Final Blog Post

With the completion of Nyx and gaining some experience working with others on a game, I can say that I enjoyed the whole endeavor quite a lot. During the production of the game I worked mainly on scripting and getting the functionally of the game going, and that itself was insane for someone with little knowledge in the area but still, I tried as best as I could with it and produced what I could.
I learnt a lot during the whole production about workflow, teamwork and the skills needed to produced a game.

I would have liked to work more on the designing side of the game but when we chose roles for who would do what I figured that someone has to do it and I gave it a try. I know that my actual passion is still in modelling and texturing but this gave me a tiny insight to what working with scripting and programming is. I guess in the end this has given me more respect towards people that work as programmers and can, some what, understand better the strain they have during production.

Working with a team has its ups and down. Its great to work with friends and design something together but it can also put a strain on friendships when you add a professional quality into the mix.
Because of the relationship between people it can make it difficult to talk about issues your having and can sometime make things awkward when you have to discuss them but all in all, I think that working with people you know and are comfortable with is still a great thing to have.

I worked a bit with the audio engineer we had helping us with the audio in the game. I helped during the recording session and implementing it into the game itself. Audio is another long process with games and being able to get the support we got was a massive help in producing the game.

In the end, I really enjoyed working on Nyx. It was an excellent experience and would definitely want to be part of a team again sometime in the future but with a more realistic goal in mind.
I know the limits of my skills and know what I have to improve on and how to improve to get into the industry I want to be a part of.

Week 9 - End of the Week

As there is only one week left to have our prototype game complete; things do seem to be coming together quite nicely. We've gotten about 95% of our audio, modelling and texturing done; scripting is another  thing  but  we  gotten  far  enough  with  it  to  have  a  decent  amount  of  functionality  for  the prototype. The characters have been rigged and can replace the blocks we've been using for our main character and while the animation on everything isn't 100% its still enough for our prototype; which is what we're aiming for at the moment.

I've started to see if we can use PlayMaker to create our AI and it does seem a lot more simple to use then attempting to write our own AI. Once I've gotten a bit more experience with it, I think implementing the AI into the game should be a lot simpler especially since we want to steer a little bit away from a complex AI to something a bit more simple while using events, lighting  and  audio  to  our advantage.

Anyway, for now there isn't any screen shots I can really post since the other day but once some more progress has been made with PlayMaker some screenshot will be uploaded to show the progress.

Week 9 pt. 2

After working through an excellent AI script tutorial, I have finished messing around with it and it seems to work quite brilliantly. Not over complex but works flawlessly for what you want it to do.
I think that if more trouble are had trying to create our own AI that this backup AI would be quite sufficient.

All in all, I'm very happy with the progress that is being made throughout our whole group and am excited for what our finish product will look like.

 Because its difficult to put up nice screenshot unlike the modelling portion of our group, I thought, why not show what I've done too.
While its length and complexity isn't mind blowing; for someone with at little experience at I have with scripting and programming in general, its pretty amazing that it does what you want it to do; being patrolling an area, chasing a specific target and shooting at that same target when its in range.

Anyways, thats it just for the moment. More to happen soon!

Week 9 - AI test battle

Currently the AI (and we always knew this) is a fickle beast and while good progress has been made with writing our own finite state machine; it is still troublesome. Some last attempts are being made to try and use a sort of tutorial AI from a lovely programming book that has been lent to me.

Our next week and a bit with be completely play testing our game to get lighting, events, gameplay and all that good stuff working well for our next submission. While scripting and this sort of functionality is slow for a less that novice person such as myself; happily the look of Nyx is excellent and is something I, and the rest of us, are (and should be) proud of.

Once this AI test is complete I shall return with results.

Week 7 - Reduction

So it came to our attention the other week that the texture sizes used in the map were ridiculously large being 64MB each. This resulted in our build being almost 2GB, which is way too large.

After some compression to the files, I've reduced the build down to almost 400MB. Further optimization to the build is needed to get it a little bit further down in size but for now it's much, much better!


Heres some screen shots of previously mentioned trigger zones we've been implementing.

The areas for the trigger zones are a transparent red so we can actually see the trigger area,  when the game is fully built these areas will be completely transparent.

Week 6 - The forgotten weeks.

It been a bit of time since an update. Unfortunately this did slip my mind numerous times but I'll try to keep the updates a little bit more frequent.
Firstly, its been more scripting for the past couple weeks. Progress has been made (screenshots will be posted), messed around with trigger areas which have worked quite well. Further refinement is needed obviously but for the mean time, its doable.
Secondly, I've been assigned a room to model but so I'm able to actually have some modelling work in the game. Its a simple laboratory room, I don't have to mess with textures too much as the others have done that already and I don't want to change the textures and have one room look totally different from the others.

Every other week we're working with Boon Hwee Yeo, he works in the industry and has great knowledge on most things and is able to help with our timeline and getting our production on track if we have problems.


Anyways, I'll try to update more often and keep the screenshots of what I'm doing up-to-date as well.

Week 3 end - Some script examples

Some of the scripts implemented in Nyx is a Flashlight with a 'power bar' that reduces your flashlights visibility over time but charges up when it is turned off.

Another is a simple button script that activates lights in an area. For now, the Generator and Button are simple cubes but the functionality is there.

Once the newly modeled Generator is put into the level, these scripts (along with others) can be easy applied to new props. These are just quick examples shown, as some of others scripts, such as the AI, is a bit more difficult to showcase but are definitely underway.