GAME - Boiling Point

[Llama Juice]

THE GAME IS DONE!

The installer and more info can be found later in this thread. Right here, in fact. (http://www.modacity.net/forums/showthread.php?p=495086#post495086)


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Hey there, I'm in my final project for my game art degree program... meaning that I'm working with a small team of students on a video game built from the ground up.

Our team is comprised of six programmers and two artists (along with an internal producer, two external producers, an art director, and a sound guy)

Our game is a mech on mech combat game featuring a steampunkish theme vs a cyberpunkish theme. You play as the only SteamMech as you defend the city from the oncoming onslaught of CyberMech forces.

We've been in development for about three months now (first month and a half were documentation and such, next month was ironing out the pipeline of getting art into the game through the programmers, and now I can FINALLY just buckle down and bust ass on making art.)

http://photos-f.ak.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ak-snc1/hs267.snc1/9423_196525638635_196141223635_4021112_3354246_n.j pg
(yea, it hurts me too)

We have been making art over the past month, but I really wasn't digging my art director's idea of a steampunk environment (see above) and neither was anyone else.... so we decided to start over on the environment, while making it awesome.

That said... onto the art!

We're going to be creating 8 different types of buildings (I might try to overrule that and add more if we have time....)

http://www.llamajuice.com/img/bldg_2b_SP_tex5.png

http://www.llamajuice.com/img/bldg_3a_SP_tex1.png

I also created the HUD which is all 2D in game, but I wanted to make it pretty.... and I can work Maya better than Photoshop... so yar.

http://llamajuice.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/HUD_bottomFrame.png

The HUD is missing all the other stuff that I have to fix and be awesome... but yar.

As for the menu... for the main menu we're going with a full 3D fun time. It's going to be working similar to what you see below. The flipping of the letters and such from the first video plus the background and such from the second video. I don't have a video of it finished because right now it's not working properly in the game.

wdkjWLQS9U0
+
IqcPlCNUPl4

Other than what I've posted here, I've made the "Cyber Mech" enemy which still doesn't have a finished texture yet.

http://photos-c.ak.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ak-snc1/hs247.snc1/9423_196531353635_196141223635_4021141_4364378_n.j pg

and I've made a "Cyber Tank" which I don't have any renders of at the moment because he's not really presentable yet.

Alpha Installer

As far as progress goes on the game, we have a standalone installer up that's buggy as hell and already slightly outdated. If you guys wanna try it out you can grab the game at

http://www.llamajuice.com/Game/AAO%2...oint-Alpha.zip (http://www.llamajuice.com/Game/AAO%20BoilingPoint-Alpha.zip)

A few words of caution. Do not fuck with stuff in the menu, only go to start game or adjust the volume of stuff lol. The profile system doesn't work yet and I'm fairly certain will lock up the game. Once you're in the game, don't try to minimize the game, it'll lock up lol.

There's a bunch of memory leaks and such in it still, as we are dealing with Havok as our main third party API and... well Havok is a bitch. The programmers are working on that to make it all work smoothly.

Since this build we've gotten lighting, normal maps, and specular maps in. We haven't made those maps yet for our assets so for you guys it doesn't really matter all that much.

The objective screen in the pause menu is rather useful, use it if you don't know what to do.

Your basic controlls are that 1, 2, and 3 switch between your three weapons, I think only the "Auto Cannon(1)" and "Rocket Launchers(2)" work right now... and the rockets are only half there (don't bother using them lol) Spacebar uses your "steam pack" jump jets type thing... watch the heat gauge on the bottom right of your hud. When you overheat your guns and jump jet don't work anymore. WASD to move, and mouse to aim/shoot. Pretty simple stuffs.

The animations and the compass are all placeholders, they'll be replaced this week.

If you can't run the game please post whatever errors you get, or any bugs that you encounter. I'll pass those bugs along to the devs. Any suggestions on gameplay and such I'll pass along as well.

Also, there's supposed to be a giant wall on one side of the peninsula, and there's supposed to be actual terrain and water out there... none of it is in the game in that build I think... (I'm on my mac side, I can't test it and see right now)

Beta Installer

Hey there guys, I've been wanting to give you guys an updated build of the game and such but whenever we get around to a major turnin we end up having some problems with getting some assets in game... and then it turns into other problems with getting other assets in game... I realized that I'm never going to be content with giving you guys a build until we're done.... but I'll hand one out anyhow haha.

There's a few important things to note with this build. Still only go into the game, don't try to make a new profile or edit any controls. You can edit the sound volume and such, but everything else you should leave alone.

There are a few destructible buildings in this build of the game. I'm working on dressing it up more and making them break apart into smaller pieces (this was a test to see how our engine would do with just a ton of dynamic objects in the world)

Switch between your weapons with 1, 2, and 3. However do NOT use 3, it'll break stuff. Q and E also cycle through weapons, be careful with this though as it will go to the third option.

Right now we're tying together a bunch of stuff to make the game play better and look better. The day after we put this build together we finally got it working right where we can put in proper models with normal and spec maps. We also got it so that a mesh can accept multiple textures.... which is why the giant wall along one side of the city looks like garbage right now... it only has one texture applied... and it doesn't have the normal or spec maps applied.

The ground has been redone since this build, and the skybox doesn't accept light anymore. The mech's texture is still being fixed, and there are a few minor tweaks to the enemy mech's texture as well.

The HUD has been touched up since this build a little bit.

http://www.llamajuice.com/Game/AAO%20BoilingPoint-Beta.zip

[Inferno]

Those buildings are awesome but the mechs look so low rez in comparison.

Hope you fix that up.

[Malloy]

Yeh the mechs better be placeholders, cos they look shit

[Gwunty]

Looks like the game was clay rendered in max.

it needs a better rendering engine :saddowns:

[Llama Juice]

Yea, the mechs are going to have a slight overhaul. I'm not a character artist at all, and neither is the other artist on my team... so it's a bit rough for us.

The rendering engine is a work in progress, it'll be awesome by the time we're done with the game. the reason why it looks like crap there is because there isn't any lights in the world yet, so everything is at full brightness which means there's no shadows yet.

The render engine guy is working on getting lights in right now... like... he's sitting behind me working on it.

[Con]

That's pretty cool, can we try the game when you're done with it.. or even beforehand >: )

[Limited]

Haha sweet nice work there. What language is the engine being coded in by the way, also what API's are you using?

I'm working on things like this, problem is we cant use 'big' teams, its limited to 2 people per group which blows.

[NuggetWarmer]

Yea, the mechs are going to have a slight overhaul. I'm not a character artist at all, and neither is the other artist on my team... so it's a bit rough for us.

The rendering engine is a work in progress, it'll be awesome by the time we're done with the game. the reason why it looks like crap there is because there isn't any lights in the world yet, so everything is at full brightness which means there's no shadows yet.

The render engine guy is working on getting lights in right now... like... he's sitting behind me working on it.

Do you guys have a website?

[Llama Juice]

@Con Yea, we will be needing some testers soonish, so I'll put up a link to an installer when I can.

@Limited They are using C++ to code it. There's some scripting support put in too so that we can make external variables that people can change in .dat or .txt files or something... I'm not quite sure how it all works. They're also using C# (C Sharp?) for external tools and such (like our weapon editor) As for APIs the big one we are using is Havok for our physics/collision. We are planning on doing a destructible environment, so Havok should be able to take care of most of that for us. We are also using a sound API.... either Xaudio or.... something else...not Fmod... can't use it 'cause we're using Havok... it's a rule that the school has where we can only use one paid API or something.... not quite sure all the details there. The reason why we get big teams here is because this is the final project for our degrees. Before this the programmers have worked on a few smaller game projects with teams of 2-3 people.

@Nugget Warmer We have a blogger site, and a facebook group. I have my own personal blog http://www.llamajuice.com that I use to update stuff about my game and such... but that's just me.... and most of the time it's probably going to be mostly copy/paste same shit I put here lol.

http://boilingpointfinalproject.blogspot.com/
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Boiling-Point-Final-Project/196141223635
http://www.llamajuice.com/

[n00b1n8R]

If you want inspiration for steampunk mechs done right, check out Warmachine (google it, specifically the warjacks)
EG:
http://tinsoldier.open24x7.biz/catalog/images/prodimg/img2575.jpg
http://tinsoldier.open24x7.biz/catalog/images/prodimg/img2676.jpg

And as for cyberpunk mechs, check out the heavies from dystopia (it's a source mod).

The mechs do look like ass but the rest is cool :)

[Llama Juice]

Yea, we have tons of reference of them, and the SteamMech was based mainly off that red mech you posted there actually.... just... that the art director thought it'd be cool to add spikes onto the shoulders...

http://photos-a.ak.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ak-snc1/hs247.snc1/9423_196531358635_196141223635_4021142_7264975_n.j pg
There's an untextured render of him. We're probably going to be removing those spikes...

I found a render of the cyber tank on the facebook page for the game.

http://photos-e.ak.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ak-snc1/hs247.snc1/9423_198076578635_196141223635_4033842_707982_n.jp g

With the cyber stuff I was trying to base a lot of it off of insects and stuff like that. When I made the CyberMech I mainly had a praying mantis in mind, when making this tank I was thinking of an ant/scorpion type situation.

The idea is that there's a big fan in the middle of him pushing air downward and that's able to keep him afloat, and that's how he moves.. hovering lol. The big grey feet that come down are so that when he's not hovering he isn't just sitting on the ground 'cause that would scratch his awesome paint job. I wish I saw this dystopia stuff beforehand though 'cause I'm diggin it.

Actually... looking back at the reference that we collected... it's pretty much all cooler than what my art director gave me.... and from what I understood at the time is that he wanted it to look like the reference he gave me.... which kinda makes me wanna just try to bang out a new mech and see what he does... because the current guy doesn't excite me or anyone else on the project. He looked cooler in my head and on paper than he does in the game.

I kinda wanna just do it. Just see what I can bust out in a good day of solid work rather than the constantly interrupted work I get when I'm at school/with the group.... but it's cool.

Just kinda wish I got home earlier than 5AM last night.... haha

[Corndogman]

The current Cybermech looks like an empty Elvis suit, jus sayin'.

[Llama Juice]

http://www.llamajuice.com/img/Scene.png

I was playing around with just placing stuff around. Get a better feel of stuff this way.

I'm considering just chopping that second building I made in half and getting two other buildings out of it.

I'm not going to remake the cyber mech until I get permission for that one from my art director. I'll see him tomorrow.

[Ganon]

I really hate those mechs ;__;

[Con]

I really hate those mechs ;__;
ditto

Also, needs more texture variety... actually, just needs more variety in general.

[FreedomFighter7]

The pictures or model are too dark. That tank looks nothing like one.

I'm really unexcited about most of the stuff in this game.
Just some criticisms.

[Gwunty]

Your art director is fucking retarded.

[SnaFuBAR]

needs more details on both the mech styles and the tank. neither really convey what they're supposed to be.

[mech]

Your gears in your menu aren't spinning at a constant speed. They slow down, then speed up. This is a result of your tangents not being linear, if I remember correctly.

[Llama Juice]

@Snaf: We throw the word "Tank" around just to talk about the ground unit. He's more of big ground unit than a traditional "tank".

@Mech: The gear speed was intentional, I meant for it to be a lot more subtle than that, but the tiny effing change ended up just being a distraction. Now they spin at half that speed and at a constant rate.

We finally have an installer working and such for the game and we are looking at releasing an alpha build of the game to the public tomorrow. (As is, there's a handful of memory leaks that the programmers need to take care of so that it doesn't eat your computer's RAM or something)

The game as right now is just finally now starting to almost feel like a game haha. It's broken all over the place, (we JUST implemented jumping so it's rather wonky haha) but it's playable at the moment.

I haven't showed you guys the other artist's buildings yet, but those'll be in the Alpha release and it adds a good chunk of variety to the mix. His textures are a bit too dark at the moment... but overall it works :P

[MetKiller Joe]

Must be awesome getting 6 months for this project and only having two artists for the artwork.

[Llama Juice]

Haha it's more like we get 5 months.... but then we had GDC/ Thanksgiving/ Christmas all in the middle of it.... so we get more like 4.2 months.... and the first month and a half are all paper work... so it's more like 2.7 months with two artists. It's happy fun times.

[Limited]

Wait, so you had 4.2 months to work on solely this? (I.e. no other work?)

If so, you jammy person :O

I have 6~7 months to make my final year project, yet I have 5 other projects on the go at the same time, so I have like, 1 month to work on it fully really which sucks.

[Llama Juice]

No not quite, the first two months we have another class alongside our game which end up just being giant wastes of time... (considering our classes are 8 hours long) The third month in we have just solely this game to work on... the fourth month the artists have a second class to go to where we are supposed to make high res assets for our demo reel... and the fifth month... well we present our game on the 10th of December... so the 5th month is hella short... the rest of that month is "Archive" I guess.... all the programmers have to get their code all in order and put in proper comments and such.

As far as progress goes on the game, we have a standalone installer up that's buggy as hell and already slightly outdated. If you guys wanna try it out you can grab the game at

http://www.llamajuice.com/Game/AAO%20BoilingPoint-Alpha.zip

A few words of caution. Do not fuck with stuff in the menu, only go to start game or adjust the volume of stuff lol. The profile system doesn't work yet and I'm fairly certain will lock up the game. Once you're in the game, don't try to minimize the game, it'll lock up lol.

There's a bunch of memory leaks and such in it still, as we are dealing with Havok as our main third party API and... well Havok is a bitch. The programmers are working on that to make it all work smoothly.

Since this build we've gotten lighting, normal maps, and specular maps in. We haven't made those maps yet for our assets so for you guys it doesn't really matter all that much.

The objective screen in the pause menu is rather useful, use it if you don't know what to do.

Your basic controlls are that 1, 2, and 3 switch between your three weapons, I think only the "Auto Cannon(1)" and "Rocket Launchers(2)" work right now... and the rockets are only half there (don't bother using them lol) Spacebar uses your "steam pack" jump jets type thing... watch the heat gauge on the bottom right of your hud. When you overheat your guns and jump jet don't work anymore. WASD to move, and mouse to aim/shoot. Pretty simple stuffs.

The animations and the compass are all placeholders, they'll be replaced this week.

If you can't run the game please post whatever errors you get, or any bugs that you encounter. I'll pass those bugs along to the devs. Any suggestions on gameplay and such I'll pass along as well.

Also, there's supposed to be a giant wall on one side of the peninsula, and there's supposed to be actual terrain and water out there... none of it is in the game in that build I think... (I'm on my mac side, I can't test it and see right now)

[Limited]

160MB? Damn :D, I'll play it and report any issues :D

[Llama Juice]

Haha a good 100 MB of that is silly Direct X stuff that the programmers think we need to include (I don't think we need EVERY redistributable... but... that's just me....) We're going to be trying to optimize that for sure.

[legionaire45]

Need to fix some typos in your readme:
Spec:
PC
200 mhz
64 mb of memory
DirectX drivers march 2009

!!Must Install Distrubutable in order to run game!!


Default Path:
c:\ProgramFiles\BoilingPoint

How To Play:
Follow mission objectives as they appear.
Complete objectives to progress.
Finish mission to win game.

Controls:
A,W,S,D = movement keys (foward, back ,left , right)
Q,E = cycle weapons
Space = jump
P = Pause

Known Bugs:
Tally Screen when win goes blank versus when viewed during in game pause menu

Crashes: NONE

Bugs/Things that could be imporved:

Major flickering in your startup movies after "Stu Stu Studios".

It's very hard to select things from your menu - it would help to slow down the speed at which your menu selection changes.

Animations seem jittery - looks like they need to be updated more often or something.

Would be nice if you had a menu at startup or in one of the menus to change graphical settings at some point - not sure if you already had that planed but the jaggies hurt :<

Not being able to fly over and onto buildings even though you can fly higher than them is a bit of a let down. I wanted to be a mech ninja D:

During the game itself, the first wave of cybermechs never came.


Graphics could use a boost too - I know your team is working on implementing lightmaps now, but adding basic specularity might make your pipes and mechs look better. Steampunk stuff usually has a shine to it, especially if it's brass or copper - it would be worth the extra work imo to add some shinies in.

Additionally, maybe setting up a bugzilla account would help you keep better track of bugs if you haven't already set one up.

[Kalub]

I like it, but... I don't at the same time.

[Trulife8342]

Haha a good 100 MB of that is silly Direct X stuff that the programmers think we need to include (I don't think we need EVERY redistributable... but... that's just me....) We're going to be trying to optimize that for sure.

You need new programmers.

[Corndogman]

Correct me if I'm wrong here, but doesn't Full Sail allow it's students to use the work they create while attending for any purposes they want after graduation, even commercial?

[UnevenElefant5]

Correct me if I'm wrong here, but doesn't Full Sail allow it's students to use the work they create while attending for any purposes they want after graduation, even commercial?
I wouldn't think any school would NOT do that. It seems kind of unfair to say "Oh, since you used it for a project you can't ever use it for anything else again."

[Llama Juice]

Yup, we own all rights to the game. The only limitation is that when we sell it we can't go over $10 per copy because of Havok. If we charge more than $10 then we need an actual license.

[UnevenElefant5]

I had a lot of "spasms" with the mouse, where, when firing, the aim would just veer off to the left or right. Dunno if you know about that, but that's what happened to me. Jumping could be smoothed out more too, so you don't pause, float up, then float down, then pause, then begin walking forward again.

[Limited]

I wouldn't think any school would NOT do that. It seems kind of unfair to say "Oh, since you used it for a project you can't ever use it for anything else again."
My university has half the rights of any work I do. Unless its completely in my own time.

Then again, they don't do it to hurt me, if we ever sell stuff they dont steal all the profits, yet they have the big funds for legal people and whatnot.

[Kalub]

update?

[Llama Juice]

Haha sorry, we've been working on animations and effects lately so on the art side there isn't much fun stuff to show :/.

As far as the actual game goes the programmers have fixed a TON of the bugs in our game and most of the memory leaks.... but now they broke like everything again because everyone is trying to get new stuff in right now, so it's all in a state of chaos.

Everything has new animations now, and the tank player is a ton smaller now.

My art director won't allow me to work on any environmental stuff until all the special effects and animations are done for the game.... which *sigh* it'll happen soon. Special effects should be done today, and we'll be able to move on to breakable buildings and such.

I wanna give you guys another build of the game, but as is it's not in a really playable state at the moment :/

[Limited]

Has lighting been implemented yet? Also whats the file size like now?

[Llama Juice]

I think he has a basic directional light in the game at the moment... it's just there temporarily though 'cause he's going to be trying to get deferred lighting in, so eventually it'll look rather bitchin :P.

I haven't looked at our file size lately, but I'd assume it hasn't changed much, maybe a meg or two bigger. We've been working on Animations and fixing old stuff... so not too much NEW stuff added. We still haven't optimized the direct X install yet because it's kinda hard to test to see what you need or don't need when you've already installed the stuff.... and I don't think Direct X is easy to uninstall lol. If anything I might pull those files out for you guys that already have Direct X installed so that you'll save that extra 100 MB of space.

[Kalub]

bump?

[MetKiller Joe]

Anybody else just get a black screen when running it on Windows 7 64-bit?

[SMASH]

I did Met.

[Kalub]

can we get a bump on this shit right here?

[Llama Juice]

Hey there guys, I've been wanting to give you guys an updated build of the game and such but whenever we get around to a major turnin we end up having some problems with getting some assets in game... and then it turns into other problems with getting other assets in game... I realized that I'm never going to be content with giving you guys a build until we're done.... but I'll hand one out anyhow haha.

There's a few important things to note with this build. Still only go into the game, don't try to make a new profile or edit any controls. You can edit the sound volume and such, but everything else you should leave alone.

There are a few destructible buildings in this build of the game. I'm working on dressing it up more and making them break apart into smaller pieces (this was a test to see how our engine would do with just a ton of dynamic objects in the world)

Switch between your weapons with 1, 2, and 3. However do NOT use 3, it'll break stuff. Q and E also cycle through weapons, be careful with this though as it will go to the third option.

Right now we're tying together a bunch of stuff to make the game play better and look better. The day after we put this build together we finally got it working right where we can put in proper models with normal and spec maps. We also got it so that a mesh can accept multiple textures.... which is why the giant wall along one side of the city looks like garbage right now... it only has one texture applied... and it doesn't have the normal or spec maps applied.

The ground has been redone since this build, and the skybox doesn't accept light anymore. The mech's texture is still being fixed, and there are a few minor tweaks to the enemy mech's texture as well.

The HUD has been touched up since this build a little bit.

http://www.llamajuice.com/Game/AAO%20BoilingPoint-Beta.zip

http://www.llamajuice.com/Game/Destroyed.png

http://www.llamajuice.com/Game/Breaking.png

http://www.llamajuice.com/Game/MainStreet.png

These pics are from the most current build, but the lights were just a test thing, he set a huge ambient value which washed everything out on the ground :/

Today I was working on fixing up some things with getting our logo down and getting a design done for our team shirts.

http://www.llamajuice.com/Game/ShirtDesign.png

[Higuy]

Looking pretty cool so far dude, keep it up.

[Con]

needs more ambient light :gonk:

The t-shirt design is way too dark and hard to tell anything apart. The noise is gross too.

[Kalub]

I like it however, you should fix your hud transperancy. And make us a gameplay video, cause I can't run this.

[Ganon]

The building with the orange roofs don't blend will with the purplish ones

[Llama Juice]

@ Higuy: Thanks! :D

@ Con: The programmers finally gave me a file where I can edit the placement and attributes of lights so I can go in and change the values of stuff real time.

The Tshirt design has it's reasons for why I did what I did.

The noise isn't as gross as it looks here, the noise itself is actually on/off noise applied to an alpha on that shape. Basically all black or all white. It helps to add a texture to that shape while keeping it basically all together. Thats why I did the noise to the shapes in the foreground (mechs and gears) I had them as a solid color before and showed it to the team, then showed them the "textured" version and they liked that version better.

The buildings in the background have that same noise because I wanted to separate the shapes without adding more colors to the print. So that darker layer of buildings is the same color as the text and solid buildings, but it makes it look further back and darker because of that color dotted next to solid black.

This helps make it a two color print, which makes it cheaper to print.

@ Kalub: The HUD thing was an interesting problem. I'd exported that over and over again, put it in the game countless times... and couldn't figure out why the eff that one wouldn't work, while the other HUD items were fine.

The programmer that placed that object scaled it down... making the game re sample the image between solid black and solid white (alpha) and it wouldn't do it entirely accurately... making it have a slight white outline around the shape. I actually went into the code and looked for that object, fixed the scale, then replaced all that stuff and the lights on top of it so that it looks proper now. I'll make a gameplay video soonish when I have the time to do so :P.

@ Ganon: I made the buildings with the orange roofs, then I sat down with the other artist in the team for an hour and a half or so, explaining why I did things a certain way and how I made things so that he could keep a consistent art style between them. He sat there and listened to me while I told him all this, I offered him help with his textures and such to make them better and he made what you see in the game. The darker buildings with the purple roofs. The reason why you see more purple roofs is because he made those buildings taller than mine, so they stand out higher than my buildings do. I've spoken with him multiple times about fixing those textures/models but he just won't touch them.

[Hunter]

I couldn't play :(

I am using Windows 7 64bit. I could see all white apart from selected text on the menu, when I selected new game and it started there where no 3D elements, just the HUD I think :S

[Limited]

Theres a new build? Dang, these comments are about the old build, incase they havent been addressed that is.

Downloading new build now.

2.1 Comments

I've had a few serious issues with 2.1 lol.

Firstly, just after the steam pack objective test, my mouse got locked, up and down worked fine yet left and right did nothing. The WASD controls did nothing too, they were locked. Although I could jet pack up and down.Closing the game crashes for me, probably some resource management issue such as freeing models or textures.Just as the enemies appeared, I fired a gun and the game went crazy. The camera location, along with the origin point for particles stayed put, however the actual mech model kept moving forward even if I didnt press a key. something wrong with a transform/translate method call during model rendering. I managed to get a screenshot of it, the red circle is the player model.

http://img130.imageshack.us/img130/3650/mabody.png



1.0 Comments

The mouse is visible in the menu system, yet it can not be used to click or select other options. Maybe remove it being rendered if it won't be used to allow input.

Window textures seem to mess up at far distances, are you using mipmaps/going to use mipmaps?

Explosions take a while to disappear, personally I'd lower the time they show up for but thats just me.

Are the ammo drops suppose to spin when the player gets closer to them? That occurs but only with ammo, not the repair.

After being in the menu for a few minutes, the mouse camera movement seems to go wacky.

Also going back into the menu a few times, it froze on the tally screen, displaying a bitmap (tally) and the rest of the screen was white.

[Llama Juice]

Every build you guys get is old because the build is constantly growing :P

The issues with the old build have mostly been resolved, the mouse in the menu thing was because the 2D menu stuff was placeholder and he didn't wanna make click checks for stuff that'd be placeholder.

The 2.1 comments.... I'm assuming you accidentally tried firing the Tesla Cannon (3 on the keyboard.) In the build I gave you guys that would break the camera. (it's been an issue for a while... I think we just fixed it the other day... but I don't have the build in an installer for you guys. :/)


Theres a new build? Dang, these comments are about the old build, incase they havent been addressed that is.

Downloading new build now.

2.1 Comments

I've had a few serious issues with 2.1 lol.

Firstly, just after the steam pack objective test, my mouse got locked, up and down worked fine yet left and right did nothing. The WASD controls did nothing too, they were locked. Although I could jet pack up and down.Closing the game crashes for me, probably some resource management issue such as freeing models or textures.Just as the enemies appeared, I fired a gun and the game went crazy. The camera location, along with the origin point for particles stayed put, however the actual mech model kept moving forward even if I didnt press a key. something wrong with a transform/translate method call during model rendering. I managed to get a screenshot of it, the red circle is the player model.

http://img130.imageshack.us/img130/3650/mabody.png



1.0 Comments

The mouse is visible in the menu system, yet it can not be used to click or select other options. Maybe remove it being rendered if it won't be used to allow input.

Window textures seem to mess up at far distances, are you using mipmaps/going to use mipmaps?

Explosions take a while to disappear, personally I'd lower the time they show up for but thats just me.

Are the ammo drops suppose to spin when the player gets closer to them? That occurs but only with ammo, not the repair.

After being in the menu for a few minutes, the mouse camera movement seems to go wacky.

Also going back into the menu a few times, it froze on the tally screen, displaying a bitmap (tally) and the rest of the screen was white.

[Kalub]

SON I IMPLORE YOU TO UPDATE MORE FREQUENTLY OR PAY A STEEP FINE

[Kalub]

UPDATE UPDATE UPDATE I WANT FUCKING NORMAL MAPS AND SOME BADASS SHIT NOW PLUS PARTICLES AND SECRET BLOWJOB GIFS

[Gwunty]

KALUB THIS IS NOT GOOD

IT IS AGAINST THE RULES TO CAPS LOCK DOUBLE POST

[Llama Juice]

Hey there, we're in the final crunch of our game, turn in is on Tuesday, so we have a lot of stuff to get done in the next few days.

We spent the last two weeks tweaking destruction stuff trying to get the other buildings to be destructible... but our engine isn't liking it on the programmer's laptops. We need to have the game run at at least 30 fps on their machines (which aren't great machines at all) as part of our grade so we had to cut a lot of the art that we did in getting the other buildings destructible.

We have been optimizing our models/textures (cheat like a whore in the tri count, and bring the texture sizes down and such.) over the past week as well trying to get those other buildings to be able to run with more than 2 fps on their machines... we got it up to 7 fps... woo success haha. So like I said, we had to cut the other buildings' destruction. Since we only have four building types that means that 1/4 of the buildings in the game are destructible.

We cut the jump jets from the game, as they didn't add to gameplay, and were causing a lot of problems with our collision. We've also spent a lot of time on the new missions in our game, making it actually have something to play rather than just walk down the street and kill someone haha.

The past few days I've been working on the main menu, getting it working properlyish and getting the art displayed properly. The other guy that was on that... well... he's a failure.... so I finally got one of the other programmers to sit down with me and go through it and place the separate assets in there in the right spots and such. The letters flip now almost properly... the guy that was supposed to the animations for the letters flipped (on the code side) decided that he'd ignore our design for the menu and went in and procedurally animated each letter... rather than pulling from a pool of animations I gave him.

I don't remember if we had our music in the game before, but now it's in and we're working on getting the music to blend into battle music and such when enemies get close enough to the player.

We've done ton of bugfixes where weapons would just... stop shooting after a while... or just stop causing damage. Now our rockets can do damage on ourselves (so don't shoot walls right next to you haha) There are a lot more enemies in the game, and a new mission where we have to defend a building from an assault.

I gotta hop back to it though, I'll hand off an installer on Tuesday after we turnin. I'm working on finishing up some other art for the menu, then I'm going to play with the terrain in the world to make it interesting. Right now it's just... bleh... but... we'll see how that goes if I have time to get on that.

Sorry for being a stranger ya'll.... bare with me it'll be up soon :P

[Kalub]

AWESOME UPDATE THANKS

[Llama Juice]

Hey there everybody :P

So turnin was this morning, it was an eventful time. Last night we were finishing up everything, making sure the game runs right and everything.... we made an installer... tossed that on someone's computer and... for some reason the ground units stopped shooting at us.

Most of the team had already left and went to bed at that point (2 AM) so we had a rather... fun morning this morning while we were getting everything working properly right before the turnin. :P

There's still some art issues that bother me, but overall I'm happy with the game. Our lighting ended up not getting in properly, so our world is shadowless. I didn't have time to fix the terrain, so that's ugly... and I didn't have time to fix the normal maps on my buildings. All that aside, the game came together and I think it's a fun little game.



"BOILING POINT"

System Specification:

PC
200 mhz
64 mb of memory
NVIDIA QUADRO graphics card 1600M or Better
DirectX drivers march 2009
Visual Studios Re-Distributable

Default Install Path:

c:\ProgramFiles\StuStuStudios\BoilingPoint


How To Play:
"1st MISSION"
1st Objective: Move foward (W)
2nd Objective: Move backward(s)
3rd Objective: Strafe left or right(A)(D)
4th Objective: Aim Reticule (mouse/pad)
5th Objective: Cycle Forward Through weapons: (E)

"2nd MISSION"
1st Objective: Go to Chester Street and destroy two mechs.
2nd Objective: Go to Rashad Lane and destroy three mechs.
3rd Objective: Go to Byrne Hall and destroy four mechs.

"3rd MISSION"
1st Objective: Go to the intersection of Ross and Hathaway. Destroy six tanks.
2nd Objective: Protect the building on east Lodato from four cyber mechs.
3rd Objective: Destroy two tanks and four mechs on Chaffee Way.
4th Objective: Destroy eight cyber mechs as they assault the wall.


Player Menu Controls:

Up,Down Arrow = Traverse menu selections
Enter = Confirm selection
Left, Right Arrow = Adjust selection
Escape = (PAUSE/CREDITS SCREEN ONLY) Exits to previous menu


Player In-Game Controls:

A,W,S,D = Movement keys (foward, back ,left , right)
1,2,3 = Select weapons
E,Q = Cycle through weapons
ESC = Pause
Left mouse = Primary weapon fire
Right mouse = Secondary weapon fire


Known Game Bugs: Tanks may not fire on the player. Facing too low while firing will shoot occasional shots upwards.
Known Game Crash: No known crashes.

I forgot to include the readme.txt in the .zip so... I posted it there lol :P

Anyhow, the game is done. Here's the installer.

http://www.llamajuice.com/Game/AAO%20BoilingPoint.zip

A few other tidbits to know. The "Tesla Cannon" (3 on the keyboard) has a charge up time, hold the button down for a little bit for it to shoot. If you're too close to a building and you fire at the building then the tesla cannon shoots weird.

I dunno if this bug is still in, but if you go into the game a second time (play, die/quit/win, start the game again) all of the mechs will be shooting extremely powerful rockets at you. This makes the game damn near impossible haha. Best of luck though.

The compass on the top is a compass, not a radar. It tells you the general direction of where the enemies spawned.

When you start, keep the tutorial on. If you turn it off on your first playthrough then the tanks won't shoot.

[Kalub]

You will post gameplay vidjoe now. :)

[legionaire45]

Did you ever end up cutting out the extra directX crap? Huge file is huge.

Menu system is nice, although maybe shortening the amount of time that it spins would be better. That, or have the menu things spin when you go past a menu item or something, idk.

Game itself is fun, although it gets really difficult towards the third mission when mechs and tanks just start swarming you. Haven't gotten past that part, lol.

I got that the area with the water was kind of like an ocean area, but maybe making it a bit more obvious (adding a beach? throwing in some ships?) would help - as of right now I get the impression that something was meant to go there but it was cut.

EDIT: found the quicksand on one of the sides - maybe put a trigger or something there that plays an audio clip warning the player not to step into it.

The other far wall looks good though, as does the player's mech and the buildings.

Overall good - cut down the file size, throw in some lighting/specular and it would be a pretty nice game.

[MetKiller Joe]

Still can't get it to run on Windows 7 x64 :[.

[Moses]

One thing I STRONGLY suggest if you for some reason still plan to work on it is to add an option to set mouse sensitivity. I had to lower my mouse speed to 1 and it was still flying all over the place lol. I didn't get too far in the game because of that so I don't really have any specific crit. Awesome job though Team Llama :-P

[Llama Juice]

Did you ever end up cutting out the extra directX crap? Huge file is huge.Sadly not, I'll talk to one of the guys who made the installer and ask if he'd be able to cut that stuff out for me.

Menu system is nice, although maybe shortening the amount of time that it spins would be better. That, or have the menu things spin when you go past a menu item or something, idk. Your suggestions were my suggestions, sadly the programmer in charge of it wasn't willing to help.

Game itself is fun, although it gets really difficult towards the third mission when mechs and tanks just start swarming you. Haven't gotten past that part, lol. Thanks :3 We decided to make the game's difficulty ramp up because it's a short game and we wanted people to try multiple times so that they'd play the game longer lol

I got that the area with the water was kind of like an ocean area, but maybe making it a bit more obvious (adding a beach? throwing in some ships?) would help - as of right now I get the impression that something was meant to go there but it was cut.The other artist was supposed to make that asset, he put the placeholder art in and never got around to changing it. By the time I got enough of my stuff done to be able to fix that it was too late.

EDIT: found the quicksand on one of the sides - maybe put a trigger or something there that plays an audio clip warning the player not to step into it.Yea.... don't walk off of the street mesh haha.

The other far wall looks good though, as does the player's mech and the buildings.

Overall good - cut down the file size, throw in some lighting/specular and it would be a pretty nice game.We tried to get some fancy lighting in... didn't happen and by the time that flopped it was too late to get any simpler stuff in :(
^I'm so bold.


Still can't get it to run on Windows 7 x64 :[.

I'm fairly certain we've had it running on Win7 x64... but I'll check. I dunno if the redistrobutable that we included for DirectX works with Win7 or not.... or if our other redistrobutable does (can't remember what it's called :/ Try installing the game again and looking at the other stuff that pops up during installation and finding Win 7 versions? Sorry sir, I can't really test for you :( )

@Moses: We're done with this project, I haven't had any problems with sensitivity of the mouse in the game, it's a bit jumpy yes... but I've never experienced what you're describing :/

Anyhow... we had our big presentation yesterday and I had my dad's girlfriend record it for me (handed her my camera and tripod, had her hit the button haha) and so as Kalub requested here's a gameplay video.

Part 1 of the presentation: Power point slideshow saying what went into the game, and talking about some key aspects of the game.
f2cTlSItaPA&hl

Part 2 of the presentation: Actual gameplay walk through of the game.
eDd1Bru7gk4

Part 3 of the presentation: Questions and Answers. The audience was allowed to ask us questions about our game, so we answered them.
xeNkWd-wH8A

Overall the presentation went smoothly, and I had a great time. :P

Also, fun treat.

http://llamajuice.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/NES-Boiling-Point-1024x768.jpg

I brought my NES pad in and we were playing our games using the controller. Was an interesting experience :P. The guy in the picture is an artist from another team, really cool guy.

[Llama Juice]

I had to make some art for our "Game Bible" and our game dvd.

Front
http://www.llamajuice.com/Game/front_Cover.png

Back
http://www.llamajuice.com/Game/back_Cover.png

http://www.llamajuice.com/Game/CD%20Label.png

I'm done with this game now though. Woooo.

[neuro]

come on, even you have to realise that the whole thing looks kinda terrible :/

80% of everything in there screams I LERN MAEK GAMS!
if that really is an acceptable level and you teachers are accepting that as passable content, i'm inclined to tell you you're wasting your time there.

full sail right?

[blind]

THE CYBER FORCES
lololol

[Llama Juice]

Neuro I agree whole heatedly. My game was easily the worse looking game of the studio.

I had to spend more time fixing the other artist's stuff, and compensating for student programmers. I'm not going to go into specifics because I'm not going to throw anyone under the bus here... but it is a student game, tons of mistakes were made, and from those mistakes I learned a hell of a lot.

The real reason why we were able to go on with our game is because we used Havok. We were the first and only student project to ever "succeed" with Havok and when we'd talk to professionals they'd always be surprised/impressed that we were able to manage Havok in our game.

There was more time wasted in fixing assets than creating them. Mostly due to poor planning and poor communications between certain programmers and the artists. We went through four animation systems and in the end most of the animations we did were cut from the game.

We sunk a ton of time into making our buildings destructible and getting the engine to accept the assets... and while it looked cool it tanked our FPS so we had to cut those assets.

I was in charge of the main menu screen, the HUD, two of the buildings(orange roofs), the giant wall, and the enemies in the game (along with their effects/animations). The other artist was in charge of the pause screen, two buildings(purple roofs), the player mech(with effects/animations), the street, terrain, water, and skybox.

We originally planned to have 8 building types, a bunch of extra stuff to line the streets, and a flying enemy, the other building types got cut when we started over on the environment, the flying enemy got cut when the AI guy had to fix half of the broken systems in our game and couldn't get proper AI for the flying guy.

I can't speak negatively on Full Sail for our project. Yes there are flaws in the system, yes there are areas that could be optimized, and yes there are MASSIVE time sinks in the process. The real project here though in my opinion wasn't about the end result. It's about the process. We made mistakes throughout this project that I'm glad were made. I learned heaps from this project, and even though I can't say that I'm proud about how it looks, I can say that I'm proud to have worked with most of the individuals that made up my team and that I'm looking forward to working with them again in the future.

So as much as it is about making a game, it's just as much about working with a team on a project from concept to completion. Now that the mistakes have been made we all know what NOT to do, and have learned the importance of proper planning and communication.

tl;dr? fuck off, I stopped here, was going to continue but I think I made my point already. :P

[Limited]

As long as you learn from your mistakes, then dont worry about it too much :)

From a programming point of view, its impressive, from an artistic view, I can see why people dont think the visuals are great, yet the programmer in my doesnt worry too much about actual look (although I like things to look great) I can see the under lying technology being used.

Do the other projects have websites you can link us to? I'm dying to see the other peoples creations :P

[Llama Juice]

They have facebook groups, that's about all I know of.

Here's Steam Tower, it's a tower defense game that had one artist on the team (the guy in the pic above). It's a rather fun game.
http://www.facebook.com/#/pages/Winter-Park-FL/Steam-Tower/161272311871?ref=ts

The other game was Brain Storm. Their facebook page isn't nearly as useful, but here it is anyhow :P Their game was an "aggresive weather simulator" where you controlled a storm cloud who kills 50's styled robots.
http://www.facebook.com/#/pages/Brainstorm/159500766660?ref=ts

I can't find any videos of their game, but here's a picture taken during the presentation! lol
http://photos-e.ak.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ak-snc3/hs051.snc3/13866_509025432833_104200473_30296883_6905150_n.jp g

I don't have download links for either games, i think the steam tower guys might try to sell their game so they aren't too privy on throwing a free download link up just yet. The steamtower page has videos of their presentation, whereas the other one hasn't been updated in a few months :/.

The kids that presented their games last month had two teams in their studio. Two teams of 6 programmers and 6 artists. Both games turned out fairly decent looking, and overall they rocked the show.

A puzzle/platforming game "Quintessence"
http://quintessencegame.com/ (website is well done, they have videos and a download to the game.)

Their presentation videos
Part 1:
http://www.facebook.com/search/?q=violent+protest&init=quick#/video/video.php?v=175525397734
Part 2:
http://www.facebook.com/search/?q=violent+protest&init=quick#/video/video.php?v=175604107734
Part 3:
http://www.facebook.com/search/?q=violent+protest&init=quick#/video/video.php?v=175669087734

I'm not sure if you'll be able to watch those videos 'cause... well.. my friend posted them and facebook is weird like that... but... *shrug*

The other game that month was a survival shooter game called Dreams No More.
I can't find much media on their game other than a few videos of the presentation.
Part 1:
http://www.facebook.com/search/?q=violent+protest&init=quick#/video/video.php?v=175364062734
Part2:
http://www.facebook.com/search/?q=violent+protest&init=quick#/video/video.php?v=175448007734

Again... same friend posted those videos... so I dunno if you'll be able to watch them or not :/

[FreedomFighter7]

I agree with Neuro, the game looks like ass. But it seems you did learn something from this, which is good. Knowing what you're doing wrong and not to do it again or do something to get around it is a good thing to learn. Its way to simple for my taste. I love really complex games, I love not knowing what everything does at the beginning, so I love learning about it. It brings more play value, more time to discover and play around. I played some NFL game with my bro on xbox 360 a while ago, and I didn't know what I was doing so I was having a blast! In contrast, once I know what I'm doing and losing I usually get mad. :P

[Llama Juice]

Steam tower has a download link available now.

http://www.filemonster.net/en/file/14781/SteamTower-installer--1-0-exe.html

Steamtower is a tower defense game that looks great and plays even better. Well worth the download. :P

[Terror(NO)More]

Llama, I think you have gone real far in my opinion not only as a student but as a person also. Great guy here guys. You will be on one of the next big titles for sure here in a few years.