Hallways And Room Upgrades

It's only Tuesday but I'm posting again, I've gotten all the remaining hallways and rooms finished, just the computer pods left. I also drew up all the upgrades for the weapons. I'm falling behind slightly, haven't started my student or zombie animation yet, but at the same time I'm getting a lot done and have more work in my other classes then I thought I'd have.

This upcoming week I'm hoping to finish off the rest of my graphics and then I'll be able to sit down and tackle the animation. I was talking to Ayla, my girlfriend of four years, and she was telling me that someone in her class was using flash and discovered a tool that allows characters to be linked together, allowing for easier animation. I'm going to definitely check this out before I start animation, if it works like I understand, then it will end up saving me a lot of time and frustration.

Weapon Upgrades

Combat Screen

This week hasn't been as productive as last week, too many other projects and meeting going on, however I did get all 15 weapons created, the combat screen layout and graphics finished and several hallways drawn.

One problem I did run into was when I was placing all the weapons into the students hands for the combat screen. The MP3 player that I had drawn for the first tier of blunt weapons just didn't fit into his hand like I wanted, causing the hit zone to be way off from the Baseball-Bat and Crowbars hit zones. This would mean that I'd have to create two different attacking animations for the blunt weapons, and I'm already looking at around 9 animations for the students so I just changed the MP3 player to a Hammer, and switched out everything that had the MP3 player with the Hammer.

I feel like I haven't fallen behind schedule yet, however I will need to put quite a few hours into this next week to stay on track.

Week 1 of Zombie RPG

So my project has been approved and I'm now into creating the assets for the game. I've drawn the rough working versions for the four students and the twelve zombies. I've also drawn the rough working version for the chibis of the students, the four zombie types and the two parents. For each set of three zombies, it takes me about two hours to get them from a rough sketch to bodies that are colored and can be animated; the chibi's took about thirty minutes each.

One thing that I started using a lot was the swap button for graphics, this would allow me to just duplicate a zombie and all the body parts, then just change the individual parts and swap them out on the duplicated zombie, saving about 10 minutes with each zombie skin, just setting up the body structure and creating new graphics for all the moving parts.

Something that I noticed after doing several zombies was the speed it took, to go from the rough idea to a working rough section, was decreasing and I was creating cleaner drawings quicker. I'm glad to see some improvement after just one week, who knows where I'll be by the end of this product.

Start to my Self Directed

I've started working on my self directed project, for this class I need to make a project for myself that will teach me things I need to become better prepared for the gaming industry.

I've come up with a Adobe Flash Zombie Survival Role Playing Game. I haven't created an in-depth game yet; I've made one 'Choose Your Own Adventure' game and a single 'Point and Click'. My idea for the game is set in an after-school Recreation Centre. The person you first play as, wakes up after falling asleep in one of the activity rooms. They wake up to find one of the adult supervisors with them in the, now locked room. You soon learn that while you were asleep a virus has spread through most of the Centre, turning all who became infected into the walking dead. The supervisor gives you a metal edged ruler and a flare gun, unlocks the door and sets you off on your adventure to try and escape, alive.

I've created my gantt chart and have just started creating rough skeches now, as I get things done I'll post pictures here. :D