Drifters

It's Beta Time!

Lisa Melegari — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 12:01:42 -0500

This week marks the end of production as we push on to alpha/beta stage. Only minor assets are being loaded in when needed to fix bugs, and the majority of the work for the rest of this month is testing, testing and testing. The only new things being developed now are the game manuals and box art, as well as finishing touches on the websites.

The museum environment got a much deserved facelift with a new lighting setup, making it easier to see and to cast shadows with the characters. The lighting is now baked in to the geometry, allowing the dynamic lights to be focused on characters so they now have shadows as they wander through the museum floors. The Sovereign has been seated on her throne and is being rigged for animations. She currently provides commentary on the match, commending or berating her Drifters on their performance against each other. Other sound additions include the announcement of the selected Drifter's name on the player select screen, more random comments from the NPCs as they stop at various exhibits, and the Drifters have more sounds including taunts, victory comments, and attack sounds.

The Drifter Vision no longer snaps from glowing character to Drifter form, rather a new light burst transition activates to reveal the Drifter form, letting players know they're now visible as a Drifter. While attacking, there's better response time, so a missed strike no longer makes you as vulnerable to your target. To better assist the player in learning to make better use of Drifter Vision and attacking, the video tutorial which was in progress is being updated with the latest assets and controls.

On the technical side, DevTrack is being used to track the bugs that come up during playtesting. As a bug is identified, a log is created by the player that tells when it occurred, under what conditions, and what the steps are to reproduce it. The bug is assigned a category, and then the QA lead reviews the report, determines who should handle the bug, and assigns it to a team member to work on it. The team is also busy testing on multiple machine setups, including 3 versions of Windows (XP, Vista and 7 beta), various video card configurations, and multiple processor speeds. The goal is to optimize it so the game can run on virtually any current generation machine capable of playing games like Half-Life2.

These next two weeks, Cohort 5 will be conducting interviews with many companies within the video game, simulation and digital media industries. With so many interviews and companies to coordinate among the 49 students, the teams will not be holding their weekly status reports. The final game presentations will take place on July 30th and that will most likely be the final development blog post for Drifters, since we'll be done! Keep an eye out for final announcements!

2 Week Countdown!

Lisa Melegari — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 12:36:12 -0500

The results of the focus group testing are being analyzed, causing the team to shift their plan of attack to look at some of the nuances of game play. More polish time is being spent on environment assets, huge improvements to NPC variety added, and of course, the fourth Drifter! The team is picking up great speed and looks to be on target for their goal of July 6th...
The first glaring change in the game was the addition of Lenore, the fourth and final Drifter. Once in game, the next large change was the huge increase in the variety of the NPC models. Through two gameplay sessions it was difficult to see a duplicated combination of parts, thanks to the magic of the Voltron rig and the design team's creations. Another addition to the gameplay was the drift radius highlight: when a player is near a driftable NPC, that NPC will have a faint blue glow on them...especially useful when you near a body that doesn't glow, giving it away that they inhabit a Drifter without having to switch to Drifter Vision.

After looking through the questionnaires from the focus group, listening to the Q&A tape, and starting to watch the player footage, a number of suggestions for improvement were brought to light. One of the major things the test players found was that attacking was a bit slow with the extended animation times, and when killed, the time to respawn in a body was also a bit too long. Also, when a player is killed while not in Drifter Vision, there's very little in the way of feedback to tell that has happened. The team has brought these issues up to the designers, who have formed a task force to adjust these parts of the game and eliminate the confusion and lag.

Some polish details in progress include baking in the lighting within Maya rather than the 80-some lights placed in scene designer. The artifacts are almost finished being re-rendered and placed in the museum, along with a few ambiance pieces such as benches and banners to add some color to the interior. The exhibit audio which used to project in a sphere from the podium, will now project in a conical 3D shape instead, originating from the new speaker boxes on the new podiums. The audio team is also working on adding a distortion filter to make the voice sound more speaker-like rather than the clear sound it has now.

All the models are being weight painted so the animations for their walks, tells, and environmental cues all flow more naturally. The attack/fail animations are also being retouched to help with the feedback timing and transitions between animation. While the Drifter models are complete, some slight detail work is being done to further push their individualism and iconic look, as well as the addition of particle effects unique to each Drifter. The finalization of the environment with the lighting and exhibit/prop placements will allow the cinematic team to get that in and render out the entire cinematic movie for inclusion in the game.

The website has also gotten a bunch of new content, including a new introduction video with the 4 updated Drifters and gameplay footage, art pieces, and of course, a mirror of these blog entries.

3 Week Countdown!

Lisa Melegari — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 18:02:59 -0500

Play testing is now a daily event in the Drifters half of the cohort space. Crowds can be seen gathered in whichever hex is hosting a game at the time and cheers of victory and defeat can be heard throughout the halls. However, the team knows that testing your own game is easy, so they've brought in some fresh testers, unrelated to FIEA and unfamilliar with the game. This way they can get an unbiased look at the gameplay and have a fresh set of eyes look things over. Last Friday they had a group in to cold test the game: they were given a brief presentation on what the game is and how to play and then let loose on two 5-minute and two 10-minute matches. After, they participated in a written and verbal Q&A session, and were provided with free pizza as a thanks for their participation. The team is currently analyzing the video and questionnaire data to make more improvements to the gameplay and balance.

As with last week's promise, the team delivered on optimization of the game in many ways. Their two major changes were the conversion of all .tga textures to .dds files and also the size reduction and sharing of the environmental texture maps. Both of these changes produced a cutdown of 50% of the video memory used, a huge improvement! Many of the exhibit models are also being redone to drop their poly count and add to the reduction.

Graphically, small improvements are being made as most of the assets are complete and are undergoing a bit of polish. The bathroom area is now completely textured and the team is working on a new display case so they're uniform in appearance. Small details like the audio tour guide speakers on each exhibit are being added in as well as just small cosmetic touches to add to the realism of the environment.

Two new models were also released this week: the Sovereign and Gideon, the third Drifter. The Sovereign is completely modeled and textured and awaiting placement on her throne. Her audio files are getting their final adjustments and her haunting voice will be heard during the match, updating the Drifters on their progress and egging on their competition. Gideon has been added into the in-game play with his own image on the character select, complete with his unique stats.

A lot of bug fixes took place this week as well, with all the NPCs now correctly pathed and spawning, resulting in no more walking into walls. There are currently 50 unique paths each with behavior nodes where a NPC will stop and interact with an exhibit before continuing on. The team hopes to get another 30 paths in so they can potentially increase the number of NPCs in the environment as well once all the final assets are in and play testing can focus on value adjustment.

Since the NPCs will randomly stop to examine the various parts of the museum, the team implemented a keyboard command to let players do the same. By pressing the Q button the player's current body will stop and lean in and examine whatever they are near, or if they are in the open, they will play another context-sensitive animation such as checking their watch. Another control option added this week is the free-view camera which can be a useful strategy if your player is stopped at an exhibit. You can perform your environmental animation and while that is taking place, quickly hold down the F key and use your mouse to take a 360 degree look around you, identifying any suspicious behavior that may be taking place behind your head.

On screen you can now see statistics as to who is in the lead, how you stand compared to their number of kills, and a report in the bottom left updates constantly with the latest "Player 1 killed Player 2" announcement. These can be brought up at any time during game play with a tap of the shift key. Another addition to the user interface is the inclusion of loading screens which show the keyboard controls while the match loads. A player tutorial video is also in progress to explain the finer points of gameplay, including blending in with the crowd and drifting strategies.

Drifter Vision has also gotten a huge update, mainly in how the transition to and from corporeal vision works. Now instead of a jerky switch to glowing NPCs, the glows on other bodies slowly fades up, as does your own. Your Drifter form fades in after the waiting period and soon other Drifters are also visible. When drifting in Drifter Vision, a bright flash of light disorients you for a moment as you switch, leaving you slightly vulnerable for a second as you adjust to your new location. When switching back to corporeal vision, the glow on the other bodies slowly fades to a shell and disappears completely.

Next up on the plate is further testing, additions of the final art assets, and biggest of all is the final Drifter reveal, Lenore.

4 Week Countdown!

Lisa Melegari — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 13:58:06 -0500

The museum environment is looking more and more realistic by the week, with nearly all the exhibits and aesthetic pieces making it into the current build. Next week they plan on having all the placements finalized so full work on the final lighting and shadows can be completed. Currently 8 new lights have been added to effect the characters: 1 directional light and 7 point lights to help with shadows.

One of the biggest additions this week is the 3D sound effects within the game build. 3d sound is basically a technique used to create a more realistic sound within a game: as a player gets closer to the item creating the sound, the sound gets louder, as they back away, it gets softer, just as it does in real life. Aside from the already impressive custom music score, many of the exhibits have been augmented with an audio tour guide voice over that explains the story behind each artifact on display, telling its history and how it was used as an 'instrument of death'. This is how it works in normal corporeal vision; switch into Drifter Vision and walk past the same display to hear the sounds that occurred when the item was used to kill its unfortunate victim (or victims, as with the heavily used guillotine).

The second biggest addition is the new Drifter forms for Luther and Sid. They now work correctly in-game (no more double model) and they're reacting properly with players being able to select a specific Drifter over another and have that one show properly in form. The character select screen shows slots for all 4 Drifters and when a specific Drifter is selected it will also show their bio and unique stats. Not all Drifters are created equal: they have 3 categories of stealth, drift time, and strength that will effect how they perform in the environment.

The cinematic team is ready to begin production, as their camera and shot layouts are finalized and a basic mockup of the storyboards has been rendered with stand-in models and a basic untextured environment. They're working on getting the finalized assets into the cinematic builder and then it's full steam ahead.

Testing is starting to be the next big thing with the game, with strike teams created for various sections to consider when looking at gameplay. One of the biggest focuses is optimizing the game to run as seamlessly as possible. A few of the ideas they're working with is the reduction of the character texture size (each piece of each NPC is a separate texture) to free up video memory, and also optimizing collision checking by dividing the areas into zones, having the characters only check collision on the zone they're in rather than the entire environment.

A few of the bugs that have been worked out since last week are the same time attack that would cause the game to crash when players attacked each other at the same time. The Drifter form was fixed and glow shaders work with the alpha on the environment during Drifter Vision. Load screens have been added between match start and the actual game load, so there's no more confusion if the game build froze or not.

Within the game, taunts are now active and also done in 3D sound, so a player can activate a vocal taunt near a group of NPCs and quickly move away so it resonates from decoys and not their own body: a great tactic for throwing off a pursuer! The game menu was updated again with animations, transitions and sound effects. More updates to the NPCs paths have been made, so they now stop at exhibits, examine them, and continue on, which is a behavior pattern a player can easily emulate to blend in while stalking targets.

The next steps for the team are to continue testing and tweaking the game play to get the smoothest, best version possible ready for Alpha stage testing. The last exhibits will be placed and sound added and the final texture sets for the 3 NPC Voltron rigs will be finalized and put into the randomization cycle. New animations from the last mocap shoot are almost cleaned and ready to be added for the final animation sets to finish off the pathing. The 3rd drifter model is being textured, everything is getting a cleanup and quality check, and the final image of the game is definitely coming through!

5 Week Countdown!

Lisa Melegari — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 13:56:30 -0500

Nine down, five to go in the countdown to the end of production. Testing is gearing up, assets are being finalized, vocals are being cleaned up, and beards are growing as the teams ramp-up to industry speed.

The Drifters opened this week with a look into their current organization and task management systems. They're using a modified SCRUM along with planning poker and tasking with "user stories". User Stories are short descriptions of various types of user experiences that could take place within the game (i.e. "I want to kill someone while in drifter vision"). Each Story is assigned a level of importance from 1-3 and the top priority Stories are assigned a Strike Team who break it down into the tasks needed to accomplish it. These tasks are assigned to individual members who work on them until all components are complete and the Story can happen. Tucker, the scheduling and analysis master of the team, has calculated that the team accomplished an extra 23.5 hours of work this week with a total of 154.5 more man hours this sprint.

The Voltron rigs for the Maria and Howard NPC types are active in engine and nearly every geometry variation is working on each rig. The Agnes NPC is also nearly complete and almost ready to be placed within game as well. Currently, 40 NPCs are being placed within the game, each with their own unique path and randomized texture configuration. Shadows in-game are slowly being implemented in, as they had been turned off for testing purposes to keep the frame rate up to snuff.

With the main part of the museum almost finalized, work on the back part of the museum, which is slated to be a bathroom area, is getting underway. The team decided this lesser-seen part of the environment should be something serious like a bathroom area to keep with the realism of the game. The central focus of the museum floor - an ornate fountain - has been base modeled, positioned in the environment, and is ready to be textured.

On the cinematic side, basic play blasts of some of the camera paths for the various scenes have been created for testing and reference. The paths have been finalized and the voice work is all ready to roll once the scenes are assembled. Some of the camera and animation work for the cinematic is also serving double duty as the menu screens get a wonderful motion upgrade. A preview video was shown of how the new menu will act, hovering outside the museum before the game starts, then rushing into the blinding realm of the Drifters beyond the doors.

During the initial game demo, 2 players were in-game to show playability with the ability to enter drifter vision, make a kill, respawn, and have a game status with kills/deaths and current score. Prior to starting the game, a player can choose to host or join an existing game, give themselves a unique player name, as well as choose their drifter. A player who hosts the game can set game parameters such as the game name, number of players, time limit, and number of kills to win. Improvements on the drifter vision were shown with the glow effect in place with the environment and on the NPCs, as well as a new 10-second waiting period in which the drifter has to stay in drifter vision for that cool-down period before switching out. The tells system is also actively working, with the player's currently controlled body having a coughing action that increases over time as they possess the body.

After the 2-player success, the team was challenged to try out 4 simultaneous players just to see if it would work - and it did! With four players being the target goal for the end game, it was a great success for the team to see their goal already met so far.

Production reports resume post-summer break!

Lisa Melegari — Fri, 29 May 2009 15:17:40 -0500

The team enjoyed a partial break between summer classes during the week of April 27th up to May 18th. But just as the game development industry never rests, neither does the Drifters team, and those weeks were spent making major improvements, additions and changes to the games. This week marked the return of status reports and with that we begin our ongoing weekly overview of how the game development is progressing. The clock is ticking with only 5 weeks left before the game needs to be in a playable, near gold master state.
The first major addition to the game has been the exhibits, with over 30 pieces added to create the "Instruments of Death" collection that's currently on display. The interior has been slightly redesigned with a new bridge crossing from one side to the other in the upper level, new textures, and better lighting. To create the proper lighting the environment had to be split into 12 separate pieces, each uniquely lit with over 80 individual lights to bypass Gamebryo's lighting limits. The resulting effect is stunning and not ambiently lit like most environments. The lighting is also being reconfigured within the Maya models, as it needs to be lit properly for use in the cinematic as well.

With the Voltron rig ready to assemble, the artists have been working on many texture variations on the geometry used to create 3 unique NPC body shapes - Agnes, Maria and Howard. With 4 pieces to each rig and multiple versions of each piece, there's a huge number of combinations that can be created by the design team using the Character Builder tool. Currently, the design team loads the tool, flips through the various pieces until they build a model that looks correct, and can save it as a unique NPC.

Then, using their Path Builder tool, they can assign that NPC a unique path within the environment, including pauses and animations, essentially creating non-repetitive, natural looking crowd interactions to further add to the need to blend in with the museum-goers in order to avoid detection as a Drifter. To better create all this content, "strike teams" have been created to handle pathing batches so no one person is burdened with doing all the work.

A new user interface has been created for the main screens using an exterior shot of the museum. No longer a static image, the new UI is animated and has effects as the user interacts with various menus and choices.

The four Drifters are shown on the character select screen and they are starting to get personalities of their own through new animations and designs. The team's most recent mocap session produced over 40 new animations for combat, some unique to each Drifter and some generic. The Drifter models have also changed, no longer a skeletal-armor style, but now they resemble more of a full body suit.

Drifter Vision has also received an overhaul with a new temporary glow map serving as a base for the final product. Instead of just desaturating the environment, the altered perception resembles glowing runes on the walls and objects, with the glowing accentuated on Drifter-related items within the sight of the player. The Drifter form of their character is also shown, and their animation for walking changes slightly to a stalking motion.

In regards to the previously mentioned cinematic, the shot lists are done, layouts and camera placement is in progress, and the script recorded. As soon as the environment is ready and everything finalized, production can begin with a mid-June target set for completion. A final voice acting session is wrapping up this week, with most of the already recorded dialogue in the cleanup stage.

In the non-visual realm of things, the programmers have been hard at work refactoring their code to produce version 2.0 of the game's build. Many of their changes allow for smoother networking and easier integration between the values created from the producer tools and the game engine. In testing, users are now able to input a player name for the multiplayer, join or host a game, and wait in the lobby to see other players. The tools are all working with XML, allowing live changes to be made during gameplay. An internal script was also written to control the number of NPCs and their starting placement at the initial load of the game. Another major addition to the control of the NPCs was the inclusion of a behavorial steering script which will detect when 2 NPCs are going to collide and adjust their paths to avoid each other.

With the programmers hard at work finishing their internal overhaul of their code base, the artists churning out great designs for the characters and museum exhibits, and the producers developing the audio and NPC behavior, Drifters is shaping up to be a highly immersive game experience.