So… New week, new blogpost. A lot of stuff has happened past week, so let’s
just start off this post with an article by Luuk about the particles workshop,
after which we'll give a brief summary of what has been going on with LSDude as
of last week!
Particles Workshop
On thursday 28th November, Robert and Luuk did not attend the usual meeting
with our tutor. Blasphemy! Why did this happen? Well, they both had an
acceptable excuse, because they went to the particles workshop of DGDARC. At
the workshop, they learned a whole lot about the theory of how particles can be
used to greatly improve the look of a game. Two people from Abbey Games first
gave a presentation about what particles are and how you can implement them in
a C# project with XNA. After this presentation of roughly one hour, the
attendees of the workshop could toy around with particles. Tigran of DGDARC
gave us a C# project in which a basic particle system was implemented. At
first, the assignment to recreate some cool particle effects Tigran had created
was given. But, when we had recreated some of these effects, we noticed it is
awesome to toy around and see what is possible with these particles. Luuk found
out that it isn’t hard to let a program crash if you use a lot of particles
(150000 per second!). Robert created a lot of cool effects which make use of a
mouse. Effects where particles are emitted at the current location of the mouse
and will travel to the location of the mouse a few seconds later were also
created. This effect could come in handy for LSDude, since it looks like as if
you used LSD or another halogenic drug….Not that I would know how this would
look like. I´m not saying that- Let’s move on. Robert also found it interesting
to create a particle system which involves fire. I think he might be a
pyromaniac.
At about 17:00, the workshop was over. All of the attendees greatly enjoyed
it and learned a lot. We also learned that working with particles isn't as hard
as we previously thought. I am sure we can use the gained knowledge to greatly
improve LSDude! It might be a challenging task to accomplish that we can use
particles in LSDude easily, but we will surely try our best and figure it out!
Our thanks goes to Abbey Games and DGDARC (especially Tigran) for giving us
the opportunity to deepen our knowledge of particles!
- Luuk
This is isn’t the only thing we’ve done all week of course. While Luuk and
Robert were out having fun playing with fire, the rest of the team went on and
made some final decisions about how we want LSDude to be played. You can read
all about this in our Designdocument which will be linked (it’s in Dutch). We
also got around to assigning which elements of the game everyone would be
tackling and defining a general team-structure. so without further ado, here’s
a list of our ‘functions’ within DeltaGames:
Luuk van de Wiel: Teamleader
Kevin Deelen: Lead Programmer
Robert Groot: Lead Artist
Jurre Berkhout: UI Design
Jordy van Opstal: Sound design
Koert Hup: Level design
Ricardo Scholtus: Gameplay
While these may be our ‘functions’ they don’t have to be necessarily
strict: If Koert, for example, has problems with something he can always ask
someone else to help him. The focus with these functions is to force people to
go in-depth into a certain topic, while making sure they don’t lose the big
picture and only get to work on their assigned function. Also, seeing as we are
working with Kevins framework (GFrame©) we assigned him the function
of lead programmer. He will most likely help the rest of the team when they’re
having trouble with a certain aspect.
The rest of the functions were more or less assigned with personal
preference in mind.
Furthermore, the game itself is making great progress as (nearly) all basic
functions are implemented or being implemented as we speak. This is mostly the
work of Kevin, who apparently has quite a lot of spare time to work on LSDude
outside of school hours. This past week our focus has mainly been on getting
local local co-op working - we had some problems with new clients not showing
up on the host side - while Koert en Jurre made some rad drafts for the
HUD and possible colours to be used throughout he menu’s.
Link to our designdocument.
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