Oct 15

Sandsea DevBlog: Senior Project Over

I have completed my senior project course, and am soon moving on to my final semester at Wilmington University. I’ve put together a Trailer of the game for you to check out. I wish I could say I plan on putting more polish on this game for a release, but I just got a job in Baltimore, Maryland. Full time classes and a work schedule won’t leave much time for a side project.

Aug 06

Sandsea DevBlog Week Thirteen

I’ve made a lot of progress, but there’s still more to do. Every time I came to make a new post, I was thinking to myself that “I just need to finish [this] up” or “This doesn’t look quite right yet.” I finally realize, that’s the point of this, to show the process.

 Some of the big changes here are graphical. It’s finally starting to look like a game. The models and animations were taken from opengameart.org. I just don’t have the time to do the art I need. Also, they were hurriedly inserted. One of the many things I need to do is change up some code so I take advantage of Unity’s animation event system. It shouldn’t be difficulty, but I have more important things to work on right now.

Something finished after the video was made is the saving and loading feature, and the level select map. They work completely. Saving and loading is something that won’t make it into any web player builds for obvious reasons, but the game was never intended to be made for the web player.

I’ve begun to adopt Unity’s Navmesh and Pathfinder features. The big white blocks in the test level are there to show that off. Right now, the controls of both the player and the enemies use a combination of the two. The result is an effect that makes it look like characters enemies have little control over their own momentum. Additionally, some of the AI isn’t quite as polished as it needs to be. The rangers can get briefly stuck in little loops of ActCowardly() and ActAggresively() if the player is hiding around a corner.

I’m currently getting prepared to start making greybox level designs. Two features I want to add before that are enemy spawn points and friendly NPC interaction.

One question on my mind is, of the 13 acts of the game, how many individual levels do I want? One, two, or three. I need to work on my boss mechanics…

Jul 12

Sandsea Design Documents

With the recent developments in the game, I found it prudent to update the design document. These are just two of the five design documents including the Master document, Art & Sound document, and Technical document. Here it is for your reading pleasure.

Read: Sandsea: Shadow of Umbri Gameplay Design Document

Read: Sandsea: Shadow of Umbri Story Design Document

Jun 27

Sandsea DevBlog Week Seven

I didn’t have much to report in week four, but before I knew it I was all wrapped up in getting ready for the Philly Game Jam and recovering from the cold I got while I was there. A few weeks later, and here I am again. I’ll now report the progress I made before and since the game jam.

Play the latest version now!

Continue reading

Jun 18

Philly Game Jam 2012

This weekend, I participated in the Philly Game Jam with two classmates (Jason Morano and Yanni Hajioannou), alongside nine other teams. It was run by the Philladelphia chapter of the IGDA. Three was the minimum number of team members to participate, so we were among the smallest of the groups.

Continue reading

Jun 11

3D Art – Caustics Render

This render was an exercise in caustics.

I found this piece of stained glass work. I’m not sure if it’s a physical piece of art or a digital work. I brought it into Photoshop, cleaned up the grouting, and turned it into bump, normal, and diffuse maps.

This project was also an lesson in render time, and how to not use all my computer’s RAM to render a single still image.