Jared

We had a great meeting this past Thursday.  Our LED goggles finally came in and we shot a lot of footage for an IR LED replacement tutorial.  I’ll post up the video as soon as it’s edited.  We also spent a lot of time talking about everyone’s individual endeavors, problems they had, and how we will overcome them.  The Gantt Chart (linked at the bottom of this post) shows that the work ahead is well dispersed among the team members.

This week I spent some redesigning the website, creating a Fourmation logo symbol, and updating our color scheme.  I also transferred all of our Gantt Chart milestones into a Google Calendar that automatically updates and displays in the sidebar.  Other than that, I mainly spent time thinking of concepts for the game.  I made a couple sketches (I’m going to transfer them to vector before I upload, terrible sketcher) of possible 3D models that we will have to build, and developed ideas for the menu concept.  I did not spend a lot of time coding this week, but that is my main concern for next week.  We are going to hold another meeting this Monday for just the main programmers on the team to test our IR goggles and learn how to interface with Papervision 3D objects in Flash.  I can’t wait to see what we will be able to accomplish with head tracking.

Chau

This week was fun filled with Tutorials, IR Goggles, LED Goggles, Crazy Gantt Projects thingies, HUDs, Menus, Coding, Pre-coding, Emails, and Contacts. But as a few of the other posts mentioned we did meet this week on a Thursday to film some tutorials, Todd brought in the LED goggles which are super awesome and we made an IR Goggle.

This past week i spent more time designing pretty things. This time it’s an in game HUD that maximizes human computer interaction specifications and minimizes complexity.  Todd is pretty much going to take over the Menu design but we settled on a concept that is similar to both his and my original idea. The new menu is a free flowing and transforming layout. Which is ideal because our game uses head tracking, so i figure the menu should correspond with the concept of the game. As for the rest of the week. Sunday, i’m going to begin shelling and making a copy of all the menu items. Monday is our first IR testing meeting. Tuesday and Beyond are left for Menu, HUD, and other alpha coding or possibly asset concepts. I feel like we got a good footing on the project and we are well on track.

Todd

This week I focused on jazzing up the main menu. Jared found a very cool menu here.
This would similarly make use of Papervision the way we want create our menu. Considering our game is 3D interaction, it only makes sense to have our menu be as well. For this I began experimenting to see where we can take it.
This is an example of the technology that will be implemented. I am making use of the work Chau has done with the site map and design. Between our two concepts we have molded a solid idea to move on with.

Kyle

Over the past week I have made some good progress at getting headtracking to work in flash. I’ve been messing around with the one set of IR goggles we made on Thursday and it’s pretty cool. We initially thought we we’re going to have to code all the actionscript from scratch for the head tracking, but I’ve recently found a man by the name of Alan Ross who has a bunch of open source WiiFlash demos on his website, one of which includes some basic headtracking. I’ve been looking through his code and playing around with it. There isnt any real documentation to go along with it, so it’s been kind of just guesswork, but the fact that we now have a starting point is great.
I have also managed to get 2 separate WiiMotes set up and fully working with the Papervision cube. I’ve posted a few demos in my separate blog post HERE, but obviously unless you have a Wiimote all set up with bluetooth it’s not going to do much…but trust me, its cool.

Nick (aka Deimler)

This past week, I did another portion of the level. The level is proving to be very challenging since 1) it has to incorporate teamwork, 2) it must use head tracking somehow, 3) and also be entertaining. However, the level is looking to be very promising. The final sequence remaining will be my task to tackle for next week. As you can see here, I have the level explained in a task order showing what each player must do. I’ll continue refining it even when finished to make sure that the characters in the level cannot get stuck. We debated on whether or not to simply have a replay button, but decided that it would be more enjoyable if the character progresses linearly.

As Jared said, the IR Goggles turned out great. I was impressed that they worked so well. I was ready for some minute detail to hold us back, but it was much easier than I anticipated. I look forward to creating my own pair once I get my IR bulbs to replace the LEDs in my glasses.

Updated Gantt Chart

Week 2 Hours