Quarantine: T.O.

Week 10 Update

2012-03-23T14:50:00.000-04:00

This has been a particularly successful week for me and QTO. I'm confident that I will have something to be proud of by the time I have to present - four weeks from today.

Progress since last week:

character swears when loading last bullets
added an inventory (holds all the items)
stockpile energy cans, health kits, ammo boxes
character now can't pick up items when inventory is full
use energy cans, health kits, or pistol if equipped
modelled, textured, and added metal and wooden bats
added melee weapon combat capabilities
added sounds for bats and machete
added an inventory screen that shows details
equip items from inventory screen
started working on particle systems: created rain, mist, fire, smoke
added a mission screen (will show map and let player save, change options, see controls, or quit the game)
implemented quitting and options

Newly discovered bugs:

shooting up at the very beginning kills random zombies
zombies attacks constantly - implement a finite state machine
the input states on the level screen are updating strangely when closing other menus

~John Adam

Midterm Report - Half way there?

2012-03-09T23:14:00.002-05:00

It feels like time is flying by too fast, especially since the due date is coming up in mid-April!

Here is a link to the report in full.

And here's how the game looks so far:

A nice and bloody title screen, showing off game menus.

Game start, showing the user interface, ammo boxes, etc.

The camera zooms out when running, based on speed.

Zombies show up and limp after you, hungry for your flesh.

Getting hurt causes your heart to beat faster and faster...

*sigh* … We all know what happened here.

I hope progress continues this smoothly!

~ John Adam

Exchanging Ogre for XNA

2011-10-25T09:02:00.001-04:00

Over much debating, I've decided to make Quarantine TO using C# and the game engine XNA, rather than C++ and the graphics engine Ogre3D. Changing languages and engines while the project is in the making is not something I recommend, but in this case, I think it will be worth it.

Ogre doesn't let me attach a node to a bone, only entities. Nodes are required for scaling, rotation, and translation. I was planning to have the characters' items shrink down and vanish while the character puts them away and grow as they take out a new one, but since I can not attach a node to a bone, I can not have changes size or rotation. The option left is to give each and every item two scaling animations, which is kind of rediculous.

XNA has the sound libraries built right in. In fact, it has -all- the libraries built right in. That means native math functions, native XML capabilities, and thankfully, native audio and graphics. Before changing over, I was going to use OpenAL for audio. Every bit of XNA is nicely documented, and consistent in style, as well.

XNA uses C# as its programming language. C# is a much cleaner language than C++. Foreach loops just feel so nice. It has dynamic garbage collection, meaning the game will keep running smoothly for the end player, and be much less likely crash due to a missed bug.

XNA is built for developing for games on Microsoft systems, be it Windows, Xbox, Phone, or the poor dying Zune. This means much easier access to the online stores, and therefor to the future players of QTO.

C# is closer to Java and Objective C than C++ is, so that increases the portability to Android and iOS devices. This means easier access to every android phone, every android tablet, Sony's upcoming Vita, and RIM's new BBX platform, as well as every iPod, iPhone, and iPad. Mobile is a huge market for games now, since almost anyone with a capable device is willing to spend a dollar to try a new game.

Microsoft Visual Studio is much nicer to work with when using C#, I've found. There are quite a few features that C++ doesn't get, for whatever reason. Although C++ is slowly getting replaced by higher-level languages, I don't think it's near the place where they should start killing it. It's still a very useful language, and necessary for many things. Moving to C# means I can spend more time programming, and less time debugging, more time working on my game, and less time linking libraries, and more time polishing my product so it will be ready to sell by the end.

Rather than completely taking care of the graphics, lighting, and animations, like Ogre, XNA gives me access to the matrices, letting me deal with them directly. Honestly, it's strange that a high-level language is giving me more power to do what I need.

~ John Adam

Scenery Leaping

2011-10-21T11:07:00.001-04:00

I’ve come up with a cool way to help keep the game light and fast while appearing full.

Each level in my game will be made of a bunch of streets in Toronto, but I don’t have the time to go and model every building, so the game will show a generated approximation of Toronto. For a residential street, there will easily be over a hundred houses. Since I will have about 10 different house models, I have to spread them along the street repetitively.

As the character walks forward, the same houses will leap from behind them to in front of them, giving the player a view of a fully designed street, while it’s actually all being built just out of view. This way, I’ll only have to have a few houses in memory at one time.

I call it leaping. Although I’m sure something like this has been thought of and done before, I’m still pretty proud I’ve done it myself. Don't get me wrong, it's simple, but it's very useful.

The same tactic will be used for fire hydrants, street lights, stop signs, etc. The code doesn’t change between these types of scenery objects, so fleshing out Toronto will be a breeze!

The beginnings of a daily log

2011-10-17T22:06:00.000-04:00

I'm starting to keep a daily log of my progress. I won't go into too much detail, since most of these points are self explanatory. I'm not a very experienced 3D artist so it takes me a while to do simple things, but I'm taking my time to make the models look decent while being low detail. This will help keep the game running smoothly.

Sunday, October 16, ~5 hours

modeled the shotgun
started on the inventory prototype
made item disk graphic using Google drawings
started working on two dimensional collision physics

The weapons so far. No textures have been created yet, so they seem kind of flat, round, and off-colour.

Saturday, October 15, ~10 hours

modeled a basic house
started a document containing all needed media
modeled a can and a recycling bin
modeled and animated a street light
modeled the pistol
modeled the revolver
modeled the nimble zombie using MakeHuman

The nimble zombie is unnaturally tall. He is easy to see, but not easy to hit. A more zombieish texture will come later.

Friday, October 14, ~10 hours

created a simple character on the screen using Ogre
added direction control, animated walking
set up basic camera, follows the character
improved direction control
set up basic run, increasing animation speed
started coding the vector2 and vector3 classes
started coding the player character class

Using Sinbad, an mesh that came with Ogre, I created a very basic demo. The game will be viewed from this angle.

I'll be updating my log every day to keep on track, but you can expect to see a post here about it maybe twice a week. It will be so cool to look back upon these first few posts. Not even I know how the game will look by the end. I can't wait to find out!

~ John Adam

Game design document

2011-10-15T10:29:00.000-04:00

For those who don't know, a game design document is made to bring all of the creative ideas one has about a game into concrete form. It means making a lot of decisions early on so that you have direction later on, leaving you to focus on development. When working with a team, like I am, it helps make sure everyone has the same concept. The game might not follow every line spot-on, but it should end up being rather close. Here's a screenshot of my completed GDD for Quarantine: T.O. from a bird's eye view.

If you're interested, you can see the whole thing here. I'll be pulling parts from the document and posting about them as I work on those parts to keep you all in the know of how it's coming.

~ John Adam

A fresh start

2011-10-13T00:37:00.000-04:00

This blog will be a place for me to publicly record my progress of my capstone project for my game programming course at Humber College. It will be a zombie apocalypse survival shoot-em-up type game, and hopefully will be pretty complex. You can read the project pitch here.

I hope to inspire a few programmers wanting to create their own games with this blog. It's going to be a wild ride!

~ John Adam