters
Weight: 300kg
Age: 21


CHARACTER SHEET

Physical Description:

Female troll that stands about 2.3 meters in height and with a solid slim build (for a troll) and long black hair which occasionally needs to be redyed to take away her brown roots. She bares several surgery scars from when she had her wired reflexes installed by some two bit hack body shop job. To hide the scars she wears tattoos all over her body and wears cut off coats and shirts. She usually sports leather and enough ammo to kill any army. Her tattoos range from skulls and crossbones to the decorative flower patterns but on distinctive pink cartoon bunny that is on her right upper arm which she uses as her masoc and excuse to get into bar brawls.

Background:

Elizabeth was born in the outer parts of Chicago during the time of the insect spirit infestation. She was your normal kid with aspirations to be a Doctor or a Rock star and favored a pink bunny stuffed animal like it was the last and only thing on earth. It quickly ended when the infestation happened. There was chaos everywhere. Her family was eventually moved out of the city for their safety. The ARES military took it upon themselves to take care of the situation. The truth of the matter is they were one of the 1st groups moved out before there was a city wide quarantine and the guards didn’t check the people. The bug spirit took its time to begin re-infesting a few others. The camp turned into a mini war/quarantine zone where only the few were let out after magic screening. Elizabeth was one of the few. Her family wasn’t. She decided to get back at the bug spirits for her family. So when old enough she joined Ares Macrotechnology to be trained as an elite member of one of the bug killing squads.

She trained to be a heavy fire support specialist and hand to hand combat. With persistence she got her way through the rigorous training and after graduation day in remembrance to her family she got her Little Pink Bunny tattoo and given her tag name as Little Pink Bunny. After several missions within an Ares team she became disingenuous over the team, not staying behind to “finish the job” or disobeying orders to slay extra spirits when ordered to pull back. She became more and more angry about the situation and eventually caused her to get into a fist fight with her superior. Ares eventually had to discharge her and sent her on her way. Many jobs came and a few taken but none ever lead to where she wanted to be, fighting insect spirits. She eventually heard that several runner teams would occasionally encounter spirit swarms and get the chance to wipe out entire hives. Elizabeth decided to jump on the chance of a chance to run into bug spirits rather than fighting metahumanity, and has been running ever since.

Personality:

Uncouth with a militaristic attitude. Always ready for a fight. Quiet. Never takes mentioning her tattoo of the pink bunny as girly or underwhelming you will get punched in the face.

Reference:

OK so looks like I can finally have something to show for our work in terms of burndown charts and the such...oh wait Silcat deleted them ...DAMN IT!!! 

Well anyways the team are changing around a little this week. I have Connie, Jeanette, Joel, and Mike as leads right now. The one I am worried about is the Connies Team...mainly because Mario and Connie are both on that team, who fought last semester over story stuff. So here is hoping.

We also picked up Henry Nitz as a programmer, one of the 1st semester students. Hope he works out. Seems to know what he's doing. Kind of a shame to have no-one else volunteer. 

Otherwise its impediment solving as usual.

So we finally got to work on the AUG finally and it seems we maybe have to do some shuffling around with team members and how we are going to do our game design.
Currently the game design is to use the GPS on the phone to get to hotspots where a riddle will pop up. They'll find that each of the hotspots there are a bunch of QR codes. Each one translates into an answer object which when collected turns into a machine object and is stored in an inventory for later.
Later on in the night the player will be able to load these machine pieces together to make a larger portal that leads the player the the home planet of the observers. We haven't fleshed that out just yet but its close.

I have some new content for you all from the shadowrun mod project for my design class. It is the chase scene for when the shadowruner team leave the Milwaukee Ale Alliance.

If the party leaves Milwaukee Ale Alliance hot:

2 MAA military choppers follow
Chopper 1: Gunship (See Below)
Chopper 2: heavy carrier (Ares Dragon)
Procedure

1. Chopper 1 disables vehicle with light weaponry
2. Once vehicle stops Chopper 2 grapples car with magnet drag line
3. Both return to base with vehicle.
4. MAA either guns down the member’s or counter offered to screw over The Brewmaster Viglanties.

Choppers Matrix Device Rating: 6

Nodes: LMG, 2 Missile Racks, 2 Rocket Racks, Navigation, Flight Control, Communication

Matrix security each node: Automatically One Black IC Patrolling the node

1 - Tracker IC

3 - Black IC

5 - Black IC

7 -  System Shutdown / Await Pilot restart

Gunship Stats:

Name	Handling	Accel	Speed	Pilot	Body	Armor	Sensor
MAA Choppa	+1	20/40	150	2	16	8	2

Get away options:

1. Blow the choppers out of the sky
2. Lose the choppers among tall building area.

If/when the players lose the choppers the party can move throughout the city for 20 minutes before the Knight Errant will gain start making rolls to find the team.

If Knight Errant finds the team and they only lost the choppers, they reappear after 5 minutes


Knight Errant Chasers: 1 Patrol Cars (Chrysler-Nissan Patrol-1)
Matrix Device Rating: 4
Nodes: Driving controls, Communication, Navigation
Matrix Procedure:
2-Track
4-Attack IC
6-Black IC
8-Terminate connections

Every 2 minutes add one car.

If the party leaves Milwaukee Ale Alliance cold:
Rival Biker gang caught wind of the heist and are patrolling the highways to find the car and jump them for the recipe.

Vehicles involved:
8 Bikes (HD Scorpion)
2 Vans (GMC Bulldog) double armor

Bike Matrix Nodes: None
Van Matrix Nodes: None
Armaments: 2 light machine gun mounts, armor plating. 4 passengers(Rating 1 grunts)

Procedure:

1. Using weapons and ramming techniques run the team vehicle(s) off the road
2. Kill everyone.
3. Take swag (everything)

After 5 minutes: Double the amount of vehicles
After 10 minutes: Add in Knight Errant patrol squad (3 patrol cars, one Wasp Helicopter)

Knight Errant Procedure:
Follow Team to identify collbrites
Upon identification warn to pull over
Attempt to run team off the road
bag em and tag em
(If team is still hot from heist)
hold team til MAA retrieves

If apprehended when in a cold state they stay in jail...they lose.

So we continued working on the ARG for another two weeks, which is two weeks too long. Actually its two months and two weeks to long. I am not a happy camper with it. Oh well I will have to learn to plan better and try to get more motivation out of my team. Here is our user stories:

https://docs.google.com/a/gmatc.matc.edu/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0Au1XenIYGwGvdG5mVXBraExhMW9Ra00tY3kyRngxakE#gid=0

Hopefully things go as planned.

Boots to butts

Alright so this week I have finally had enough with people's work ethic in my class. We are pretty much at this point the laughing stock of the school. We don't look like we are going to get this game done unless we really put our noses to the grind stone. On the good side of things, my management team all agreed with me. So that's good that I do have to support of my team to get this done.

The major things I updated this week is the AUG roadmap, which I discovered that I was doing it wrong and was actually making Gameplay Flow Charts instead. So I updated that and post them on the Project site and remade our Gameplay flow chart just so people can see where we are going.

I think if this boot to butts mentality works we should be getting back on track and have an awesome game!

I think we made good progress this week.

We ironed out our AUG gameplay, defined our Alpha Roadmap, and prepared our feature/task list for user stories. The Roadmap has been updated and placed onto the project site here: https://sites.google.com/a/gmatc.matc.edu/matc-arg-project/roadmap  and I remade the Gameplay flow chart here: https://sites.google.com/a/gmatc.matc.edu/matc-arg-wiki/aug-gameplay-flow-chart for everyone to reference.

I plan on getting it into SilCat for Monday so all we need to do is make the tasks based on the roadmap, assign them and get to work :D

Another thing we agreed on as a class that management is not pulling punches no more. Basically if you don't pull your weight; you'll be pulled from the credits and then held back a semester. We all know Emil has no problem with this concept and I have now taken the gloves off. We have already talked to a few of the misfit people who need to step up and start proving they want to be here or they are the 1st to go. I'm sorry it has to been done, truly I am but we can't sit around any more, it's go time!!!

That's pretty much the content this week.

Bizzare's Corner Begins

With me trying to switch this site over from a personal website to a professional one, I got rid of the Gaming for City Slickers page which I am going to use for a local zine but when I got to looking at Bizzare's Corner I figured this would be a great page to show my creativity and writing skills. SO I'm keeping it and there is nothing you can do about it :P. Actually go check it out now, I have a few items up there now!

http://powerupranch.blogspot.com/p/bizzares-corner.html