Alpha Testing of The Game

Kinect keeps us busy

As we approach the holidays our team is working on the game and its various components. After solving the problem we had with the collisions we now focus our attention to a different kind of problem; how to make the game work with the Microsoft Kinect.

The team hard at work!

A bunch of issues solved

It has been a while since the last update and since then everyone’s been working really hard into making this something great. These past 2 weeks were filled with excitements, disappointments, relief and in the end that inevitable feeling of accomplishment that we’ve achieved something great. One day we solve a problem that seemed impossible to solve, the next day something new comes up that needs fixing. These kinds of ups and downs continued throughout the week although our persistence and dedication to the project made us push even more and not give up. After 1 week of insane research and coding we finally have our first prototype ready to play.

Character, map and music design

Well into week 6 our team is making progress in the creation of 2 maps one that will be used in the stage were our character will be on foot and one that will be used when our character is flying. tIDE engine is extremely helpful and straight forward.

Overview of the UDK research and the final decision regarding the game's development kit
 

UDK (Unreal Development Kit):

            UDK is the ideal graphic engine for designing 3d games, using numerous features that make the engine more about designing the game and less about programming it (Unreal Kismet, Unreal Cascade and Unreal Matinee). Also add-ons like the Bink Video Codec, the SpeedTree Foliage Editor and the FaceFX Facial Animation make the engine more capable with less effort. Although these awesome features are truly brilliant there is one major draw-back... the learning curve. UDK is the best open source game engine today and arguably one of the best overall game engines, but it takes time to learn and understand how some major features work. It’s only when you get to know the engine that it becomes creative and unbeatable. Unfortunately considering our deadline that was given to us a month ago (Deadline: January 2013) we do not have the luxury to spent time on learning the UDK.

Character Design

CHARACTER DESIGN

For each game the characters are one major factor that must be given a lot of attention. People tend to put themselves into the characters shoes making them more attached to the game. So as we are about to create a game we need to think carefully about our characters development. Character design mostly consists from 2 major things. The appearance and the personality of the character. Appearance is what makes you like what you see, and personality is what determines how the player will see the character and how much he/she 'll come to taking a liking on the character or not. So I 'll be talking about these things , and how I think we should implement them in our game.

Fast Forward to Week 3

Three weeks into the project and everything seems to be going smoothly. The excitement and involvement is at its peak, with all the members doing a great and better job every week that passes. Today’s meeting was literally a brainstorming festival. We had the opportunity and good fortune to bring Mr. Tasos Anastasiadis into the team. Mr.Anastasiadis is a lecturer in Graphics Design at European University Cyprus and a game enthusiast, to talk to us and educate us about some of the basics in the visual part of designing a game.

First Day

Our first day, started with our instructor Dr. George Christou explaining about our course and our objectives for this semester. He shared with us his idea for the main project of this semester, which will be a game on xbox 360 using kinect, which it will be directed to kids with special movement problems. The basic concept for this idea , is to create a fun game for those kids and at the same time will help them improve some movement difficulties that they have. So, instead of the kids doing the normal physiotherapy schedule, which is pretty frustrating for them , we will urge them to do so by creating a game on xbox kinect, that will implement some of those moves, and actually make the kids try their best while also having fun.