Game Update: Deadline Today! Final Screenshots & Video

We've finally reached the project deadline. We've presented our game to the teachers and fellow students today. We can be pleased with the results :) As a (probably) last update of this game for now, I've included some additional screenshots for your viewing pleasure. A video will be compiled and added later on...(Update: As promised, the video can be found at the bottom)

Update: Video Added!

Game Update: Bedroom + Reflection!

Another game update. Not much to say, just watch... :)

updated models and diffuse added. Normal + specular available soon ;) The lights use emmissive coloring.

Closet used for one of our story events...

Reflection! It won't be used for any gameplay/storytelling aspects. It's really just a graphical gimmick...it caused no performance issues so far (game running on 40 fps on laptop)

That's it for now. We still have till Friday to complete this project. Maybe I can compile a short video of gameplay somewhere this week.

Game Update: Apartment Textures!

The artist did a great job with the apartment textures. They look pretty sweet... :)

We have till Friday to deliver a good 'Serious Game'. We have a very busy week ahead of us, I'll try to update the Blog with screenshots & videos when new assets/mechanics are completed.

Currently my laptop can run the game with 30-50 FPS (1024x576, AAx2) but has the tendency to overheat (100c+) when running GPU intense applications...So final recordings will have to take place on my PC.

Game Update: Models

The models arrived about an hour ago :) They look pretty cool. Quickly imported them into the scene and setup some basic lighting. Textures should be ready by the end of the week...

Recorded some footage of our game intro. The video is on the bottom of this post. On a side note, most of the voice acting is completed (thanks to Dutchtraveller for his voice-acting work as "The junkie")

Images:

The white text is part of the intro and is not visible once the game is actually playing.

Video:

Game Update: Apartment (Level)

As promised, the first images of our work in progress apartment ( like last time, models are done by our awesome artist ) Images are taken inside of Max. In-game renders should be ready by tomorrow.

In the meanwhile I've been doing some work for our intro and menu. I'll wait till the models arrive (most likely tomorrow) before creating a video that I'll release to the public...So stay tuned!

Part of the livingroom...

Part of the kitchen...

Closet for the bedroom...

Kitchen...

Bathroom...

Game Update: Character

Finally some screens from our upcoming (serious) game. Starting with our character. Model is created by one of the artists in my team (Bo) The apartment is merely a placeholder ;) More screens and a video will follow very soon (We're in the last week of development already!)

Character inside the editor...

Shadows... :)

camera position...

Engine Update: Cinematic Controls

...Another feature for the Edit/Play-mode. Cinematic controls can manipulate camera behavior. Our next game will feature some cinematic moments (more on that later) so having a tool to tweak positions and movement speed quickly and visually can be really helpful. Most of it is already working, additional features will be implemented only if the need arises. To demonstrate I recorded a short demo:

(Watch full-screen!)

Note: The controllers are saved and maintained like any other object in the scene.

Engine Update: Materials in Sunburn

More screenshots!

The diffuse textures are in fact the Sunburn textures that ship with the default project. Normal/Specular/Displacement maps are generated with Crazybump. Crazybump did all the generation work, and with Sunburn it was simply drag&drop in order to get the current results. A lot of material tweaking can be done with the Sunburn Editor. I might show more about that later, as its only a small test for now.

Note: The floor is very stretched. It probably makes the cubes look better by comparison ;)

Engine Update: HDR/Bloom & Particles

Two screenshots taken from the demo scene. Features the DPSF particle system (Smoke + Snow) with Sunburn's HDR/Bloom Post-Processor.

I will be focusing on features required for our game the next couple of weeks. So less messing around and more focused building :) The editor will finally be used by one of the designers.

More screenshots and videos will be posted the next couple of weeks (the deadline is at the end of this month already) you can expect some footage of animations, cinematic camera controls, triggers & events and audio.

Update: Another Bloom screenshot (combined with an emmissive map)

Engine Update: Particles, Performance & Profiling

Since my last update over a week ago, a lot of progress has been made. First steps for Full-Screen post processing (HDR, Bloom, Gaussian) DPSF Particle system is integrated and works perfectly with Sunburn out-of-the-box. Progress has been made with the level & content management classes, loading/saving works great and a new method .CombineScenePart() is currently WIP to combine scenes or scene parts into a single level.

Other features like the CameraManager is coming along nicely and should be ready very soon. The manager allows you or the engine to add/remove and set a certain camera type and modify its properties. Dynamic actors have been updated, they now return to their original position when returning to EditMode (original being the last assigned position by either Xml or the Editor). Moving the dynamic objects while in PlayMode does not affect the EditMode position of that object.

Finally got some time to work with CLR Profiler. I wasn't sure how to use this little tool to my advantage, but after some hours of fiddling with the engine code and running it through the profiler I got the hang of it. Some silly code errors were altered/removed (Like an old and unused Matrix-array being called every draw-call for my game objects, the Matrix-array had no actual purpose it was merely a left-over from a previous XNA draw method. As a final optimization I had a better look at the xml files that were created when serializing my level data. The demo scene (screen in previous post) required 43.000 lines of xml data (The demo scene had about 350 objects) worth a total of 900 KB. It took me less than 15 minutes to get this down to 7.000 lines without losing any necessary data (A easy way was serializing only the Euler rotation property (of type Vector3) instead of a complete rotation Matrix (Thanks to Sean James)) The final Xml file only requires 150KB of disk space. The overall memory allocation have been decreased, it may be a bit early for memory optimizations, but it was good practice for later stages of development...

Unfortunately I have no new video/screenshots right now. I'll try to get some interesting footage later this week!