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.