I did a lot this week. I finished the menu design, did some 3D modeling in Maya, developed a rough concept of our game cube with a 3D model on top, helped Deimler with the game scenarios/design (maybe he’ll post something up today about it), and updated the IR LED replacement tutorial.

Everyone really likes the new menu design. You can see some of the process I went through with my 3 consecutive posts. I tried to keep the design very minimal and clean, the colors and icons are what really stand out.

My 3D model example shows what our game cube will look like. The shapes on the top represent buildings, a castle, pyramids, and tree stumps. This week I’m going to start actually creating the real models (these were just basic shapes). The models were created in Maya, exported with a Collada plug-in to make a .dae file, and then read into Flash through Papervision3D.

Deimler and I met for about 2 hours on Thursday to think of gameplay ideas. This is one of the most challenging aspects of our project, since our game consists of 4 “dimensions” that are all connected. Moving things on one plane affects one or more other planes, so it can get very confusing. We made some headway, developed a different approach, and will meet again this week to discuss our ideas.

And lastly, I spend a couple hours updating the IR LED replacement tutorial with some nice pictures and better instructions. I also started making a stop-motion effect for the video tutorial, and it came out pretty well. Then I realized I spent a lot of time doing something that is really not needed at this point in our project. Although I enjoyed it, and definitely want to finish it at a later date, I need to focus on more important things.

This week I plan on integrating the menu design into Flash, doing some more 3D modeling, and helping Deimler map out the game scenarios.

This week was kind of under-the-covers in terms of what i actually accomplished. I spent a majority of the week trying to covert AS2 to AS3 for the server to work properly and came very very very close at one point. (i got it to connect internally through my router but not through the dynamic IP address.) At which point i began to question the integrity of the actual server script. So i redid the basic AS2 chat tutorial and fiddled with the server configuration file until i finally got it to work! …. in AS2…. fortunately Deimler emailed me an open source code from a guy working in AS3 for his multiplayer game. I’m pretty sure it can be used efficiently.

Check that out here

Along the lines of the server. I ran into a problem with the flash security so to help everyone out i decided to write a short tutorial about how to deactivate the security. This isn’t a problem unless the server is run via desktop so it should not be a problem now. However when the game is packaged it might become a problem.

The Tutorial can be found here.

Lastly and less involved. I converted the Maya model to a Collada .dae for Jared. This was kind of trial and error but was pretty simple in the end. I’m glad something was as easy as expected this week. It’ll help us in the long run because the exporter is easy to use once it’s installed.

This was a much more productive week for me and I got some cool coding things done. I’ve been tinkering with some custom IR classes the guys over at [ASB-labs] have created, and I got some actually useful things done with the head tracking code. Using their custom class we can easily get the location of each individual IR point and use this to change the scale of objects to give the illusion of moving in and out (if you get closer to the monitor they get bigger, and vice versa.) I also added a function so when you press Space bar the location of the IR points can be hidden (well, for now I just dropped the transparency a bit… but whatever.)

I’ve also been messing around with the grid system that we are going to be using for the game, but I can’t quite get it working the way I want it yet, but since Jervo said too, I’ll mention the ‘behind the scenes’ stuff too. Hopefully I’ll get this working eventually, all though I think Deimler has a pretty good one already set up.

A new version of of WiiFlash was released last week, so I checked my tutorial and made sure nothing major needed to be changed, and despite some version numbers the basic connectivity is the same.

We all decided to meet twice a week now, so each Tuesday we will share what we have done as well as on Thursdays. Hopefully by Tuesday I can implement this code into an actual Papervision cube, and get some boundaries working so you cant look too far up and down. So far this is proving to be difficult, but I’ll keep messing with it.
Check out my post about it over [HERE]

You can download the source code [HERE]. I decided not to make an individual post yet since you cant run any of this over the net anyway.

This week, there was alot of behind the scenes work that I have been working on. Starters, I re-did the character concepts and turned them into a biped. I made 2 models. One model (on the left) is low poly and boxy, while the other (right) is smooth but higher in the poly count. We opted to go for the first character simply because 1) it will run smoother in papervision since its so low poly and 2) the characters are going to be very small so the user most likely will not notice the difference.

view character render

I also (with the help of Jared) created a grid system to lay out the sequences. I made it overhead because I want to place in all the objects, then go through the level sequences to make sure they make sense. Currently, I just have white blocks moving (click them then use arrow keys to move) until I completely finish the level sequences

view grid swf

And finally, I wanted to mention the progress on the level sequences. While the final sequence is not quite done, I have made some headway. I have realized 4 points that the last sequence must have: 1) use head tracking 2) have problem solving 3) involve all 4 items (from previous sequences) and 4) involve the level holes (from previous sequences). Once I come up with a scenario that meets these requirements, then the sequence should be complete. So far, I have sat at least 3 hours every night (or more) and tried to come up with this part of the level. Jared and I also sat for about 4 hours on Thursday just brainstorming scenarios, but with little results. On my individual post, you can see the many pages that I have made on this part alone just last week. Hopefully this week, we will be able to finish up this part of the game.

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This week I was able to get deeper with Papervision’s code. I applied what I’ve learned to the menu design so that the cube icon for the “Play” is 3D. Here is the example. The next stage will be applying this to the outtro of a click so that the background color stripes are revealed as 3D as well before revealing to game.

I have also been tinkering with Full screen capabilities. We would like to have this option, but because of the mix of sources for assets, different player resolution issues for multiplayer. I am still unclear if this is a viable option.