Funativity presents:
CS 426Fall 2008
Team Members
David Smits – LeadChintan Patel – ProgrammerJim Gagliano – ProgrammerAshleigh 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 MayaModels ArtSkyBox 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
www.addictinggames.com/bloons.html - Simple Concept: Pop balloons with darts- Simple Controls: Forceand 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 youex: 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 30 0 0z 250
x_gap 50y_gap 50
map_20 0 0 0 b b b b b 0 0 0 %0 0 0 0 b b b b b 0 0 0 %0 0 0 0 b b b b b 0 0 0 %0 0 0 0 b b b b b 0 0 0 %0 0 0 0 b b b b b 0 0 0 %0 0 0 0 b b b b b 0 0 0 %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
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 DevelopmentThings 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