Operation: A.C.O.R.N: March 2013

Sunday, March 31, 2013

Weekly Update 3/31/13

Steven is working on Mr. Dalt, who is the CEO of A.C.O.R.N.

Action pose for our concept artist.

Justine is working on some buttons for our UI.

A concept for the starting up HUB theme.

All of the above sounds were made by Miguel

Manny implemented the Butterfly model into the AI, and added a spotlight. He is trying to find the value that will adjust the size of the butterflies.

Monday, March 25, 2013

Weekly Update 3/25/2013

Josh, with help from Lincoln, got the basic health mechanic working. Sam is given three hats, or lives, at the start of a level, one of them on his head. If he gets hit, the hat flies off in a random direction. Sam is now hat-less, and if he gets hit without a hat, it is game over.

When you are in this hat-less state, you have two options. Option 1 is ignoring the hat and letting it disappear, therefore losing the hat in the process. Option 2 is scrambling after the hat before it's gone. If you get to it in time, Sam will pick it up and you won't lost that hat / life. However, if you take too long and it vanishes, Sam will pull his second hat out of nowhere and put it on his head.

If you lose all three hats, it's game over, so protect your hats!

Manny is working on the AI for the Tarsier, which functions as both a spot light and alarm. When the Tarsier spots you he calls over the nearby enemies. When the enemies see you on the way, they will move in to attack, and if you escape the scene in time they will look around for a few seconds and go back to patrolling.

The Armadillo has been rigged and animated by Steven. This enemy will walk around slowly, searching for you. When it spots you, it will roll up in a ball and attempt to run you over. If you get out of the way in time, it will crash into a wall, getting stunned in the process. This is your chance to attack. The animation needs some work but it is good for now.

Murillo blocked out the first level, above is a top down view.

Acorn model and texture. These are all over the level and can be picked up.

Murillo modeled a turret that spits out fire when you get close. The best way to avoid it is to crouch under the flames.

A cartoon wall texture by Murillo.

Justine finished the HUD

Acorn vector for the HUD

Hat counter by Justine

Hologram vector by Justine.

Main villain model by Dusty. Known as the King Monarch, he plans to put a stop the Squirrel Agency.

Sunday, March 17, 2013

Weekly Update 3/17/2013

We decided on a production team name, head in the clouds studio. mainly because we are all giants. like only 3 members of our team are below 6 foot. I did a mock up of a logo

We are working very hard to meet our deadline of April 19th. We decided on having April 19th as our deadline mainly because of a competition being put on by ESA.
http://www.theesa.com/newsroom/release_detail.asp?releaseID=189
If we are judged to be one of the 5 best games, we get to present our game at E3.
If we are chosen it will mean major recognition by game studios and will make our name known

AI work done by our AI master Manny. He is still working getting this done in unrealscript. He is think converting this behavior into unrealscirpt will help us get the tarsier alarm behavior working using unrealscript.

HUD mock up 1

HUD mock up 2

Justine proposed 2 new hud concepts. after review and looking over the mock ups, we decided on HUD concept number 1. the only change is smaller icons.

justine overlayed her hud on a screen shot we took before.

Miguel modified the monarchs voice to become more robotic. it came out very nice
new recording for the female voice of Alex. Miguel modifyed her voice. It is voiced by Emily Millman

B-roll sounds of squirrel screaming

Miguels main job at the moment is to make a theme song for our game. this is the first trial of it.

this is reference for Miguel for the theme of the game

Josh has written this as his reseach for the week:

I've been trying to add damage parameters to our pawn's melee attack using this tutorial: (http://www.mavrikgames.com/tutorials/melee-weapons/melee-weapon-tutorial-part-1). Early in the tutorial, the author introduced Archetypes. The quick description made Archetypes sound useful for the group's workflow because archetypes would allow the designers to quickly access -- and alter -- parameters for our pawn, bots, etc., from the editor. There's also the added benefit that we will not need to recompile the scripts after changing them -- which saves us a bunch of time to do other important things. So I decided to to research archetypes since it would help out the team in the long run, and to finish the tutorial for the damage parameters.

My research about archetypes started with Epic's documentation (:http://udn.epicgames.com/Three/ArchetypesTechnicalGuide.html#Programmatically and http://udn.epicgames.com/Three/UsingArchetypes.html). These documents were helpful for making Archetypes for any object in the editor (camera, kactor, etc.) with the exception of the pawn. We want to reference the pawn's script by adding a function that can call on its properties via the archetype in the editor. I found a forum post that has the script to reference the Archetype: http://forums.epicgames.com/threads/841856-Solved-Using-Archetypes-in-script-is-it-possible, and I plan to try out it by Tuesday.

Dusty made this model of the Armadillo. This enemy will be implemented in the first level and the rigs and animation will be a big part of how it plays

Steven modeled rigged animated and textured this model within the last week. it looks pretty good could do with some minor adjustments buts very impressive work.