This week I picked up where I left off before break and have been dealing with the WiiMote as a cursor. My initial plan was to simply bound the actual mouse to a movie clip that is controlled by the WiiMote, however I learned that WiiFlash’s ‘WiiMote as a mouse’ functionality is pretty lacking, so I’ve been trying to find a way around it without having to do all the code by hand. So far the best thing I have found is Senocular’s VirtualMouse class. I still dont have it functioning correctly in our game engine, but I’m pretty sure If I decide to use this over another method it will be fairly easy to implement.

Something that we have been debating is weather or not we will need/want the cursor to be controlled by the WiiMote and the mouse, or just the WiiMote. All these factors are going to come into play when we finally get it all set up.

Other than that like already mentioned we met for an hour or so Tuesday to help catch Tom up to speed, and we had a pretty good 3hr meeting the other day about the new mechanics of our game play.

This week, we really laid out the gameplay basics after meeting with Paul. He made some good points about how the head tracking could be used. Our team decided to scrap the original concept and go for a more random/abstract approach. The original concept was a bit dull and Paul made the good point that a player could just lean to the side and play the game with no problems. Also, the new concept is now a competition to finish, instead of the cooperative play.

The new concept has the player trying to reach the opposite side of their cube while trying to delay the other people playing. They use blocks to build a pathway to reach the opposite corner. While they build their path, the user can look at what the other players are building as well as sabotage them by stealing their blocks. However, while they are doing this, they leave their own side in jeopardy because they leave it open to be changed. Users will need to try to steal certain blocks to advance as well as delay their competition from progressing.

There are also special blocks that allow users to change the competition in their favor. For example, they can use an earthquake block to knock blocks from their competition’s side into orbit so they can be stolen. Periodically, blocks will burst from the top and enter into orbit around the main cube. These blocks will be essential to advance since no characters have enough blocks to get to the end point.

Our whole group really likes the new concept. We feel that it gives a unique experience every time as well as makes for fast paced gameplay.

On my main post, I lay the game out a bit more, but here is a link to the gameplay video that I made. Again, this isn’t necessarily final until we hear from Paul. We also might change a few things in the upcoming design weeks. main post

Concept Link

We met with Paul on Friday, and he gave me advice on tackling the synchronization within the game play. Paul suggested we use a tick method of counting instead of your typical 1 player frames per second style.

I began coding with this in mind but hit a slight roadblock per say. The code that i currently have set up updates the user movement as soon as the server receives the variable from another player. So what needs to be done is that i need to overall slow down the game and only have the server update variables on tick cycles.
This is going to take a little bit of re-tweaking.

So as well as trying to get that to work I’m also coding the front end of the server connectivity. This will allow users to connect into the server and join different game rooms. The current system just allows 4 players to join a specific game system.

For next week i plan on (hopefully) finishing out the timing issue and making more progress within the front end system.

Since we had some things change around recently, I have been working like mad to make all of our ideas a reality. I am very excited about our new game idea and I think it will turn out to be a really fun and exciting game.

It seems that the only thing standing in our way is the limitations of the Flash player. It can’t handle everything that we are trying to put into it so I have been figuring out ways to cut corners without losing any quality. The amount of separate papervision Planes present at a single time on screen greatly affects the performance of the game and I have been testing out different ways to get around this.

I’ve been coding everything up for the past 2 days and I think I am moving along pretty quickly (because I need to be). Check out the current demo here.

For the next week, I will be designing and coding more. All major design elements (such as the special planes and bubbles) will be created this week and implemented into the game structure. Also, I am going to work on the main menu, changing the color scheme and making the navigation functional.

We have agreed to make the site fully flash. Since our assets in the game have changed to the people and different colored squares, the previous designs I comped simply won’t work with our new game.

Previous to yesterday’s meeting I was working on this website design. I had begun re-creating the items on the top part (since I just pulled them from other places) and animating them. However, clearly this design can not work with our new game.

From here I am working with Tom to organize a new layout and architecture all together. We are pretty certain using papervision is a must to match our new game play. For this I was inspired by these two websites, where ours could be a meld of the two.
http://www.gotmilk.com/
http://www.freedomandpartners.com/
I have already been working to create something similar to the Got Milk site in respect to having one of our characters brought in and used in the navigation of the website. However, I not produced anything tangible for that just yet.

This week I tried to get up to speed with the team and what was exactly going on. I looked over the most recent code and familiarized myself with it. I was able to get the game running and understood where all the appropriate files were located. To become more familiar with papervision I found and completed a tutorial and tried to make a basic interactive papervision file.

http://www.thomasbergamini.com/fourmation/test1/example.html

http://www.thomasbergamini.com/fourmation/test2/example.html

My main goal for this week was to go over some ideas for the website, I researched other flash/papervision sites and came up with some sketches.

here are my images and the original post
http://thefourmation.com/2009/04/04/web-ideas-and-catch-up/#more-462

hrs: 11