Work on SymbioSys is picking up momentum again now that our final exams and assignments are out of the way …

We’re aiming to distribute SymbioSys on Steam … and to get it up to standard, we’ve discussed the kinds of additioal features and changes required to make SymbioSys a success!!

Frontlining development this last week is the slight modification of some of the missions to make them more challenging or better balanced.  Additionally, I overhauled some of the navigational code to improve consistency and root out a significant bug that affected how critters Wandered around the game in loaded missions (there was no problem with the Freeform mode, however).  Some other superficial changes have been applied, and there are some small bugs I am still chasing down.  I now preload more of the seasonal and were textures to reduce the burden whilst the game is in play … I’ll try and do the same with audio as well … this removes or limits the jitters when new textures are loaded in game to add smoothness to game play.  Other updates include the addition of a couple more roaming creatures in some environments … the simple little things that make the player stop and think for a moment.  I’ve also added the latest versions of some tree and landscape seasonal textures from Dean … you can certainly feel the difference a lot more!

As for new features, we’re aiming, partly upon the advise of an industry professional:

New Tutorial Levels

Enhanced Model Appearance – I am still having issues with Gouraud shading .b3d models in Irrlicht …

Proper post level feedback instead of the jarring loss of control

Simple AI opponents (at this stage, just allow the computer some intelligent control over non-player controlled critters).  Opponent could build brances to reach creatures, and employ (assault) tactics when their predators are in high numbers, and (withdrawal) tactics when their numbers drop … should be relatively simple to implement.

Improved navigation – I am currently working on the minimal spanning tree code that will allow critters to know when to backtrack to find their destinations.  It will also allow AI opponents to know where to build bridges.

A couple more random events – Blizzards are tempting, Disease would also be a treat, and occasional random species migration would certainly be interesting!

Critter Icon click to camera jump to Cluster 0 … another interfacing improvement letting players select difficult to locate creatures.

Mouse hover options – if on, mouse hover will identify the interface icon being highlighted for better beginner in-game control.

Audio control – modify sound volumes

Beyond that list, there are other plans as well … enhanced AI with multiple difficulty settings, and the jewel in the crown, Co-op and Head to Head multiplayer mode … but these options will be assessed once the game is prepped with the other mentioned features.

Still a lot of work to do on SymbioSys, programming particularly, though some interfacing and art assets are required … but I hope to accomplish a lot in the next few weeks!  We are considering bolstering the programming team … but I’d rather try and work things out myself at this stage … a specialist focusing on networking may be invaluable, however, as multiplayer is strongly desired.

- Colin

Been a bit late uploading it since I think we’ve all pretty much collapsed after the exhibition (and caught up on all our other subjects), but the trailer we displayed there can now be downloaded here:

http://sharebee.com/5854ecdb

Filesize: 26mb

Length: 2:38

Resolution: 768 x 480

Codec: .mov (H.264) – requires Quicktime

- Alex

Yesterday was a special day for the Collective Unconscious Team, and a true trial by fire for SymbioSys …

At Queensland University of Technology’s IT exhibition, SymbioSys was experienced, not just by fellow students, and the education team that has overseen the last for years of our studies, but by some of the most respected names in Brisbane’s Games Industry, and the wider community with a vested interest in IT and games … and the response?

The SymbioSys team were humbled by the overwhelming show of support from all quarters for SymbioSys.  To each of you who took an interest in, and supported the project, and the development team, on behalf of the team, I offer sincere thanks.

In light of the support shown, we reaffirmed our intention to push forward with the development of SymbioSys.  We are very grateful the offers of advise for seeing SymbioSys flourish into a marketable reality …

I will make further updates soon, outlining the most recent progress and project intentions … but before I go,  I’d just like to thank Alex, Jai, Bart and Dean, a team who worked very hard this year to being SymbioSys to life at such a high standard.   And Daniel, whose ongoing musical support provided the game with some very high quality tracks that add layers of atmosphere to the game.  Our supervisors, Ruth Christie and Peta Wyeth, for their ongoing support, as well as Ross Brown, Michael Docherty and the other respected QUT lecturers who have imparted the valuable skills that the team now brings to the table.

- Colin

With things coming to the end here it’s a good feeling… It’s great to see what our group has achieved in the time we have been developing this game. It is also fantastic to see the game in a state that resembles the final product and that it has become something that is enjoyable to play. Even though it was a lot of hard work it has also been enjoyable to work on this project. I could restate what the others have said about everyone’s contributions but I think I’ll keep it short
Thanks to all the team who were all dedicated and very organised and probably the reason I had so much fun doing work this semester and the who were the reason that we produced a great game.
In something that is rather strange for me I also find myself looking forward to a presentation rather then dreading it. I am genuinely interested to know what the industry guys will think of SymbioSys as well as the general public’s opinion of the game.
- Jai

The end approaches, of the semester at least. Last Friday we presented our game formally to Ruth and Peta. As Colin mentioned in the last post it went extremely well. I’m very optimistic to its reception at the industry presentation this Thursday. I think because it is such a unique style of game, not really falling into any solid genres, that people will be curious to what it is about and how it is played. The addition of the extra environments thanks to Colin and the new objective/scenario levels thanks to Dean and Jai take it a step further than what it started out as. Combined with Alex’s absolutely brilliant presentation and trailer I think it is going to be a great show drawing a lot of good attention.

The game has come far from just being a lot of scrolling code at the start of the semester. Jai has built a great range of creatures from just the few concept art sketches we started out with. He has rigged them up brilliantly to allow for my animating them. He has textured them, changed their formats and made it possible to import them into the game, making a living creature. Deans work in creating the trees has been excellent, building them to specific dimensions and making sure they all worked together well. His work in structuring the game scenarios and campaigns has made SymbioSys much more than a single free-play game. Alex has done an immense amount of  designing in SymbioSys, resulting in a very enjoyable and easy to use game. His work on the interfaces have made them free-flow and simple to understand. He has been responsible for the creation of the graphical style and has succeeded, in my opinion, in making a very good looking game. His work on the presentations and assessment pieces have been great too, making it impossible for us to get anywhere near a low grade for the subject. And finally Colin has been the one to bring each and every bit together into what we now know as SymbioSys. He has built the code, implemented the interfaces, structured the world, an moved the creatures. In short he is the one that took all of our individual bits of game and along with his work put it all together. 

All this being said though this is not the end of SymbioSys. The team have all agreed to continue working on the game after the final presentation in order to make a great finished product, and hopefully something that can be marketed in the future.

I’d just like to thank everyone on the Collective Unconscious Team for all of their unparalleled work in making the brilliant game SymbioSys. It has been, and will continue to be, a pleasure.

- Bart

The feeling is somewhat surreal … if this is the conclusion, it certainly doesn’t feel like it …

After a momentous effort by the team this week, SymbioSys was packaged for submission … and presented to our supervisors and was very well received!  Alex’s excellent trailer looked awesome, offering a beautiful, yet instructive insight into how the game is played.  But this is not the end of the road, however, before I digress …

As of last post, I listed a plethora of tasks that lay ahead of me in order to complete this thing in time for yesterday’s deadline!  At this stage, I can’t even recall off the top of my head exactly what was listed … but I do know that we were very satisfied with what was submitted.

The upgrade to Irrlicht 1.6 was validated, game speed improved across the board, and it incorporates a couple of features that would have made earlier development easier.  The Irrlicht team deserve a good plug for FREELY providing a solid and well supported game rendering engine … I would highly recommend considering it as a development option.

Even more environments were added to SymbioSys, and existing ones improved, all the niggling interfaces were included, except one relatively trivial one I will incorporate soon.  Death animations were an issue, for some reason the sequencing failed to reset for different meshes, but that’s something I will look into further and seek advice about if I can’t work it out.

I constructed a couple of game levels, and Dean did an excellent job playing with the level editor.  Once he worked it out, he created some well though out scenarios.  Jai tested a few of them, and I was up all the night before the assignment was due, largely making sure they all worked properly, but once they were all ironed out, the concepts were well thought out and made for interesting game play!  Dean is also to be praised for his dedication these last few weeks to crafting some excellent environments (using Blender).  His efforts there opened the door for excellent diversification of environmental settings.

Bugs, bugs, bugs … after the fall of the dreaded camera bug that had plagued the game all semester, a large number of issues, from niggly glitches that detracted from aesthetics, subtle rarities that occasionally tripped the game up, to frustrating menu errors, were detected … and, aside from a handful, were duly eliminated.

Game messages were implemented, improving feedback!  Long planned features were incorporated, including seasonal chimes to indicate a new season was commencing!  Spur of the moment features were added, including the vocal growling of “SymbioSys” to inform the player of the production of SymbioPods … and I am sure there are other things I could add that have blurred into the back of my mind since last week.

So, the question begs, where to from here?

Thursday is the final SymbioSys assessment piece … we present SymbioSys, not just to our peers and QUT academic staff, but to honoured industry guests, both games and otherwise, potential QUT students, and a multitude of other guests.  And whilest the game was but a humble console app when last presented to the industry, the full and final product is now ready, all the careful planning has become reality, the original vision and scope, barring a few small changes, is now realised … and the game we’ve spent the better part of the year developing is pretty much ready!!!

Alex has poured great effort into preparing presentation materials, and ensuring the deliverables look exceptionally well polished with great interface graphic designs, and production materials.  Dean’s art and models have added great visual appeal to the game world.  Bart’s animations have brought Jai’s models to life … giving them added personality to draw the player into the world.  Jai has done an exceptional job with the creature models, and his consistent efforts with managing the technical issues that have arisen have made my job that much easier.  And I have poured over this project meticulously to infuse all of that well crafted content into the beautiful, enjoyable game that is SymbioSys!!!

Outstanding job, team
The end ???

- Colin

3 days until SymbioSys is submitted, and 8 days until the exhibition!

Now that I’ve finished all the interface assets (and several updates of some), my main job has been getting all the menu bits and pieces and handling the graphic design of our promo materials (posters, flyers, DVD boxart), organising the presentations and creating our game trailer.

The latter is more difficult than it seems, as it needs to clearly explain what the game is and how it works in about 2 minutes without stuffing the screen with text – not an easy job when we’re using such an original concept. There is little prior knowledge the player or viewer can recall to understand its purpose. For example, for any shooter game no matter how innovative the mechanics there are several things that can be counted upon – you will move, you will shoot, there will be opponents, etc. However, since our game is very experimental the trailer needs to introduce the viewer to a concept that that may not immediately understand the appeal of. It has the job of creating interest in the viewer and communicating what makes our game fun, and all within 2 minutes.

Some other great news I received today from Colin (programmer and other designer) is that he’s got the just-released version 1.6 of the Irrlicht game engine working with SymbioSys! This is fantastic since usually there can be a truckload of new issues when updating the technology but most have been ironed out quickly and painlessly, as well as helping with one of the key issues we’ve been having: performance. Under Irrlicht 1.5 and 1.5.1, due to the amount of stuff we’re throwing at the engine to be checked and recalculated 30 times per second it was really struggling to maintain stable framerates of a medium-powered PC. Irrlicht 1.6 thankfully has much better memory management so Colin has passed on the great news that it runs much more smoothly, so I can’t wait to see it tomorrow in our next meeting.

I finished our Project Changes Document literally 5 minute ago which details all the modifications to SymbioSys from the original game document. While a lot of them can be read right here in the blog as we tackled each, the document provides a nice condensed version including references to the individual section in the game document where content has been altered.

I’m confident we’ll have an amazing unique game to submit and present on Friday, but as most who know us will already be aware of, we’re not stopping there. It’s not over until the fat lady sings, and we’re keeping her mouth duct-taped until we’re satisfied.

- Alex

Who knew making some art for the menu would be so difficult… Each of the art pieces took me longer then I expected but the worst part was that my computer refused to boot up when I wanted to finish them off. The computer is Repaired now so. On to the images. I have been creating five images to accompany the campaign. So far I have made four of them before I was interrupted.

here are some of the images

We are approaching the submission date for the game and there is still a lot to do however at this stage I am feeling confident that we will be able to present a fun and playable game by the deadline.

- Jai

SymbioSys is developing at record pace as vital features and new assets (and some not so new ones) are falling into place in the crucial final days before the game is submitted for assessment.

Since last post, a plethora of interface items and menus have seen light of day, with all levels now loadable (once they are ready), the freeplay menu now fully functional, allowing players to set up their desired forests within a few parameters (whilst retaining some random elements, or course).

The game menu has been updated to include more instructions and guidelines, symbiopod lists are included in game as well, and identify the symbiotic partners that produce symbiopods.  Victory and Failure menus are now in to inform the player of their success (as opposed to simply reverting to the Main Menu without warning.

The main menu has been updates with Dean’s awesome background murals and Alex has touched up vital interface elements and information pages.

Amid all the chaos, I’ve managed to update the environment system, allowing for multiple environments to be generated (randomly triggered or predetermined by the level designer).  We can now easily tweak terrains and their textures (seasonal if we wish too), the volume of sunlight striking the level, the colour and intensity of fog, and a few other things that can create a variety of moods to keep things interesting.

And of course, with that latest development, some of Dean’s earlier terrain models, which never had a chance to be incorporated, have now become trivial to shine … and SHINE they do!  No pics this time, I have to get back to it, but SymbioSys has a wonderful aesthetic appeal to it!!!  Jai’s modelling, Bart’s animations, Alex’s interfaces, Dean’s environments … all rolled into one package … this team has produced some very high quality assets for this game … but for now, I just have to get back to cramming every last pixel I can into this game in the last few days we have to produce it!

- Colin

Another day another animation. Just updating you all on the status of our animations. I’ve finally completed all of the death animations for when a creature carks it. Now they can go down in a degree of style befitting them. I’ll trot them out alphabetically but before I do I’d like to show you the new an improved Genus Plungeye walkcycle.

Now the reason I changed it was the last walk cycle was too awkward when in the game, as noted upon by several playtesters and team members. THe lunge forward slide back animation only truly worked if the model moved at a speed that matched the slide back directly. Otherwise it looked like a weird thrust and slide back. To fix it as you see I have just turned it into a regular alternative side movement walk cycle, one tentacle flicks forward to pull then another. I like it better this way as it doesn’t seem to have the same kind of rough force the other animation has either. Anyhows onto killing off a few critters. First Bioduck/Mukki.

With Bioduck/Mukki I thought there is two ways I can do this, either have it fall backwards or forward. I chose backwards because I could add some steps combined with leaning back as if in pain. I added some head swaying and arm movement to enforce this. I particularly like when the model falls onto its behind and the feet swing up a bit. The next death animation is of Chomper.

Again I went with the step back motion for chomper but I thought it wasn’t to effective with 4 small legs, thus I made the creature rear up and flail with the front two. I also opened the mouth to indicate a widening in surprise/pain. This could be coupled later with perhaps a roar or moan of death. The creature then collapses forwards, unlike bioduck. To make for a better natural motion I had the body bounce slightly from the impact. The next to die is Crabab.

Now this is one of my favourite deaths. The reason is when the creature collapses the legs twitch a bit, just like a bug. Unfortunately you can’t see it in this gif file because there isn’t enough frames included. It makes the death a bit humourous I think. I had the creature collapse directly down because I has a large flat body that wouldn’t tip upside down or onto its side. So rather I just had it drop dead right there. Coming up next is killing off Eyecid.

Again another I made to collapse directly. The difference between this death however is that Eyecid make an attempt to get up with its eyes. Then we have Fuzzy.

Now fuzzy was one of the easiest to do, again because of so little bones. I just had it sway forward then flip on its back to die. Sweet, simple and it works. Another down, next is Gekko.

Now once again Gekko is an enigma. How do you kill of something with three legs. Rearing up on its hind legs was out of the question, so I settled on the trusty collapse. I had the front of Gekko fall first, leaving the sturdier single hind leg standing, only to fall later. Now I kill Genus.

Now Genus was another enigma of a creature that doesn’t really move like any creature in reality. I decided to have Genus flail its tentacles a bit, as if in pain, since they are one of the main features of it. I then had it collapse forward, flat on its face indicating death. After that we I put Gorgoth out of its misery.

Now because Gorgoth is a simple 4 legged creature I could’ve done a simple walk to collapse animation. But since I didn’t think it would be too much fun I create something more unique. I took Gorgoths eyes and had them droop outwards. Coupled with the front of the body dropping it made Gorgoth seem as if it was losing all strength to support its own body.  I then had  it do a last ditch effort at moving with its front legs. The result, a dead Gorgoth, followed closely by Leafy.

Now again here with have your classic, if not completly realistic, 4 legged variety of creature. Again I wanted to add a degree of uniqueness to the creature. To do this I decided to play on its nature as a leaf realted animal and had it curl up after collapsing. I rather like the result. Mugish was next.

With such a big body and so many small legs the best way to kill off Mugish was to have it collapse, just like Crabab. I thought I’d also add some degree of final life to it as I did with Eyecid too and made it try to use its fron legs to prop itself up. Next we had Slugger.

Again a unique creature. My idea to kill it off was to have it shrivel up after its death throws. This was easily achieved by shrinking of the armature bones used to move and manipulate the model. The result, a mangled puddle of polygons that once was slugger. Then we killed Spike.

Now here I was a bit sick of just having the creature collapse so I added another backstep cycle. Because of the dinosaurish appearance of spike to I also added a flailing rear up as well , just like dinosaurs do in movies. While perhaps not completely acurate to reality it’ll suit the style of a game nicely. My final creature was Spindle.

Again I wanted to add a rear-up swaying backstep to collapse animation. Doing it with spindle was fairly simple. The result one dead bug/creautre. There were my death animations I hope you like.

- Bart