Alpha Release Report

Progress

Layers

Low Target

• Added multiple enemies: Server, Printer, Computer, Vending-Machine
• All enemies have the same behavior so far.
  • Soon with pathfinding.
• Obstacles: Watercooler, explodes when shot
• Only one continous wave.
• Simple sound effects and background music added.

We still need a more advanced AI and implement multiple waves with pauses in between. Therefore the low target is not yet completely fulfilled.

Desirable Target

• Particle effects for shooting, explosions
• Menus
• Background story
• Weapons:
  • Stapler
  • Fire extinguisher

The main parts missing are:

• More dirverse enemy behavior (so we can have shooting, suicide bombing enemies).
• Weapon upgrade: We need to implement the waves first and then add a menu between them to upgrade the weapons.

High Target & Extras

We have some physical effects, but everything else here will probably be out of reach for the project deadline.

Problems

Modeling, Animating

This phase was dominated by modeling-problems. Pretty much every step from opening Blender to displaying the model in XNA created new problems. Nearly every model/animation takes a lot of debugging to get it working.

Design

Engine

Physics

The integration of a physics enginge was greatly benefitial to implement weapons. Not only do we now have well-working collision detection, we can also cause a physical reation on the enemies. This was used with the fire extinguisher, the water cooler and the staper. However, it took some time to customize the physics engine to work the way we wanted it to. We had to reject several approaches before the charatcter worked.

Sound

We integrated many sounds for all different purposes. Every weapon has it's custom sound. Players and models react with different sounds upon demise. Additionally we added music to the menu screen and a synthetically narrated background story.

Menus

The game can now be (re-)started using the menu screens. Additionally an option screen is available where the user can choose between two input modes.

Animations

We are now using a library for animations, which works very well. We also implemented some additional XML-configuration so we could be very flexible and import any model with arbitrary bones.

Effects

We are now using custom effects that are supposed to give a cartoon-effect. The results are still not satisfying.

Particles

The particle effects in the game are mostly (slightly modified) default effects of the library.

Modelling

A lot of time was spent on animating, and learning how to properly rig models. This proved to be very difficult, and extremely frustrating at times, especially since some things are simply left for the user to figure out him/herself (such as the fact that you need to recalculate normals before). Also, blender has proven to be very buggy for some functions, which has also cause much time to be wasted. For example, many hours were spent simply trying to export a PNG file that represented the texture map for an object. This sort of time expenditure is unavoidable, but very costly. Once the ball got rolling, however, models were easier and easier to make.

The animations have also proved to be tedious, especially considering that XNA cannot (as far as I understand), accept some animations that can be made as blender. An entire day was spent learning how to elegantly use splines to animate tentacles in a realistic manner, only to realize that XNA cannot handle this type of animation. Currently all animations are hand-animated. If there is a way to animate using curves, please let us know.