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

Weekly Update 7/20/2013

This week was mostly polishing and adding in features we had to cut to make the competition.

Here is a quick fuzzy video run through of the level as of 7/20:




Steven worked on a rock particle system that is interactive and obeys the laws of gravity:



Manny added more locations to the enemy AI, as well as tweaking their behavior some more.



Steven also worked on the sequence where you explode the support pillars to collapse a stone slab to continue the level. This also shows the updated camera system he worked on, which allows more seamless zoom-ins, transitions, and tracking.




Steven also quickly made a little animation of our logo in blender.






Aaron is working on a website, as well: aetgames.wix.com/cloudgames

Weekly Update 7/14/2013

Hey everybody! It has been a while since our last blog post ,but we still have been working on Operation : Butterfly Effect.

We added water to our environment to give it a little contrast

 We also did some vertex painting to add some variety in the floor pieces

 We added a new puzzle where you had to activate torches in the right order.

We inserted breakable boxes which will have acorns and health inside

 Long shot of water

We fixed our cut scenes so they work when we bake our game 

Added  particles when you step

This is the water and the water texture. We are going to try to replace the particles with our own custom particles



A new puzzle which you have to duck or sprint past

Weekly Update 4/19/2013

The last two days, April 17th and 18th, have been a mad house. We pulled a somewhat emergency meeting in the middle of the week for everyone who could make it to get all aspects of the game up and running, getting it to an aspect of fun, and then integrating everyone work into the master file on Aaron's desktop.

95% of the texturing of the level is finished, thanks to Murillo. We also fixed a problem with the black edge out-liner so it will work properly on far away distances, and added a depth of field to further emphasize that you are playing a small squirrel character, and not a normal 6 foot human.

Here are some screen shots of the level:

Please excuse the warning string, it isn't in the final game.

The integration didn't sound like too much of a problem, but when we got it all integrated, some of the systems wouldn't communicate with each other properly. One of the bigger examples of this is that the hat system, where your hat drops off every time you get hit, simply doesn't work when an AI enemy hits you.

Weekly Update 4/16/2013

We spent the 11th to the 14th of April working extensively on a demo for The ESA student game competition.

We took over a study room and stayed in there for four days to get as much content into the demo as possible!

Murillo worked on building assets for the level:

This last model is a tower that will spit fire at you when you get close. You must crouch to stay below the flames.

Josh worked on the health mechanics and a torch puzzle for the first level. The biggest breakthrough he made, though, was the ability to trigger custom animations for the main character. We now have the ability to trigger whatever animation whenever we want!

Miguel did some miscellaneous sounds for some of the cut-scenes, and also made a final version for the level and boss fight music.

Steven and Aaron collaborated on the particle system, which uses a Wind Waker-esque style:

Lincoln finalized the HUD, which is fully interactive. Here is a video of it in action (with teleporting and hologram mechanics done by Steven)







Dusty worked on modeling and texturing several characters, including the giant Robot Armadillo, the King Tarsier, and the regular robot Tarsier:

Justine worked on drawing some awesome plant textures:

Aaron worked on the credits scene as well:

Most of Steven's work involved animation for the major cutscenes in the demo, as well as some interactive sequences:

Weekly Update 4/7/2013

Murillo is extensively working on the First level, which will take place in an ancient temple.

Some column models by Murillo.

Our level will take place high on top of ruins, so the background will be this stylized forest texture.

Level 1 Flow - By Murillo.

Steven is working on the animations of the Armadillo. There are a few transition issues, but it is mostly done.

Manny made the butterflies flow and do damage to the player.



This video, made by Josh, shows the death scene animation when the camera zooms in.

Action pose made by Justine



This is the bird song that occurs when you get hit



This is the alarm sound of the tarsier


This is the moving rock sound



This is the nearly complete level one music. All sounds are beautifully done by Miguel

Awesome dynamic tail work done by Lincoln and Steven. Looking good!

Dusty start on the king tarsier model. It still need some modifications, but otherwise it looks good.