Week 11 – Ubisoft Game Lab Competition, resource management in games, and more Bloody Mary (our GDW game) progress!

One of the starting zones

                For this week, we were told about the Ubisoft Game Lab Competition 2013, which looks very exciting. It also looks very hard to get qualified for, as only one team per university can participate. During the lectures for this week, we had also learned about resource management, where we were told to include things like resource costs in our GDW games, such as implementing a health system. For our case, the player has a limited amount of health, and can only replenish it by picking up health power ups that are scattered across the level.

Some decorative text found in some of the rooms, left behind by the victims

Another room, showing one of the oil bottle power ups

One of the rooms with a health power up

                This week, our GDW game, Bloody Mary, has had some good progress. We are having much success with collision, where the player can now push around objects in the game, and collide with the walls and other objects (no more running through walls and objects like before). We also had some progress on importing a ghost model with a skeleton and skeletal animation. With some help from our Game Engines professor, we were able to put one of our ghosts into the game. When the game is complete, we should be able to have fully functional ghosts that wander around the level, and will chase the player if he/she gets too close to one of them. The ghosts are able to move through walls and objects, providing a challenge to the player. We are also planning to implement multiple difficulties for the game, ranging from easy, medium, and hard. If the player picks easy, there will be health power ups in every other room, and the other half of the rooms will have oil power ups. Medium difficulty will have half of the amount of health and oil power ups, and hard difficulty will have much few power ups, which makes the game very difficult as the player can only find limited quantities of health and oil power ups.

One of the ghosts for our game

                That’s all for this week, stay tuned for more updates next week!