Sorry for not blogging yesterday. We were working all day on our game here on the GDC 2007 and it was very noisy and distracting here. If you want to watch us work: We are in the Moscone North Lobby and shouldn't be hard to find. Anyway, I will probably just blog at the morning of the next day for each day here.
Our game is called Dungeon Quest and we are absolutely insane because we want to create a Multiplayer Role Playing Game in just 4 days and we haven't even thought of all the distractions here. I will try to give you a screen per day and tell you want we have done so far.
Yesterday we worked purely on the environment, the level and the general game idea and some smaller details. As I said before we started with nothing, I just created a new project and Christoph did just open up 3DS Max and started working, there are no textures or models we have already done. And we both have never worked on a role playing game before.
In the morning we still had a lot of problems getting our computers up and running (3DS Max wasn't starting, I needed lots of plugins and tools, stuff like that). It usually takes a day or more to set up a development machine in our opinion. Probably a week until you got all the important tools installed you forgot in the first day. Anyway, we finally started to build the cave, create new custom collada exporter for that and placed lights. While Christoph was working on the 3D cave I was getting the engine up and running and noticed that there are many things that have to be done:
- Like just rendering some text on the screen,
- Finding a good font for that,
- Creating a bitmap font,
- Also making other UI elements (selected monster, health, level up, etc.)
- Rendering shaders and playing around with point lights
- Working on many other smaller issues like effects, billboards, vertex formats, etc.
- Most unit tests require a good camera and testing the cave level itself was very hard, so I already created the ThridPersonCamera class we going to use for this game.
I started with most classes that are required for that and I also could drop in some Texture/Font code from Rocket Commander XNA, but most of the shader and collada import classes had to be created from scratch. Then we spend all evening and even this morning tweaking the shaders, getting all the lights working, adding fog, figuring out how to do 6 complex light passes in one shader, and so on.
Today we will focus on building the main character, getting some collision detection working and some basic game logic (keys, doors, monster state machines, player behaviour and animations). Hopefully I can provide you with a nicer screenshot tomorrow, just an empty level is pretty boring.
And here are some pictures from yesterday for your enjoyment.
This is the lobby of the Moscone North building at the GDC. The GDC Expo hall is below us and on Monday the Serious Games Summit was here, but we hadn't had any time to even check out who is speaking at the actual GDC. At wednesday I will be at some Collada round table speaking about Collada and issues we had with it so far ^^
There are many art galleries here in San Francisco and the Asian population is also huge. It was not hard to find an Asian Art Gallery.
Here you can see an ad for Microsoft's Vista Operating System directly in front of the big Mac building here (seems a lot of people got one here). There is nothing interesting about a Mac for a game developer IMO.
Alcatraz at day time. I already showed you a picture at night earlier.
A view from my desk at the Hotel over San Francisco. Its still impressive every day you wake up ^^
And some picture of a place I don't know the name of. Usually I would look it up, but I have to go back to work. Cya tomorrow!