Bear Studios

Admin

The team managed to meet with Claude today, following is some of the results of the discussion:

We should try to re-use whatever’s available, this includes libraries, plug-ins, tools and assets already developed by others.  We should still check with Dr Ashraf the exact grading requirements and what constitutes plagiarism.

Try to come up with a central mission statement that can guide us in times where we’re lost and need to make decisions.

Sort out our priorities and dependencies in order to build up our milestones.

He also suggests a development framework as such:

Pre-conceptualisation
(we are here!)

↓

Conceptualisation

(decide what we want, come up with a prototype and solicit for feedback)

↓

Pre-production

(AI and gameplay programming done here. Assets development as well if any)

↓

Production

(putting stuff together and building the actual game)

During crunch time should we need to reduce features and tasks, we should always look for whatever provides more fun and pleasure value to the players.

Subversion

As we envision the project to be bigger than what we’ve ever attempted, source version control is an important consideration. Assembla offers both SVN and trac however, all projects are open for public viewing. As far as we know, the faculty doesn’t provide SVN services and we’d need to set it up ourselves.

Our options now are:

1. XP-Dev if they allow private SVN
2. Check if Dr Ashraf can arrange SVN repositories for the module
3. Get a friend who’s webhost allows SVN and Trac hosting

Gameplay

Some quick gameplay idea tossed around:

• control-point based siege base
• traps using waymarkers
• commander and squad selection
• first person vs third person
  • pan camera to simulate looking around environment
• first person melee combat
  • distance perception and precision of control

Initial framework considerations:

• XNA
  • C# for either PC or Xbox 360. Focus would be on gameplay
• OGRE 3D
  • C++ for PC. Focus would be on game engine

Some initial broad ideas:

• Immersive feedback
  • feedback through means other than typical HUD, eg. 3D sound or other cues
• Crowd representation
  • heterogeneous representation of massive crowds where it doesn’t look like all clones
• Combat physics
  • traps, knock back
• Destroyable world
  • players able to shape terrain and world objects
• Damage representation
  • damage locality, no representation of enemy health other than visual representation, eg broken limbs, limping, etc.