Famous Five - Development diary #2

Another week has gone by, and the deadline is closer than ever : just about 2 weeks to finish the game off, and an extra week for tweaking and playtesting...

What's new ?

As a matter of fact, quite a lot. I implemented the CSDTalk (dialogue system) into the game, and am really happy with the result, as it contains all the features I needed initially, thus saving me a lot of time and pain designing my own system. Some further modifications were brought to the GUI design in order to make it more appropriate for the game : it is not perfect, but it will do for now.

I also spent some time tweaking my custom components (task manager, QT events/Contextual actions, making them more "Unreal friendly" by allowing the user to easily link them to the existing components and mechanisms provided by the engine, such as events, or triggers, without having to go through an awfull lot of pain of inheriting and speciliazing the classes for each and every behaviour needed.

The mechanics being pretty much completed, I have spend quite a lot of time both on making the final levels, and scripting (see below). The levels consist of two main sections :

• The hills, with the circus and the Five's camping site. The overall feel I was looking for was a nice warm day, with green fields and plenty of colours (flowers, red tents, etc.), and I am quite happy with the result so far. The major part of the level is done, but I am yet to finish off the circus, and add more variety in terms of objects and textures.
• The cave, with its dark humid, desaturated environment (in contrast with the first level). This is where the two criminals keep their treasure. This level is actually a lot harder to make than what I would have thought. The thing being : Unreal engine 2 is not really meant for natural environment, and thus it is quite hard to produce a convincing cave without a lot of tweaking and cheating with static meshes and so on. I am not entirely sure of the design of this particular level, however, my aim is to make it into some sort of maze and extend from the original novel.

Finally, I had some fun with scripting, and actually using the components I spent weeks designing and implementing, and I have to say : I am glad I did. In a matter of a few hours, I managed to set up the first few minutes of my game, with a really basic tutorial, dialogues, items, and so on, and it seems to be working without any major glitches.

What's next ?

Considering how little time we have to finish off our project, my focus will be on scripting and making the game fun and interesting.

Although I did plan a few puzzles, I realized after seeing other people's work that my idea of making an interactive story was probably not going to be suitable or be fun enough, and that I need to add in a lot more mini-games or things for the player to do, even though it might defer from the original novel.

This being said, I will be spending quite a lot of time next week actually planning the new mini-games, and reorganizing the game flow to make it more appealing to the player.

In the meantime, I intend to work a bit on some AI, in order to make the game more lifelike, with characters walking around the circus, have a more responsive Timmy the dog, and so on...

I have included a few screenshots of my progress so far to show the scripting in action, as well as the hill level. Enjoy!!