MQP Meeting 1/31 Notes

• We met with Professor Rosenstock and presented him our general outline for our MQP paper allowing him to give us hid advice and direction. (The typed up, revised outline for the paper can be seen in the post directly preceding this post.)
• It was suggested that Dylan also present the paper outline to Professor Finkel to receive his input
• The next step for the paper is to split up sections of the paper to individual members and begin writing them
• Joey continues to work on monster animations
• After discussing with Dylan I've been able to nail down the instrumentalist animation workflow and pipeline in order to have instrumentalist animations more readily and efficiently available
• Dylan has been working on the map and also on the Battle GUI utilizing Joey's previous art
• Kyle has fixed all monster bugs and is contemplating how to tackle the logic for the upgrade shop
• Questions still remain about the exact content of the upgrade shop which, in turn, dictates how it should be coded and implemented
• Currently we are considering having only instruments, extra instrumentalist slots, and patterns available in the shop
• We have given our game the working title "Melodic Munitions." If our attitudes towards the name change over the next week it's something we can re-visit and readdress
• Moving forward we need to begin to divide up certain sections of the paper to specific team members
• The plan is to spend one more week creating as much content as we can and then shifting our focus more towards writing the paper
• Next weeks meeting time has tentatively been set to 4:00PM on Thursday (2/10) with Professor Finkel

Paper Outline

1.      Abstract

2.      Introduction

a.       Team Roles

3.      Concept Proposal & Design

a.       Inspiration

b.      Evolution of concept proposal

c.       Concept art

d.      Goals utilizing sound

e.       Prototype

4.      Game Design

a.       Game Features

b.      Monsters

c.       Instruments

5.      Technical Design

a.       Game engine / Unity

                                                              i.      Advantages / Disadvantages

b.      Composition mode

c.       Monster implementation

d.      MIDI implementation

e.       Map & Upgrade Shop implementation

6.      Artistic Design

a.       Approach / Design

                                                              i.      Monsters

                                                            ii.      Instruments

                                                          iii.      Instrumentalist

b.      Level design

c.       UI Elements

7.      Sound Design

a.       Process of composing Game Music

b.      Implementation in Unity

c.       Process of creating sound effects

8.      Successes / Failures

a.       Postmortem

                                                              i.      Multiplayer

9.      Misc. Appendices

a.       Content not implemented in game

Instrument Models

These are the substantial instrument models I've been able to make. I also have the "two sticks" instrument as well as all the drums to form a drum kit, though they are pretty much just variations on the snare drum I had made earlier.

3 String Guitar

















Bongo Drums

 

Chimes

Crash Cymbals

 

Harp

Timpani


















Erhu

Hi-hat














































Triangle

Ukulele

Tambourine

MQP Meeting 1/27 Notes

• Joey showed his tree/flame monster and we discussed other possible interesting things we could incorporate into it such as effects and specific animations
• I worked on making models for as many instruments as I could. As of this post approximately half of the instrument models have been made
• Professor Rosenstock suggested I shift towards instrumentalist animations so we can have some of those complete
• Dylan started a new Unity project, pulling everything over, no major problems, but just some things that were noticed for the first time
• Kyle has been working on correcting monster bugs
• Brian took all his song MIDI files and converted them to .wav
• Tech hurdles which still remain are the map screen and the upgrade shop
• Some work still needs to be done to extend the view in the City level
• Professor Rosenstock brought up modular building techniques in Maya which would assist in tweaking the level
• HOMEWORK for everyone is come up with 5 (or more) potential names for our game with the goal of picking one next meeting

As a final NOTE: our next meeting will be Monday, January 31 at 4:00pm, following our own weekly group meetings. In addition the meeting time for the following week is still up in air and has yet to be determined.

Weekly Progress (1/26/11)

I wasn't able to get as much done this week as I had hoped to, but I did model out our fire monster, at least. I call it "Burnbrush". The model itself is close to what I hoped, but it does fall a little flat. This treelike creation will be on fire until the wind instruments blow him out. Until then, his massive roaring flames drown out sound around him.

I was informed that my bomb model was screwing up in Unity, so I made some adjustments to it. Hopefully it will work now.

PROTIP: Delete the history of your models before you start to animate them. If you delete history after you've made your animations, the model will be released from the skeleton to which it is bound.

Weekly Progress

Well there wasn't a whole lot of progress this week (at least for us tech guys). Dylan was working on creating a new, cleaner project, but he brought some issues with the monsters to my attention. I haven't had a chance to look at them yet, but hopefully they will prove to be easy fixes.

Weekly Progress

Not a whole lot to say this week. We had our first meeting of the term laying out the goals for this term. My goal this week was to merge the old versions Kyle and I had and create a new build of the project. I started everything from scratch and only moved over the stuff that we need. There are possibly some other things that I could remove, but most of the things that were in our way of making certain changes are gone now so we should be able to move forward easier.

MQP Meeting 1/20

• First meeting of B Term
• From where we left off last term nothing is substantially different
• Dylan worked on getting the animations right
• Flying Monster and Bomb Monster still have some issues that need to be addressed
• At this point we thought it was a good idea to start actually building the final version of the game and putting everything we have into a single version
• We also discussed the potential of carrying the project into D Term although it wasn't met with much support
• We talked about how the MQP paper will also now be taking up a significant part of our time
• We decided the overall goal should be getting the game to a point where we can be proud of it
• As part of that, Professor Rosenstock suggested airing on the side of caution and limiting our scope in terms of what we still wanted to get done, and focus on putting out quality stuff
• We also discussed the eCDR form as something to not worry about right now, but later in the term
• In terms of tech things left to be accomplished: the upgrade store and map
• In terms of art things left to be accomplished: instrument models, monster models, monster animations, instrumentalist animations, and other UI stuff
• We discussed that maybe now is a good time for the tech to put together a new build of the game
• As part of this art also needs to work on GUI elements to complement the implementation of the remaining tech features
• We also still need a name for our game

TIMELINE & MILESTONES

• With 3 weeks left we will have to work towards having a fully functioning game with as much content as possible
• Week 1 - Tech: start new build of the game
• Week 1 - Art: Rob - remaining instrument models / Joey - remaining monster models
• Week 2 - Art: Rob - remaining instrumentalist animations / Joey - remaining monster animations
• Week 3 - Art: Rob - UI stuff / Joey - UI stuff
• Remainder of the term - Brian: work on possibly putting together useful sound effects and potential monster sounds (such as death, etc.)

THE PAPER

• Professor Rosenstock suggested looking at the IGSD guidelines for the paper
• He also mentioned the paper of a previous project 'Mote' had a good paper which was available online at the library
• Professor Rosenstock said it was important to document the process and describe the design process and the various design decisions
• Some parts will be owned by certain people based on their involvement in that particular area while other sections will have to be addressed as a team
• Professor Rosenstock thought it pertinent for us to produce an outline of our paper within the next week or two, which we can then divide up and start tackling certain sections
• Last Professor Rosenstock also advised us to think about what we might want to do with the game once it is completed (entering it in competitions, etc.)

We... Have Not Posted for a While...

Here are a couple of models that I made recently.

I've been calling the top one "BiBiBiBi". The idea behind defeating this monster is that you have to play a lot of notes very quickly. If you just keep rapid-firing notes, BiBiBiBi's headphones come off far enough to actually damage. I've modeled this guy, but at the time of writing, I'm not quite done with all of his animations yet. Still need to do "disarmed" and "defeated".

The other one is "Sprorb". This is the spring enemy that we wanted to put into the game. Basically, this monster is immune to string instruments. Wind and percussion can still do damage to it. While the ball inside is a little cheap, I'm pretty proud of the spring, which retracts and expands like a real spring.