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).