Bigger... BIGGER!

We've been struggling with scale to some degree.  In our UDK prototype we had trouble getting all the buildings and the cars and the poeple to appear they are sclaed correctly to each other. Now, we're having trouble making the bird look like a bird and not an airplane.

We tried scaling the buildings up by 50% and that seems to be better, but I'm still not getting the feeling of being a small bird in a large city.

Additionally, I want the bird to lean as its turning to replicate flight.  After a week of trying to get it to work via animation, I started over and just did it via code.  Works much better now.  Hopefully our programmer will be able to clean up my scripting and/or code its movement more realistically.  For now I'm more or less getting the desired effect though.

Its all a big poop joke

So now that we have some kind of idea what we're going to be designing our game around, (WWII and poop) we've decided that everything should be a combination of a poop joke and something to do with WWII.  For example, General MacSharter, or the Deuce Goose, or Schitzkrieg.

We're also trying to think of poopy achievements like, "pooped in the punch bowl" or "befouled the fountain."

It smells like cheese in here

This week I've been focusing on controls.  Well that and a grid pattern that makes my world look like its made out of cheese.  With a little help from the internet I discovered the input manager in Unity.  Its great, or it would be if I actually knew what I was doing with it to create custom input devices.  However, some nice chap has done it for us, and I was able to simply replace the input manager file in my project and presto chango, the Xbox360 controller now works.  I was able to change the input from keyboard to the joystic buttons in my movement code so now the birds flight responds to a controller.  I think this should traslate directly into the OUYA since its Android based.  That should make coding for the controller really easy.

And God said, "Let there be a block world"

Thanks to Jaymie Vaz, we have the basic idea for building type and layout.

Thanks to me, it now exists as a block world in Unity.

There's no BomBIRDier without the BIRD

B-b-b-bird bird bird.. 

So here is the bird imported to Unity from our original UDK.  Flight is working and we have an auto leveling script running so the bird doesn't try and fly around sideways or upside down.

So Long T-Mobile :(

Thanks babe!  You're the best.  

Behind every great man is a great woman, and in my case behind an aspiring game designer is an amazing woman willing to let me quit my job and focus full time on BomBIRDier.  

The best part is, the game is already taking shape!  We've already got the bird imported into the Unity engine and flying around.

I've also been able to get 3 of the other 4 team members to successfully change their thesis projects to BomBIRDier as well.  Now we can all really focus on this project without having to worry about splitting time between multiple projects.

1.21 Gigawatts!

Well, it seems we have some traction and its time to switch gears.  We've recently acquired a wealthy benefactor who has bequeathed us with a OUYA dev kit.  For those of you not aware of just what an OUYA dev kit is, essentially its a gaming console like a PS3 or an XBOX360 except it runs the same operating system as the half the cell phones in the US; Android!  What does this mean exactly? Well, gone are the days of going to the store and spending $60 on a new game.  Now all you have to do is log on to the OUYA server and download it straight to your console.  Oh, and each download is free, or at least the initial download is.  For more info on OUYA click here.

So, what does this mean for me?  It means its time to get our team focused and making BomBIRDier a reality.  It also means I'll have to abandon my previous thesis project and start begging, pleading and cajoling my Department Director into letting me change it.  

Luckily we have a working prototype mocked up in the Unreal Development Kit.  We'll be porting it to Unity for ease of implementation.

UDK, the hot, high maintenance girlfriend of Game Engines.

Well, maybe not as high maintenance as some.  I figured I'd start this blog with a post about or first prototype.  Thanks to Charlie Huenergardt's class Game Prototyping, a group of us decided to try and make BomBIRDier.  While shooters are fun and all, they've kinda been done to death.  I said, "lets not make a shooter, lets make a game about pooping on people."  Well this is as far as we got.  Not bad, but not great, and certainly not what I want it to look like.  Some of that is a result of trying to discover an art direction, and some of it is due to UDK.  Yes, UDK is pretty, but for a cartoon game I'm not sure it makes sense.  Plus if I have to spend my time trying to figure out how to code for it and prototyping at the same time, It'll take for ever.  And so we give you the cute shy girl who doesn't know she's hot and is just happy you want to spend time with her... Unity.