Funativity presents: CS 426 Fall 2008

Team Members David Smits – Lead Chintan Patel – Programmer Jim Gagliano – Programmer Ashleigh Wiatrowski - Artist

David Smits – Role Technical Lead - Scheduling and team management Programmer – Physics and collisions, game controls, particle effects, cameras

Chintan Patel - Role Website Lead – Maintains website with current info Programmer – Effects, game states FSM, input logic, Level Loader

Jim Gagliano - Role Sound Lead – Creating/ finding sound for game

Ashleigh Wiatrowski Artist – Working in Maya Models Art SkyBox Art

Game Play - Object of the game is to pop a given number of balloons - Levels should be challenging, requiring a strategy to finish with a small amount of Ammo - Currently, level design is not very challenging, no strategy is needed yet

Game Play - Balloons have different effects when you pop them - T balloons are tack ballons, they release some tacks/arrows when popped - C balloons give you an extra Cannonball

Inspiration - Bloons - Simple Concept: Pop balloons with darts - Simple Controls: Force and angle - Fun!

Demo Initial Demo of current iteration of the game

Game Engine: XNA Pros: -ability to port to Xbox 360 large community Cons: - no real tools to help you ex: shadows,collision detection, physics - Windows specific - Only loads one type of file for models (.fbx)

Physics -Created from scratch, lack of physics engines for XNA. -Does 3-dimensional forces. -Doesn’t deal with torque, conservation of momentum yet, if do another XNA project again will extend system -Used in all of the collision, particle effect calculations

Level Loading Example: startPos z 250 x_gap 50 y_gap 50 map_ b b b b b % b b b b b % end_2

Feature of the Game FSM Clouds/ Water Model/Sky Box

Cloud and Water

Concepts of FSM

SkyBox - Consist of Cube which the inner walls are lined with Texture -Sky Box Images

Models - The file formats are called.fbx - The problem: - -What should have been in the game -What should have been in the game

Sounds Microsoft Cross-Platform Audio Creation Tool (XACT)‏ Pros: - Handles 3D sounds - Easily control volume, pitch, looping, doppler, etc... Cons: - Limited to.wav files

Further Development Things we almost had time for: More types of weapons including: Bottle Rockets ( which would fly for a certain distance and explode, taking out multiple balloons) Spread Shot ( Shooting multiple cannonballs ) Freeze Balloon ( Coded, but not in game ) Magnet ( Magnet attracts balloons, bunching them closer together for easier popping ) More Types of Objects: Bouncing walls, Crates

Tradeoffs We ran out of time, and had to cut a lot of our cool ideas that weren’t feasible to code within the time limit, including a lot of half finished features ( previous shot tracking, freeze balloons, spike balloons, bottle rockets) in order to create a working demo

If we could do it again… Don’t use XNA because of lack of speedy development tools Add animations to make the game have more character than a bunch of static characters Do more pair programming, seemed to be much more productive when we put our heads together Focus more on level design, make the demo challenging instead of trivial

Commercial Game View - Incredible amount of work goes into a large game, including art, code, physics - Keeping everyone on the same page in a large project would be a nightmare - Difficulty of predicting how much work can be done before a deadline, we thought we could do much more than we were able to