Rush for Invigorate is over, but the rush for GDC begins

We have received some good responses at the final demo session at MDA's office yesterday, especially from Donny Kristianto, who has been a great help to us,and he was surprised at the final result of our demo. So now, Invigorate Casual is officially over, but Donny Kristianto has been kind enough to decide to bring our demo over to GDC 2008 and show it to Playfirst to get their insights on our demo. So right now, the team will be busy putting together the trailer and relevant materials to pass to Donny by the 14th of Jan 2008. Not to mention, we will be polishing up our demo so that it will be much better than what we have shown yesterday.

towards the last milestone

moving towards the final milestone,
i think we've had quite a journey.
p.s. gib i think u can replace the video with a nicer one after we put in chapter 5 and get more graphics (buttons and better close up views)

bumpy and all,
i guess we made it through the ride..

Video capture of the latest version

Here is the latest version of our demo which I have uploaded onto YouTube.



You can download the demo from here too.

The last mile

Now that we have hired a full time artist, production speed has been ramped up tremendously since now, most of our time is spent on adjusting our code to add new art and tweaking there and there and some polishing. I am going to create a video capture of what we have by the end of this week, so watch this space.

New year, new issues

Now with the deadline coming in less than 3 week, 1 unexpected problem cropped up which created a major roadblock in our production pipeline. As our game uses a lot of graphics, we had 2 freelance artists working on the graphics which would be good if everything turned out well. But Murphy's Law came into play. 1 of the artist who was supposed to churn out crucial art assets for the background has been quite slow in delivering. A 3 day task was completed in 3 weeks and in that 3 weeks, I had no update on the art so I was not able to plan or even know what was going on, on his side.

On the hindsight, I should have canned him after he was late for 1 week. Now this artist is on the verge of getting canned from this project, but as he showed us pretty decent art a few days ago, albeit quite late art, so he is still in the project.

Now with the bad news over, 1 good news is that our other artist who has impressed us so far with the speed and quality of her work will be working on this project full time from the 16th onwards. So we expect art assets production to be ramped up tremendously then.

x'mas update!

finally it's done. spent more than an entire week (including x'mas eve and x'mas!!) scrapping the architecture after the mda open house,
adding some features and also stabilizing some others.

a quick summary of wat i've done:
1) chapter concept added, that controls all the scenes.
2) scenes can be locked and unlocked later, if an item opens a prop.
3) creating a new item or opening a prop attains objectives (and show them as ticked in the objectives screen)
4) paperdoll screen appears i) when a new player starts up for first time, ii) when the player clicks wardrobe.
(please delete prefs.dat before running the app...)
5)revamped gib's paperdoll screen to be more user-friendly i.e. all the stuff are laid out on a grid and u just click on what u want.

the new hierarchy is
first u load a chapter.
the chapter loads
i)all the characters that will ever appear (even across diff scenes),
ii)objectives of the chapter
iii)all the items that will ever appear in this chapter (even across diff scenes)
iv)all the different screens and separates them into locked or unlocked

then u load the scenes,
which within itself contains
i)the dialogues,
ii)the qna,
iii)the props

the dialogues and qna has a characterid to them, and they will cause the respective person in the characters array under the chapter to be rendered.

the last thing i have left to do is the 2nd image of the prop. e.g. the opened door.
p.s. gib, can u help me prepare an image for that?
pls add in the grid thing u were saying u did for the paperdoll inside the paperdoll.cpp. thanks.

merry x'mas! i'm need a break.

New stuff

It has been a while since the last update. The MDA Open House was extremely useful in helping us to gauge player response and the survey forms handed out turned in some pretty surprising feedback. We have implemented 1 additional feature as that feature turned out to be a surprise hit with the female audience and I have set up Mantis Bugtracker to track bugs and feature enhancements for me and XP.

We now have another artist on board and that makes 2 freelance artists. 1 will take care of concept and characters and the other will take care of the background. We have retooled out storyline to be something short and simple and with our Mantis database getting full of items. It is going to be a very busy Christmas for all of us.

Merry Christmas, everyone :)