NeverYear Games Week ? - Postmortem

I guess this semester is finally over. There have been goods and there have been bads, but everything worked out pretty great in the end. Let's start with a little recap, shall we?

• While still in Montreal, our team was formed and we, the naive, bright-eyed hopefuls, were ready for anything!
• Over the summer, we had quite a bit of communication such as determining team name (at least attempting to), coming up with quite a few game concepts, and generally brainstorming. 
• Once the semester started, we decided to try to work on We Love Nuclear Armageddon and Death: The Game.
• We got to the point where we were going to drop WLNA, but ended up sticking with it after bringing it to mobile was brought to our attention. Thus ended our work on Death; The Game.
• The majority of the semester was then spent on polishing and balancing WLNA, and adding a few features as we went. 
• Then came time for presentations, and to be frank, we had a really poor first run at our presentation. After some tweaking and presenting it again to the class, we realized it was still really bad. 
• We then went to work like crazy and after over 12 hours of working in one day (probably around 32 man-hours in total) we had a suitable presentation with decent videos! Or so we thought. 
• As it turns out, our presentation was at least good enough to get us through to next semester, and after drafts, we had our full team in order, going from a team size of four to ten. 

Now, if that wasn't a bit of a roller coaster, I don't know what is. Overall, I'm pleased with the work done by everyone on the team, especially the work that Alex, our programmer put into the project. Let's face it, if we didn't have such a competent, passionate programmer who's easy to talk to and get along with, we would have been dead in the water. I'd also like to give a shout-out to Mike, our artist, who made a lot of very nice 2D assets for WLNA despite being primarily a 3D artist. As for Mancino and I, there doesn't seem to be too terribly much that we've done that's exceptional, but without the miscellaneous tasks we took care of and the meticulous balancing and number crunching thanks to test sessions we helped run, the project may not have been able to carry on. I guess what I'm really trying to say is that our entire team is awesome and I'm super happy with the work we did this semester. There were definitely a few hiccups, though, and we were able to get through them as a team and learn about each other's likes/dislikes and opinions on the process of game development, and I think this is going to make next semester much easier, especially in terms of getting our new members caught up with the project. 

NeverYear Games Week 13 - Wait, what? Week 13 already?

*Hyperventilation ensues*
Tomorrow is the day.
I can't believe this.

Holy [expletive redacted] [expletive redacted] it's really happening. I guess I shouldn't be too terribly surprised considering I've logged over 20 hours for this week, 17 of which happened this weekend. I thought I knew everything I'd have to know for making videos for our presentation with Sony Vegas, but boy, oh boy was I wrong. I had to quickly learn a lot of features such as audio manipulation and zooming footage or adding effects. None of this was terribly difficult, just more time-consuming than I had expected. There was also a lot of footage taken until I realized that the program I was using was - in fact - really [expletive redacted] awful. Luckily for me, I happen to have another desktop so I took the Nvidia graphics card out of there, put it into my computer, and switched to using Nvidia Shadowplay. It was a roller coaster, but it got the job done.

That pretty much sums up my experiences this week, and tomorrow is the big day. I am confident that everything will go well, and I wish the best of luck to all of the presenters.

-John Cotto

NeverYear Games Week 11 - Back on My Feet

Last week I was able to pull together more work than I had anticipated, but I'm still recovering from last weekend's disaster, and haven't contributed very much this week. Luckily for me, however, my awesome groupmates were able to pull some of my weight for me and everything seems to be going just fine. With quite a bit of makeup work to do in other classes and some emotional difficulties, this coming week is also going to be a hard one. I'm confident, however, that I will be able to get at least enough work done that I can contribute to our team's effort. I think I will focus the majority of my attention on using Sony Vegas to begin putting together .gifs and video files for our remaining presentations. That, and practicing my Doo Wop or Barbershop Quartet singing. Probably both.
-John Cotto

NeverYear Games Week 10

This has been a rough week for me. I haven't gotten a lot of work done due to emergency family issues, but I can say this much. Our direction is as solid as it ever has been, and thanks to QA testers and their wonderful feedback, we know exactly what we have to do to push our game in the right direction. Besides general design work, I have been working with Sony Vegas, teaching myself how to make animated GIFs and videos that we can use to bolster the effectiveness of our presentations. There's also a lot more art implemented in WLNA, and our big focus now is to get the UI done properly and focus heavily on player feedback. Again, this has been a rough week for personal reasons, and there isn't much more to say, but I hope to have quite the change log to report for next week.
-John Cotto

NeverYear Games Week 8 - Where Did the Time Go?

Holy boatload of changes, Batman! This week was definitely the most productive to date, and I don't even know where to begin. I guess the biggest change would be that we have now dropped Death: The Game for good. The only project we're going to go forward with is We Love Nuclear Armageddon. Another major change is that we're exploring two ways we can take the game. The first is the arcade-style RTS game that we we've been going with for a while now, and the other is a turn-based version that we have thought of. Taking inspiration from Moonbase Commander, we want to go with timed turns where the player also has to control the objects they launch through a series of waypoints.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moonbase_Commander

Something else that we've definitely established this week is that we have to stay away from the standard RTS game length. By "we've established", I mean "I've established." How, you ask? Because of Planetary Annihilation. There are so many cool things you can do in that game like have planet-destroying lasers or moon-moving engines, but the amount of standard, boring RTS dredge you have to muck through to get there makes it not worth it. I played a game for about an hour and a half and was bored mostly the entire time. To be fair, I haven't learned the game like other RTS games such as Supreme Commander 2 (wonderful game), but I still should not have been bored for so long. 

http://www.hardcoregamer.com/2014/08/28/planetary-annihilation-launch-trailer-released/101272/

As I'm writing this I'm getting increasingly nervous, because tomorrow is our stage 1 challenge. While I feel that we're all prepared, you never really know what's going to happen. Whether we pass or not, whatever feedback we get will be massively helpful. For tonight, however, since my work is done, it's time to sit back with a cold beer and relax.

-John Cotto

NeverYear Games Week 6 - Like Molasses

This week was pretty slow, as can probably be determined by the title. Sadly, there wasn't very much work for me to do. Besides some research and readings, I worked a bit on making some level chunks for Death: the Game despite the fact that we probably won't be going forward with it in favor for We Love Nuclear Armageddon. As balance-heavy as WLNA is going to be, and as much as I enjoy making levels for Death: the Game, I'm very happy with the decision to focus mostly on WLNA for a few reasons. First of all, I am an RTS fanboy, it's definitely one of my favorite genres. Secondly, the context for WLNA is wonderful and I want to see more art for it. Finally, I just REALLY want to see two good friends battling it out to nuke the other player to oblivion before they themselves are nuked.

Aside from this, there is very little to update for the week, but I'm hopeful that this coming week is going to be the most productive to date.

-John Cotto

NeverYear Games Week 4

This has been an interesting week for a few reasons. First of all, our team was sort of split into two groups temporarily to complete various tasks. I was also supposed to be gone all weekend, but because of an issue with scheduling at my job, I was unable to do so. Thanks to this, I didn't end up missing anything from being away from the group, but it means that I'll be missing whatever happens next weekend instead. That aside, I'm surprisingly excited for our newest idea, Death: The Game (working title). One of the things I worked on with Mancino was a systems doc where we thought of a lot of possible ways that we could kill the player in a creative way that they could use to progress further in the game. After doing that, we took it to the next level and started combining possible deaths such as:

• Fire + Poison: The player is blocked by a destructible wall, so they absorb a lot of gaseous poison from the environment and drag their corpse to the wall. They then get themselves lit on fire and run to their poison-bloated corpse to blow it up, taking the wall with it.
• Poison + Enemy: The player has the opportunity to poison themselves and drop their corpse into a pit with an enemy. The enemy will then eat the poisoned corpse and be killed because of it.
• Falling + Webs: The player is faced with a drop that’s too far to survive, but they want to get down without leaving a corpse behind. There are uninhabited webs in the pit that the player can use to slow their fall and land safely.

One inspiration for this came from Life Goes On, a puzzle platformer where you use your own corpses to solve the levels.

Another inspiration was a personal favorite flash game of mine, The Company of Myself, in which the player makes shadow clones of themselves that follow the same path the player just took. This is a self-cooperative game that has a similar mechanic to what we see happening in Death: The Game.