valentine's day.

lol, given the day today I am rather busy, but had a couple of meetings which were very relevant to the development of the Diorama project, so had to post a Dev Diary before I forget it all. No pictures today I'm afraid, although if you're all very good I will post a host of pictures from the soon to be completed road safety video tommorow.

Dev Diary: Day 8 - 14/02/2006
The pitch is presented to the group and lecturers

Today featured two meetings. Both were primarily based around the pitch, the first in the morning with the design team, and in the afternoon the coders were involved also. I presented the pitch written yesterday, although I altered the tone as Jules was not keen on the police persuers being only an 'implied presence'. I accepted this point, and we asked the group for their thoughts on that, along with general advice. Their key views were;

• The game was too complicated and featured too many assets. We were asked, for the time being at least, to focus on one area of gameplay, the bike or on foot segment. We chose the bike segment, mainly because it was so different to what other groups were doing. We also felt that this would lead to some really interesting level designs
• There needed to be a real sense of danger pushing the player on at all times. Barry suggested the HL2 man-hacks as an example, that having a swarm of entites chasing the bike through the air would be reasonably simple to produce, and add real pace and fear.
• It was suggested that the bike needed to look good from behind, as the game is third person. The same with the rider.. this will inform our further design.

We then wrote up a task list for this week, so we could present it to the programmers. I've reproduced the list here;

Mike - Conceptual art for the main character, texture work once models start being made, story redraft (trying to fix off a back narrative to inform everyone's designs and code), designs for the follower bots

Jules - Work with mike on follower bots. Intorducing self to photoshop. Developing set peices for the game

Adam - Blocked placeholder geometry.. ie making traversable space of blocks representing the buildings and obstructions in the final level. White textures only.. just to keep everything clear.

Ed - Tieing physics engine into bike. Start off simply using a cube resized to the dimensions Dave gives you, then incorporate his model when it's done

Dave - Model Bike. Then start work on modeling the amended world asset list (bear in mind that YOU ARE NOT EXPECTED TO MODEL EVERYTHING YET! )

The sum total of all this should, in theory, be traversable working environment which we can start building upon and working back into in the following weeks. Hopefully this time next week I will be able to post this up.

Tommorow I have to meet up with the team to map out the bike route, as well as going into the uni to edit the road safety film together.

Anyway, I have to go now, gotta start work on the Gnocchi :)