Cyber Heist Sprint Updates

After the EA build, I was mainly working on the guard AI. But later I moved on to other roles as needed by the team.

Chris wanted a level end menu where both hacker and thief mutually agree what to do next - Go to next level, Replay level or Go to main menu.

Latest Cyber Heist Gameplay Video

Here is the latest Gameplay video.  This has Jake and Chris playing the Hacker and Thief.  You can hear them talking and get a better feel for the game.  There are a couple issues with the sound, but just ignore that.  Enjoy!

http://youtu.be/1CslGzVKU3k

Co-Signers to Cyber Heist

For a while, team Hack'N'Hide has tossed around coming up with a new name for the Co-Signers. While the Co-Signers was sufficient for a larger-budget game with a hefty marketing team, we don't have the budget for extensive marketing to get people hooked with our story. Furthermore, the Co-Signers didn't show up on search engines very well, and getting people to find our game was going to be relatively difficult.

We mind-mapped out several words that relate to our game to see what kind of words emerged. Here's a picture of our progress:

Finally the name that we all agreed upon was Cyber - Heist!

EA playtest

This past month has seem some amazing development with the Co-Signers. There have been some long hours put into the game over the summer, and because of that we are on schedule to finish this game on time and in budget.  The team was able to pull together the efforts of the game for a game demo to EA Salt Lake, which went over fantastically.  The whole design and production team were there and a few of the executives. They really liked the game and gave us amazing feedback. Cafe Rio was catered in and the whole team got face to face time with industry professionals. From their feedback we are tweaking the at style to be more modular and iconic, the hackers more of laying down connections will be faster and there will be a lot of tuning done. They also told us we should sell the game with the map editor. With all of that we have a lot of work and have a month to do it.

Here Brittany is playing the game with Chris commenting.

EA Build - My work with behavior trees

I was tasked to work on the behavior tree implementation for the guards. The team was invited over to EA for a playtest on August 22nd. It was a huge opportunity for us to showcase the game in front of professionals and get quality feedback.

As time was of the essence, I opted to use the "Behave" plugin of Unity which helps us map out and debug behavior tress efficiently. My implementation is shown in the screenshot.

It was quite a good learning experience for me.

We crunched hard and made a working build for the EA playtest.

Summer Break - Cosigners Update - My work on guard perception

Co-Signers underwent a lot of changes during the summer. Once of the first issues we had to address was the gameplay issues.

One of the biggest issues with the thief gameplay was the absence of a 'Seen' state. We played a bunch of stealth based games to finally come up with the system as given below.

It also seemed the hacker gameplay was lacking fun. We overhauled the hacker mechanic with the hex grid system which will also have some puzzle elements to it.

I mainly worked on the guard perception. We needed the guard to have peripheral vision as well as normal vision. Nikhil pointed out a method by which we can do that. I was tasked to implement it. My implementation details are shown in the video.

Summer Break - Cricket Action!

The summer of 2013 was a very eventful time for me.

I worked on my thesis game, 'Co-Signers' and also was involved in activities of the Indian Student Association. I was the sports secretary and was also involved in arranging for hosting and pickup for new Indian students who joined the University of Utah for Fall 2013. I was the organizer of the prestigious ISA cricket cup too. It was covered in the news by the Salt Lake Tribune. My comments are also featured in the article!!

http://m.sltrib.com/sltrib/mobile3/56648815-219/cricket-lake-salt-utah.html.csp


The article that came on the newspaper is shown.

Cool Graphics Scene

So, this is the final outcome of the game graphics class I took in Spring 2013. Its a pool table scene.

Features Used :

• Asset Builder for different assets like Mesh, Scene, Entities, etc.
• Convert Mesh files to binary format for faster loads.
• Implementation of Vertex and Fragment Shaders.
• Independent Light, Camera and Entity movement controls.
• Adding texture to entities.
• Use of Diffuse, Ambient and Specular lighting.
• Draw opaque objects first and then draw transluscent objects in sorted front to back order.
• Use of alpha. Partial, Additive and Binary alphas.
• Add PIX events.
• Create own Maya Exporter plugin.
• Normal maps - Wall
• Environment Mapping - Floor :: Sky and mountains can be seen reflecting on the floor. Fresnel Effect also used.
• Render targets - Beer Mugs :: The beer mugs are tranparent and distorts the its background.
• Depth Pass and Shadows : Directional Light used for shadows implementation.
• Post-processing - UI (The Play Button) and Vignetting effect (The dark corners) created