Well, It looks like I'm up to write the next update. So before we begin I'd like to just introduce myself. I am Branden the Chief Technical Lead (Hey if you get to pick your title go big.). In simple terms I handle everything on the programming and technical side. Since we're playing catch up with the blog I'm going to be spending most of this post talking about what we've been up to these last few months. But before I get any farther we'd like to invite you to check out our latest build of the game here. Later down the road we'll have a list of multiple builds on that page so you can view our progress over time.

The first thing we tackled right out of the box was our unique camera system. If you play the latest build you will notice that as you move to and from each room or area the camera will shift and change. Visually this adds a lot of control as the artists can be ensured that their work will only be viewed at a certain angle. Cutting out the worry of  making everything look good from all angles and instead time can be spent finely tuning lighting, materials, and geometry to a specific angle. Technically however, camera control; which is traditionally handled purely in code is now a content issue. So to tackle this we developed a way using minimal content to define where and when the camera changes and how it behaves.

To do this we started with the base definition of a 'room'. Now a room is nothing more than a container with unique name. Inside of a room are definitions for trigger volumes that signal to the camera that the player have entered the room, as well as one to four points which define camera position and behavior. Currently we have three camera behaviors with a few more in the design document. These are a single pivot, a pan, and a leash follow. The single pivot is a stationary camera that continuously rotates to keep the player in view. The pan is a camera on a track, and the leash follow is a camera which will attempt to always stay under a maximum distance of the player.

My next post will hopefully cover our character controller and the current state of the dialogue system.
Thanks for reading!

Project Kassa - Introductions and A Cabal

First, some introductions.

This Blog:
This production blog will detail the creation process of Project Kassa, the working title for a series of episodic, co-op, survival/horror, adventure games produced by Biweekly Games. The games tell the story of Gabe and Dani Kassa, a pair of siblings, who are trying to re-capture the evils that have been released from Pandora's Box.

The Team:
Allison Kinzelman - Producer, VFX Artist, Animator
Ryan Sand - Art Director, Environment Artist, Texture Artist, Creative Director
Branden Gee - Chief Technical Lead
Danny Huynh - Concept Artist, Animator, Visionary
Frank Schorsch - Technical Artist, Modeler, Animator
Paul Kankiewicz - Consultant

We're currently in the beginning phases of the project, and yesterday (8/25/13) we had a game cabal to discuss several aspects of it.

Titles:
While "Project Kassa" is our working title, we don't like it for a permanent one, so of course we need to come up with something we like better. We wound up mostly just brainstorming this, and coming up with a few we liked fairly well but weren't in love with (Cycle of Discord/Chains of Discord), so we'll be revisiting this at a later date.

Horror Events:
We brainstormed out all sorts of ideas for horror events, varying both in implementability and in quality. We might have had a few more ideas for these than for titles.

We went through all of our suggestions and red X-ed those that were just bad or impossible, blue X-ed those that were possible but might be difficult or were just okay, and finally green checked those that we all agreed upon and were relatively easy to implement. We also discovered just how many sound-based ideas we had come up with.

Kickstarter:
We figured out rewards and reward tiers for our eventual Kickstarter plans, though we'll be waiting to release those until we release said Kickstarter.

Working:
Just some pictures of us working the Kickstarter plans together, when Ryan remembered he had his camera with him.