Working Environment

Alright! After that brief meeting with the Executive Producers, things are starting to take shape. This is the basic background for the first level, which will teach the basic mechanics of the game. This first level will not implement pulleys at all, but instead will teach the simple mechanic of choosing a place to pull, and the consequences of choosing incorrectly.

(Even though the pulley selection interface is working completely, and for the purposes of presentation, we inserted the pulleys to show how that would be done.)

The three selectable areas will be the concrete wall (which will pull the zombie’s arms off), the light (which will pull off and break), and the gate (not pictured, but the correct answer).

We’ll show the humans hiding in the background, and make the zombies look all silly, and add in some blood. Awesome.

Jeff is working heavily on the backgrounds, looking to implement sprites as stand-ins for the prototypes. Hopefully, the humor juxtaposed from the “cartoony” zombies placed on the serious background will shine through. (I’m excited for it.)

George has implemented the drawing mechanic, and is currently working on disallowing the player from crossing the rope for the purposes of our prototype.

In that same vein, Anurag is hard at work grappling with the physics of the game, making sure that the formula holds true, as well as implementing his solution to the collision mechanic.

What he’s illustrated to me, is a plan to make the rope adhere to the pulleys after the path is drawn, which will force the player to plan out the rope in one line, but at the same time that’s helpful because if the player is just guessing, the pulley path will not work, and the zombie will die in some way. It may be best to show this in pictures.

THIS:

WILL TURN INTO THIS:

All in all, things are looking good. We may be scaling back from the original five levels down to just three, but with the extra week of time that “Fall Break” offers, we may actually have a little more time than we’re anticipating, which could help out significantly. We’ll see where we’re at on Wednesday, and adjust accordingly.