May 16th, 2014

     We decided to buckle down and finish Level 2. After level 2 is finished, we're making a finalized demo and we will be calling it a wrap for the project, and move on to another game.

     So first off, we found a tutorial that will enable us to do more dynamic music in our levels. What I mean is that we can seamlessly mix in-between tracks and add and subtracts layers to fit the mood of the action happening on screen. Here is an example of music that does this.



Notice how the music mixes between different tracks. This isn't composed into the music, each section is it's own loop file, and the system cross fades them together once the game gives it a trigger to.

Steven worked on a few test levels to flesh out Level 2

Here is a test level for the planting bomb sequence for the Airships.




And here is a test of a simple sneaking system that we plan on using on the second part of our level.





That's it for today everybody! See ya next time!

Operation A.C.O.R.N. Demo at Virtuvian Entertainment

We, Head in the Clouds Studios, will give a demo of our first level of Operation A.C.O.R.N. (a.k.a. Butterfly Effect).  Here are the details:

Thursday, Feb. 27
7:30 pm

Virtuvian Entertainment
727 N Victory Blvd. Burbank, CA 91502

Event details
Meetup: UDK Developers - Los Angeles
Virtuvian Entertainment owns a motion capture system which they will also demo that night.

Hope you can make it !!!!

January 23, 2014

Hello all. Update on the Butterfly Effect (Operation A.C.O.R.N.)

Steven  has made some progress. He has started making a boss chamber for level 1.

                                                     Here is the start of the temple.

                                                      The insides

                                          Light Shafts

                                         In engine


This is now how the final cut scene looks


 Manny has been working on getting the butterfly bots to work in our level this is the progress he has made

As you can see these bot are working pretty nicely now.
Josh, the level designer for level 2, has been getting a lot of work done here is a current play through of what we have.


More updates to come please stay posted

thank you from head in the clouds

October 6th, 2013

Here is an updated run through of the level. Because of Lincol's updated AI scrips, we have better stealth mechanics.



Below is some awesome music tracks for our game, made by Karel!

September 21, 2013

Hey everyone! Here is a new update, please take a look!




Our main programmer, Lincoln, completely reworked the AI.



Manny and myself (Aaron) designed a quick area to practice Lincoln's new AI script
The butterfly's will:
~Attack on sight.
~Go back to nearest patrol point when out of sight.
~Patrol path points.
~Die.
~Hurt the player.

Our Composer (Karel) has finished our main theme for our game. It is repeating, and it is awesome!

Finished Concept art for level 2.

Finished wood texture.

hand-painted textures for stone in level 1 (finished ) all done by John.

One of our members, Manny, has access to a 3d printer. He and Steven modified our main character Sam so he can be 3d printed. This is a 360 view of it.



Steven also made our armadillo enemy so it attack when it sees you and dies. I would like it to be smaller eventually.




Steven also rigged and properly textured our newest enemy. Super cool looking right?

Weekly Update 9/7/2013

We have two new amazing members joining our team since our last post, Karel Psota and John Vinuya.
We have brought Karel on as a composer. He has already done a lot of great work for us and John is an amazing concept artist.

Our music engineer (Miguel) came up with some reference for our sound in the second level.

(the following is not our work and we are not taking credit for any of this work it is only for reference).
















From these reference songs our composer (Karel) started working on a little song for the level. This is a work in progress and not done yet, but it does sound quite good.







For this level we wanted a new enemy. We had an idea about a chameleon enemy, so I first asked our new concept artist (John) to draw up some action poses; this is the product.

We thought that these were amazing but since level two is steam punk themed I asked him to do another version that was more in the theme of the level.

From these images Steven had a very clear idea of what to model and he came up with a model for this enemy

Steven also came up with a way to make the terrain in level two more dynamic. Keep in mind that there will be heavy cloud cover so it will look normal.



Back on our first level, our programmer, Lincoln, has been very busy working on two things: the butterfly AI and the Boss AI for level one.

This is all programming done by Lincoln, no kismet was used here.
We are having trouble getting it to work with the NavMesh.


Lincoln just started on the program for the boss fight in the first level. This is a quick diagram he drew up so he could program it correctly

If the spot light sees Sam the boss will attack him.

I asked our level designer Murilo to make our level have some inside parts. These are some of the of the textured meshes he came up with.

 

Door way for the inside parts

close up on the way insides

walls and ruins in the middle

Torches

Here is the progress from Joshua Salcido



all rights reserved © 2013 all material owned by Head in the Clouds Production

Weekly Update 8/24/2013

This week was mostly about starting production of level 2, named 'Airship':

The original concept was by Josh, and built upon by the rest of the team. The level starts out with a skydiving sequence, where the player controls which airship Sam lands on. Once landed, Sam has to jump from airship to airship to make it to the giant zeppelin where the level objective is either a lost operative or a map piece. The player can choose their own path, as there are several airships that are spread out over a wide area.






Here is an early WIP video of the basic level design:





...and a video showing the entire level and moving airships, with some background elements as wel;:







Steven also animated Sam climbing a ladder, and integrated it into the anim tree...

...and created a repair droid and animating its flying cycle.







The purpose of the repair droids are to transport the player from ship to ship. Un-alerted, they simply fly around randomly and you have to wait until they get you to the ship you want.

If you want to go to a specific ship, you have to sneak into the control room and fire a canon to the ship you want, and all the repair droids will fly there to fix it, making the process faster, but more there's more risk of alerting the enemy.



In this demonstration video the droids wait until you are on top of them and then start moving, but in the final version they will simply fly from ship to ship regardless of where you are.







You might have noticed that Sam's head was moving around and looking at stuff in the previous videos. This is because of the skeletal control track we added into the anim tree:



This is done so Sam will look at an object of interest. We don't know how to specify which object, however. Right now he only looks at the origin of the level, AKA 0,0