Animations..!

Project Sensei has come a long way in the last couple of weeks. It is starting to look like a real game now as we come closer to the due date. This entire week my task has been getting each individual character their complete move sets which consists of single attacks and multiple attacks for the completion of a combo. Some of these have been real difficult to achieve and others have been average, but it has all been very time consuming. The end result is always worth it though as it makes the game that much more interesting with a larger variety of attacks. All animations have been put together using Project Sensei Character Modeller and as I went along designing new moves for each character, I have also been adding new sprites (body pieces) to the sprite sheet to get the rotation effect for 2D images for selected moves like a Turning Kick for example.

Working in the mid-session recess

It's been a while since my last blog but that doesn't mean there hasn't been progress on our project.
Jordan has been working a lot on the artwork for the game over the last couple of days and Ryan has been working on the fighting engine mainly on fixing the move combos and collisions of world objects.

What I worked on in the past week was putting together the story mode, which functionally is working but doesn't look so pretty at the moment. Basically how it works is it chooses a random fighter from the fighters and if you win you progress to the next random fighter (you don't fight someone you already have). Once all fighters are defeated you have finished and it cuts to the credit screen. That's just the basic linear story, although if you lose a fight you can't progress, you can either quit or retry.. Before each battle at the moment it cuts to a screen showing you who your opponent is.

The most recent improvement I have made to the game is added in inertia to each move created. This is extremely important when an attacker wants to perform a combo, the idea is to have light moves do not move forward so much but recovery time is much quicker and then heavy moves have a lunge into their attack but in turn have a longer recovery time.

My main next task is to create all the proper and hopefully final animations for all the characters. Jordan is putting together the characters sprite sheets and once he has finished with them I will be able to start. But for now I will keep tweaking the game fixing small things here and there being the pedantic one :P

New characters!

The last week has been really busy trying to complete assignments for other subjects. Although I managed to fit some time late at night a few nights a week to put together a basic skeleton for characters Ivanov and Catalina. This is just to demonstrate our working models and mainly something to show for our prototype. A few very basic animations were thrown together to also test the individual characters move sets such as Jabs, Straight Punches, High and Low Side Kicks and each characters blocking stance.

Combos, Health, Selection and Animation :)

 Over the last week the work load I had for other subjects were minimal which gave me the time to work on Sensei throughout. The main idea was for Ryan and I to work on the fighting engine and trying our best to complete as much as we can in a small time period. Ryan worked on getting the combo list working which stores a combination of buttons which the user inputs in sequence, this list cancels after a second of inactivity or when a combo of 10 buttons has been pressed.

What I worked on through the week is getting the health bars drawn to the battle screen which work responsively to the players health after taking damage as well as round winning conditions, Sensei now caters for players that draw, the same round is to start over just with less time on the clock. Next round condition I'll be working on is if players draw twice in a row, this I think will cause the round to go to sudden death. Ideas may change in the future. We also have the functionality for one or two players to use the character selection screen completely independently (if one player, player will pick their character and then character they would like to fight), and based on their character selected, their names are passed through to the battle screen and displayed over the top of their health bars.


Jordan had a quick play with the Sensei game and quickly implemented his animation engine into our game so now we have animated fighters...that dance at the moment (just to prove that the animation works for our needs). Quite a bit of work was accomplished this week and we all hope to keep this progress up.

Working at home...

Today was a day off from Uni as all assignments were complete and free from working. I spared some time to go through a bit of Project Work today and what I focused on was getting the game to end a round when a player reaches zero health points.
On top of ending the round at zero health points, I also focused on getting place holder images to display the round before players fight and place holder images to display the winner after a player reaches the set rounds. All did work successfully

There is only two noticeable problems in which that when the starting round images are drawn up;

1. The fighters aren't being drawn to screen and
2. Player's are still able to control them before round officially begins

This will be the next part I'll be working on in any spare time we get to spend on our project.

Progress on Fighting Engine and Round States

Over the last week Ryan and myself worked towards getting the Fighting Engine up and running, we focused on getting the game to assign each controller to an individual active player within the game. We are now able to control two different players simultaneously with two controllers, one being an xbox 360 controller and the other being the computers keyboard.
Today, I worked on getting the rounds working. Each round has its own timer and characters are to begin with 100% health points. In conclusion to each round, the game will decide who's character wins based on the amount of health each player has at end of the round countdown. For the game to continue through to the post-match screen (included by Adam), which contains statistics of the fight, a player must reach at least two successfully won matches (which we will then down the track have the option for the player to change in the game options menu).

Back to Uni

so this week we have come back to uni after our non-working holidays ready to get stuck into working twice as hard to make up for the time we maybe should of used in the holidays...
On the Tuesday (2nd August, 2011), all our group members gathered together to have our first face to face meeting for the Spring semester, basically we discussed what we should achieve in the next couple of weeks to get our project up and running. Ryan and myself have been working on the in-game controls and have been implementing the jump control in any direction to work with the xbox 360 controller thumb stick. Other small things we have achieved are:

• Implementation of Arena
• In-game timer until round over
• Player movement
• Event manager class

Just before the code...

It's been a little time before my last blog, but we haven't slacked off on work. From the last blog we have mostly been working on the technical document before we start the coding for our game. This was basically writing up information to understand how the game is to work and function. I had parts of writing up sections mostly about what the XNA Framework is, game screen design and writing up information on the fighting engine with help from Ryan. From here on in, we all hope to start actual coding for the game which we will be using a game engine created by Jordan to help us all throughout. I will be mostly working on coding the fighting engine with Ryan collaborating ideas and seeing them finally being put to use. We have quite a task ahead of us, something we all have been looking forward to :)

Working in the Holidays?

Well this week was a small holiday just before another small Easter break, no uni classes or lectures to attend which is quite nice, although throughout our break we were assigned some tasks to complete which will contribute to our game manual.
My task was to create the games story. This did take quite a bit of time, though the story isn't long, the hardest task was to get the story right and for it to piece together with the game. We had different characters in mind for our game, so piecing them all together and how they would meet and compete was the challenge. After going through many ideas I had come up with the solution which works well with the whole 'training' side as well. The story takes part in a few different sections in the timeline. Firstly, the story contains little history about the trainer which isn't a playable part of the game. The next part of the timeline takes place in the playable mode 'Training', where the trainer finds his students and teaches them how to really fight. The last part of the timeline is the competition which is played in 'Story Mode' or even 'Quick Match'. That is just a small part of the story. I also thought now that we have an overall story, I should also give each individual character a background story about themselves.
I was also worked on creating the controller layout of how the game is to be played and the basic combo moves which will be adjusted as we move on through our project. Only reason this will be changed is because some moves may be too hard to achieve or we might have time to make better or add more.
Lastly, a quick drawing of the game screen was drawn up just as a place holder for now until we get actual screenshots of our game.
All this will be placed together into the user manual hopefully in the coming week :)

Storyline and Characters

After the last meeting we had I was given the task of taking care of the story and coming up with some  characters for our game. I've been working on the overall story as well as short stories about each individual character from across the world. So far this has been working quite well, and haven't had many problems.
I noticed that in our planning for our game we didn't have any female characters! This has now been taken care of though discussed in the meeting. We will be including a female character into our game.
As we are limited to three characters I thought why not go for three complete different types of people with different backgrounds, one being Japanese, Russian and the Brazilian woman.
I have also been given the task to come up with the control scheme and game screen, so far I don't see that I'll be running into any problems but if I do I will be posting.
This will all be put together to go into the games manual.

Bone animation or Spritesheets ?

While doing my assigned task for the week of coming up with a basic set of moves/combos it comes to my attention that to make it look flashy and neat with little more advanced combos we will be in need to use sprite sheets. I will need more time to play with the 2D bones animation to see if we can make these moves/combos look as awesome as possible. If it is too much of a limitation I'm thinking if we might be able to use both techniques or come up with some sort of solution. This I will be bringing up into our next group meeting on Wednesday 6th April.

another group meeting...

Last week had been a busy week due to many things both at uni and personal. We managed to get three meetings out of the way, which consisted of a meeting on Tuesday 29th March about learning how to use subversion. With past experience in using subversion this shouldn't be too much of a problem up ahead. The next two meetings was our regular planned group meeting and our scheduled meeting with our supervisor Luke.

In the usual scheduled meeting we had planned on the games content and how the be lay out and design will be. We had all come up with basic sketches of 'screens' our game will contain, I was in charge of the fighting screen and Adam was in charge of the Character/Level selection screen. Now we are starting to get a visual representation of the game, just now to decide on colour schemes and themes. We are leaning towards having a bright and colourful theme rather than a dark gloomy theme which you would find playing Mortal Kombat.


We have been issued new tasks which are almost complete for our next group meeting. Over the course of the week i have also thought of some problems we might encounter which will be explained within the next blog(s).

Planning Stages

After the last few meetings we have all come to some sort of conclusion of what we all intend our game to be. We have discussed whether or not to create the game in a 2D or 3D world, and from points discussed we have leant towards creating a world in 2D, although having a 3D world with side scroll fighting would be a very nice feature to have in the game which may be considered after the main focus has been completed which is the AI.
We also intend on using 3 different character types; slow and powerful, fast and weakish and ofcourse a well rounded player. When this was considered complications arose about how the AI would learn depending on the character you fight as, we were to decide if the AI was able to learn each and every possible move in the game or have the AI only learn the generic moves from each character. This complication is still to be discussed within the group as we have not come to a final decision.