Friday, March 5, 2010

Vanishing Point Release!

The game is done!

A downloadable copy of the game can be found Here!.

Simply extract the contents of the folder and double click C4.exe. Plug in a microphone and you're all set to play!

Note: Requires the DirectX SDK to be installed (August 2009 version or later).

Monday, March 1, 2010

Video up on Youtube

Friday, February 26, 2010

Milestone 3

Milestone 3 is done!!!

Work already completed:

Player Movement
Running and jumping
Player Death from moving wall
Wall to later be replaced by the horde
Procedural Generation of hall way which the player runs down
Transitioning from platformer to shooter – Original / Based on C4 Demo
Firing gun
Able to shoot enemies
Procedurally generating a hallway with proper zoning / portals
Enemies
Spawning enemies from the horde wall during shooter segments
Simple AI – seek player
Die when shot

New Work completed:
Speeding up the game over time
As the length of the game increases, the player and horde speed increase proportionally
Generating Hallway Lighting
Full procedural generation of hallway
Platforming obstacles in the hallway
Airlock segments
Timed doors
Dynamic lighting
Dim / remove lights as the horde approaches them

*Particle effects for the horde wall*






For Milestone 2 we now have a very close to final hallway set up. We have some original textures and some nice point lights to decorate the hallway with. The monster wall also consumes the lights as it passes by so the player will be in darkness before being eaten up. The monster wall now emits… human skulls! These, although cool will eventually be replaced by dark smoke or just darkness. We are doing our best to make the monster wall as much of an aspect of fear as possible.





Features Remaining
Interacting with mounted gun
Reset of hallway

Additional Desired Features:
During platforming segments, have the camera from the position of the
horde and not the player
Microphone integration
Traps
New environmental sources of player death

Current bottlenecks
Still waiting on content from our artists
Enemy monsters
Mounted gun to interact with
Still need more original textures
Existing textures require some work
Memory Management
Hallway segments not correctly deleting and
resetting on player respawn without the game hanging
Light removal works for the most part

Tuesday, February 23, 2010

Milestone 2

Milestone 2 is done!

Work already completed:

Player Movement
Running and jumping
Player Death from moving wall
Wall to later be replaced by the horde
Procedural Generation of hall way which the player runs down

New Work completed:


Transitioning from platformer to shooter – Original / Based on C4 Demo
Firing gun
Able to shoot enemies



Procedurally generating a hallway with proper zoning / portals



Enemies
Spawning enemies from the horde wall during shooter segments
Simple AI – seek player
Die when shot






For Milestone 2 we have a player that can run, jump and now shoot. The Player also has something to shoot at as enemy monsters, currently represented in game by white donuts, spawn at a constant rate from the “death wall” and seek the player. These monsters can be shot and do die in an explosion of green blood. As of now they don’t do anything to you aside from collide with you, but in the future we will have them hurt you and slow you down. The Hallway can now procedurally generate to an infinite size correctly. We have also incorporated 12 different kinds of hallway segments for the player to run through.

Features Remaining :
Generating Hallway Lighting
Interacting with mounted gun
Speeding up the game over time
As the length of the game increases, the player and horde speed
increase proportionally
Complete procedural generation and reset of hallway
Platforming obstacles in the hallway
Airlock segments
Timed doors
Dynamic lighting
Dim / remove lights as the horde approaches them
Additional Desired Features
During platforming segments, have the camera from the position of the
horde and not the player
Particle effects for the horde wall
Microphone integration
Traps
New environmental sources of player death

Bottlenecks that are no longer a problem
Trouble reseting the “death wall” and the player upon player spawn at the same time
Broken world models giving us bad hallway configurations.

Current bottlenecks
None to be had.

Friday, February 19, 2010

Milestone 1

Milestone 1 is done!

Work completed:

Player Movement
Running and jumping
Player Death from moving wall
Wall to later be replaced by the horde
Procedural Generation of hall way which the player runs down



Currently we have a default player model running around and jumping in a procedurally generated tunnel. Right now we don’t have a working tunnel end or door sections. We also don’t have correct zoning yet so we only build our hallway out to some predetermined number of blocks. The procedural hallway generation selects from a series of hallway blocks and places them one after another.
Although it will eventually be replaced by the monster horde we have a moving yellow wall that kills the player on contact. After player death the wall resets and so does the player.




Features Remaining
Generating Hallway Lighting
Transitioning from platformer to shooter – Original / Based on C4 Demo
Interacting with mounted gun
Firing gun
Able to shoot enemies
Procedurally generating a hallway with proper zoning / portals
Enemies
Spawning enemies from the horde wall during shooter segments
Simple AI – seek player
Die when shot
Speeding up the game over time
As the length of the game increases, the player and horde speed
increase proportionally
Complete procedural generation of hallway
Platforming obstacles in the hallway
Airlock segments
Timed doors
Dynamic lighting
Dim / remove lights as the horde approaches them
Additional Desired Features
During platforming segments, have the camera from the position of the
horde and not the player
Particle effects for the horde wall
Microphone integration
Traps
New environmental sources of player death

Current bottlenecks
We’re currently working on refining the reset of the game on player death. Currently, when the player dies, we’re teleporting the “death wall” back to its original position. However, this occurs regardless of whether the player has respawned or not. Thus, if the player doesn’t respawn immediately, the wall will have moved past the player’s position in the hallway, effectively blocking the player behind it.

We’re also waiting on fixed versions of the world files from our artists. While they have already provided us with a secondary set of environment assets after the original set had facing problems, the new set does not have consistent orientations. Thus while we can place many hallway block pieces into our game, some of the pieces are backwards, making it impossible to progress past them.

Friday, February 12, 2010

Vanishing Point is a go

Here's a link to the draft design doc for the game team When It's Ready will be developing over the course of the next 3 weeks.