WHO WE ARE Ewan McGregor (Design) Rob Madden (Environment Art) Keir Heriot (Character Art) Laurie Athey (Gameplay Programming) Gregory Foster (Engine Programming) Rory Bennet (Sound)

RECAP! Dark General is a strategy game With turnbased tactical combat The tactical combat was to be the main focus of the prototype You play the villainous extradimensional threat du jour, and attempt to take over the world! You have an army of various monsters, controlled by the titular Dark General. For the prototype, you would only have the General, and one Monster type. You are opposed by the Forces of Justice, whose goal is to foil your schemes and save the world. Composed of individual, powerful Heroes and large numbers of mooks. For the prototype, only one Hero and one mook type.

PRODUCTION Do we have a working prototype? Kinda. The AI doesn’t exist, nor does any code for managing what happens when a unit runs out of HP. You can move around and attack stuff though! It draws stuff, can animate stuff, and the level design system is quite nice.

DESIGN Since the previous progress report, I have: Fixed the Grotesque rig to function in engine Modelled, rigged, textured and animated the Dark General character Written a number of functions for the Animation code in order to allow for calling different animations without having to splice the character’s FBX file together out of a dozen different exports Used the Level Design system to finalize the Hong Kong level Finalized the UI textures Taken up drinking

DESIGN – LESSONS LEARNED Overall, I feel that I’ve learned a lot of lessons here The first of which is that I am ill suited to being a Producer The second is that “contingency planning” means you should never expect anyone to get anything done on time ever. On the plus side, I have developed my game design skills, my character animation skills, and can now find my way around C#!

AUDIO Audio I have for the project: Background SFX Gargoyle SFX Soldier SFX Music layers What I learned from the project: How to use XNA XACT How game audio differs from other media

GAMEPLAY Gameplay is almost playable Pitch two units against each other This is done with mouse and interactive menus We can ‘move’ units from one location to another There is semi functional UI This movement and attack is done on a grid system There is support for four different units in the code Other Things I’ve Done Mouse picking, texture swapping, Model loading /drawing, UI, camera, the grid system

GAMEPLAY - WHAT I LEARNED C# XNA XACT Lots about Data Management Units stats, The grid, Models and other assets Found out what picking is Realised UI is an immense job Buttons, detecting clicks on UI, Menus They all need intense structure to function I hate matrices Intensely How to work with artists What they need from me What I need from them To edit.fbx ascii files

ENGINE PROGRESS Implemented animations that actually mean something (ie, not just playing all of the one animation file) Kind of implemented A* pathfinding. It is coded in, but has little function at the moment. Included and implemented XACT to play the music and sound files.

ENGINE PROGRAMMING WHAT I HAVE LEARNED Probably not the best engine programmer. C# XNA 4.0 Mouse picking is not trivial if you don’t know what you’re doing Programming an animation pipeline. AI would have been implemented sooner, rather than as late as it was. Most importantly, spending too long on one task without making progress is firstly demoralising, secondly pointless.

CHARACTER ART The project has been a great learning experience I have improved my skills as a character artist Didn't meet work expectations – did exceed personal expectations. Group learning has been difficult but valuable. I’m happy with the style I brought to the game through the characters. The environment art and character art worked well together to make a strong memorable product.

CONCEPT

CONCEPT 2

MODEL

ENVIRONMENT ART Overall, very happy with how environment has turned out. I feel I managed to define an interesting visual style that suited the tone and themes of the game. Also managed to produce good variety of assets, fleshing out the world as much as possible. Very pleased with the modularity of assets and how these work within the level editor. within the level editor Further development would include more variation in base assets. Focussing mainly on small details such as clothes lines, more plants, posters and signs etc. One of the most important things that I gained from this was experience in a game production pipeline.

QUESTIONS?