Vinyl Shockwave!

During the last couple weeks of Vinyl development I've been implementing various gameplay features.  The biggest two have been obstacle generation and the shockwave (pictured above with programmer art).  We have already been generating obstacles based on beats and notes of songs for a long time, but it was thrown in quickly and the different types of obstacles could prevent you from hitting the others.  For instance, a ball could spawn at the same spot as a chorus filter, and the player could not hit one without the other.

I went through the generation code, and made sure things would spawn out of the way of other things, and added some functionality for spawning chains of filters for potential combos.

The way cooler thing I worked on was the shockwave.  Now when you jump out of the halfpipe, when you land everything within a certain expanding radius goes flying up and out of the pipe.  It's pretty satisfying.  As of right now, it just radiates outward from the initial impact of the player to the designer specified max radius over the specified time, blasting everything it hits out of the way as it goes.  I threw on the fancy static ball shader for now, so that we can visualize why the obstacles are flying away.

Vinyl After the Summer

Alrighty, Vinyl got a pretty major overhaul over the summer.  Basically most of the work we wanted to accomplish last semester, but had no time to do is now done.  Big props to Sherley and Cody for doing the bulking of the programming since the rest of the engineers had internships and were out of town.  I managed to throw together a useful main menu from Montreal, and sit in on several meetings via Skype, but for the most part I was busy with internships and had dodgy internet everywhere I was staying which made VPNing into the university network rather difficult.

Anywho, here's a short video of what the game looked like at the beginning of the semester, since I'm a couple weeks behind on these posts.

As you can see the pipe is now generated by the song itself and curves to the left like the groove in a record. There's some filters that carried over from the prototype and scratching, as well as a remixing system and some grinding rails that I believe were cut before this video was made.

Since the semester started we've been doing a bit more of an art pass, building the style we want for the game and bug fixing.  I personally fixed a few bugs involving the mesh generation and primarily worked on getting a rope made of tiny boxes to tether the player to the needle.

Here's an updated screenshot of the visual changes since the semester started.

The game is starting to look a little less like a prototype now, but still has some of the design/team issues I blogged about last semester.  We're working out the kinks and should be ready with something cool for IGF.

Year 2 Start and Summer Recap

So this blogs been pretty inactive for awhile.  Last semester was ridiculously hectic, getting worse and worse until finally coming to a sudden early end when I an internship offer from Ubisoft Montreal with extremely short notice and starting halfway thru finals week.  I managed to wrap up everything I was working on and get to Montreal with about 12 hours to spare, but the blog suffered a bit for it those last few weeks of school.

Anyway, the Ubisoft internship was really fun and I learned a ton about enemy AI, or at least how UDK does it.  It should probably be noted that this wasn't a traditional internship, it was kind of like a student project on a grand scale supervised by Ubisoft, that I got by competing in their game prototyping competition.  We basically built the winning teams prototype into a full fledged hour or two experience in 8 weeks using UDK.  It was an intense two months, but the end result was fantastic, and I was blown away by what some of those art students up in Montreal can do.  Here's a teaser video that has a download link in the info if you're interested.

Since that internship started so early and was only 8 weeks, I was done by the end of June with two months of summer left, so after taking a week off I headed down to Baltimore to intern at Zenimax Online working on the Elder Scrolls Online.  This was a more traditional internship and I spent the next two months building internal tools for the QA team.  It was great to see how a real studio operates from day to day and month to month and the game looks great.

The best part of these two internships is all the talented and also connected people I met.  I'm no longer worried about being able to find a job come May.

Onto this semester!  I know we're approaching 3 weeks in already, but the end of my summer was almost as hectic as the beginning.  I basically worked at ZOS until the Friday before school started, got back to Utah Saturday night, moved into my new house Sunday, started my new job as a TA on Monday and class started Tuesday.  And the homework for the first week held back no punches, I'll talk more about that when it's done (hopefully this afternoon) and make another update about Vinyl shortly!

It's good to be back!