Captain Spice: Rise of Dr. Stink

Captain Spice defeated by The Evil TimeBandit

2010-02-25T13:49:00.001-08:00

It's with a Heavy heart that i have to announce that our beloved Captain Spice has been killed by the Evil Villian "The TimeBandit"!

In all seriousness, I've pulled my entry from this year's Dream Build Play competition. Long story short, i've simply not got enough time to finish the game to the level that it needs to be to be a serious contender and as such I don't want to take any resources away from competitors that actually have a good shot at winning this competition.

It has been an amazingly educational and fun experience to have attempted this, and for that I'm always going to be thankful.

But Work and Home life are starting to heat up and the checklist of bugs and features that need to be fixed in the game could fill my full time attention for the next couple of months at least.

So better luck next time, I'll just have to swing for the fences that much harder next year. . .by then I'll be ready!!

Not to fear either , this work is not in vain all that I've learned and implemented thus far is going to be featured in my new project which I'm code-naming "Refuse"

Stay tuned for further updates!!!

This is not the end, but merely the Beginning!!

Video Update #5! The End is Nigh

2010-02-22T07:50:00.000-08:00

Here is the latest installment in my video journal documenting the progress I'm making creating a video game for the Microsoft 2010 Dream Build Play Contest Sponsored by Old Spice!

http://www.dreambuildplay.com/

A lot has changed since the last video, including a completely re-written engine which now works equally well on the Xbox as well as Windows. The Save Game functionality is 50% complete in that when you first create a new game that game is stored on the User's profile. . . I don't have it working where the user can save at any point. . . I was going to just do checkpoints for that. Also I can't load any levels yet either. :(

On the good side, I have finally started getting the animation on the characters. Right now The Captain only has two animations, stand around looking silly, and Stomp around looking silly. . . But more animations are coming in the next Vid!

The main thing is that the lighting is working with SunBurn. Big thanks to the fine folks over at SynamseGaming for making SunBurn!
http://www.synapsegaming.com/

Thanks also goes to Tom who converted XNAnimation to work with Sunburn at :
http://coreenginedev.blogspot.com

I am using BEPU physics after all, but in a very limited fashion, right now I'm only using it for quick ray intersect detection with the ground. I will have more uses for it once I get rest of the game objects included in the game. The Physics Library is really robust and I recommend anyone working in XNA and needing physics to check it out.
http://www.bepu-games.com/BEPUphysics/

So there's only about a week left in the competition and we gotta face facts. . . there is a LOT not finished! I have a ton of stuff to do, and a very short amount of time to do it in. It's going to be a flat out sprint to the finish line just to have a playable demo of this game . . . and if I'm honest I doubt it'll be tested enough to make it through peer review. There is a lot I still need to learn. Especially about what all it takes to make a game that will pass the scrutiny of the Peer Reviewers over at the Creators Club.
http://creators.xna.com/en-US/

That said, nothing worth doing was ever that easy and I intend to work to the very last second to get this game in as complete a state as I can. I may not win, but when this is all said and done I've learned a TON of stuff during this process and developed a lot of tools along the way, I'll be able to turn all this work into some fun games in the future and that is an incredibly exciting prospect!

Video Update #4 . . . sorry for the delay!

2010-02-17T10:45:00.000-08:00

So, Valentines weekend was last week, so I apologize for the delay in updates, but Love knows no deadlines. ;)

There is SOOOOooooo much going on right now in the game it's going to be hard to explain it all.

First here's the video for Video Update #4:

This is sadly the last video we shall see in this environment. . . it also marks the last time we'll see characters without animation. . .

What's this?? you ask. Well, not to be too dramatic but the truth is I started the game over, almost from scratch! . . . Why??? Well, three reasons,

1. The code was getting increasingly bloated with code that for whatever reason I had written but abandoned along the way. These things happen when you are developing "straight ahead" to borrow a term from my animation background. I'd think of a cool feature I wanted to add and without really thinking it through would plow into coding said feature. Then later on I'd realize I needed to do something a different way or worse decide not to use that feature at all and I would abandon that code I so feverishly added. This presents a lot of problems later on as I end up with tons of extra code in the project that I'm not sure I can delete because I can't remember if I had abandoned all of the code in the file or just snippets or what. So, to fix this I needed to start a new project and move over only those code files that were still relevant to the game.

2. I never made a Windows copy of my game. On the surface this isn't really a problem, I'm making the game for the Xbox 360, not to run on Windows Pc's so why do I need a version of the game that will run on Windows as well?? The answer is, because it speeds up the development cycle immensely if I don't have to recompile the game and redeploy the game to the Xbox each time I make a minor change. Now that I have both a windows and a Xbox copy of the game, I can do a lot of testing on the windows side without ever sending it to the Xbox which opens up the ability to use profiling tools that are only available on the PC. Also, I can now use SunBurn's editor to edit the textures and lights in my game in real time which is also a huge win.

3. I have to abandon my animation clip management in favor of using XNAnimation api instead. This is actually a sad thing for me, I was quite proud of the fact that I had successfully implemented Brian Phelps animation clip manager in my game. However, since the method requires a specific content processor to work, if I use the anim clip manager then I can't light my characters with SunBurn. . . For my next game I will tackle the daunting task of fixing this problem, but since the deadline for the game is a mere 15 days away, it's time to cut anything that can be cut and make this game as good as it can be in that very very short amount of time.

So, this all seems very doom and gloom I'm sure, but believe me when I say things are moving much more swiftly now! I've redesigned the Fiji level and re-sculpted all the terrain. I've re-rigged Captain Spice so that he is now actually three separate rigs. I've got a rig for his body, another for his face, and still another for his cape. This allows me to keep all the controls I had in the animClipManager and still stay under the requirement of 74 bones or less per entity sent to the GPU. It does introduce a kinda convoluted workflow where I animate with the whole rig but export three separate baked out rigs from Maya, but thankfully I've got that scripted in .mel (good thing I'm a character rigger by day ;) ) so this was only a couple of hours to transfer him over. I've also got the menu system working and re-skinned to be much more appealing and match the game's style. I've got the bare-bones save game working too, but load game is still not working.

Tonight I plan on converting the girl rigs, and getting their path-finding in this new game. This will be the first time I'll be able to see them lit in the engine so I'm excited for that! I'll also move over the BEPU physics engine to this new game as well.

SO the next video update will be this Sunday, and it will include ALL of the new features as well as some new enemies, and if there is any luck in this world I'll have the HUD and actual gameplay implemented as well!

So, Stay tuned there are great things to come!

Video Update # 3!

2010-02-01T15:47:00.000-08:00

Recently I've been working with optimizing my game engine.
The reason is that once I started adding trees and plants to the game,
the frame rate dropped significantly.

Luckily I've made some real improvements.
I've added model instancing which reduced the number of draw calls the CPU was making.
I've also modified my AI so they don't call on Path finding so often.

This has managed to raise the FPS to over 30 fps.

I'm sure I can find more performance enhancements as the project continues, but for now I need to focus on getting some of the remaining game mechanics working. . .

Next on my list is to improve the steering behavior of the characters to achieve a smoother
overall animation, as well as add ease in and out and true collision detection to them.

Here's a video I took once I got the first pass of the terrain collision working, the landscape and buildings are all being reworked but it's starting to come along! :)

Video Update # 2!

2010-01-25T10:07:00.000-08:00

Hi True-Smell-ievers! HAHA sorry couldn't resit!

So, it's been quite a while since my last post, that's mainly because I've been hard at work trying to squeeze as much performance out of the XBOX 360 as possible.

It's been a long month of octrees, instancing, and tool writing but I'm finally back to the fun part of gamedev, asset creation and gameplay!

I've made a few changes to the gameplay elements of the game and totally re-worked the story! I'm hoping these changes will be a lot of fun for the players! I know I'm highly amused, but then it doesn't take much to keep me amused. . . but I digress!

Without further ado I give you the Spectacular Video Update # 2!!!

As you can see the terrain is no longer flat, the vegetation is coming along and the lighting is getting better.

The girls and captain spice still lack animations, and they still don't stay above ground, but that's for the next update.

There's tons of technical improvements made to the engine but I won't bore you with all the details. Suffice to say I think I'm ready to focus this week on total asset creation / animation / texture painting / and sounds!

Oh and the HUD is coming along but didn't make it in time for this video so stay tuned for that next time!

Video Update # 1!!

2010-01-07T01:09:00.000-08:00

Hi everyone,

So it's been a while since the last update and that's because I've been super busy implementing features for Captain Spice: Rise of Dr. Stink!

Here's a list of SOME of the new features we now have working.
Animated 3D Models that feature

Smooth Skin Instancing.
Animation Clips Stored as Textures
Bone (skeletons) and weighting also stored as Textures
A Star Pathfinding
AI with "Sense of" hearing and Sight
SunBurn Lighting
Texture Map based collision detection for static level objects
Physics Based movement for enemies

Whew, that's not even all that I've got but that's all I can show in this video!
So Cavets. . . This is EARLY EARLY EARLY stuff, think not even Beta Version,
More like ALPHA Version 0.001 so don't worry that stuff doesn't look all that
great yet, this is just a demo of the Tech not the Art!

Also, One Final note, I recorded this with my video camera pointed at my
computer monitor because I don't currently have a video card capable of
capturing straight from my Xbox and that's what this game is being run on.
So I appologize for the crappy video, I'll try and do better next time! :)

Anyway, NJoy!

Spice Girl!

2009-12-19T00:07:00.000-08:00

Here she is the lovely Spice Girl!

Bad guys should watch out for her in
Captain Spice : Rise of Dr. Stink!

First Pass Captain Spice Model (textures are quick temps)

2009-12-17T01:53:00.001-08:00

As Promised, here is my first update!
It's Captain Spice! This is the first pass of his model, these textures are just quick and dirty temp that I whipped up. The real ones will be much cooler!

Old Spice Dream Build Play Challenge!

2009-12-16T11:13:00.000-08:00

Hi Everyone,

I've decided to enter the Microsoft hosted
and Old Spice sponsored
Dream Build Play competition this Year.

The contest is to utilize XNA to create a independent
video game for the xbox 360 utilizing Old Spice and their
new line of fresh exotic products as inspiration.

To that end I've titled my game:

Captain Spice: Rise of Dr. Stink

It's going to be an open world free roaming super hero
sandbox game that follows the adventures of Captain Spice
as he struggles to defeat the Evil Dr. Stink and thwart
the evil Dr's plans for smelly world destruction.

It should be a blast, but the deadline is March 3rd!!!
So the pressure is on as well as the coffee because to
realize this goal I'll be burning the midnight oil from
now until March!

I'll be posting updates as often as I can.
So, Wish me Luck, and Stay Tooned!
:)