Big Happenings At BrainStorm

Aww Yeah, BrainStorm!

We here at BrainStorm strive to bring you the best product we possibly can, and with Ascension we are doing just that. Though Ascension is still in development we try our hardest to make the quality of Ascension the highest possible at all times.

What's going on at BrainStorm?

We have a few things coming up this week that we hope everyone will look forward to. As of now we are not able to say exactly what developments we have in the pipeline, but we can say that the we be very nice, and significantly enhance the experience of the game.

Got any sneak peeks, trailers, cool stuff like that?

Hmm, not really anything that we are at liberty to say. That would be cool if we could do a trailer or something, but we don't really have the resources to do video stuff like that... Though there is one thing to share, A NEW LOGO!

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Special shout out to Derek Marunowski ( Meganowski!! )

Detai|s Are Paramount!

When creating content for anything you, anyone involved, must think of the big picture and the small picture. Try not to just see the forest for the trees, see the forest for both the trees and for what it is. Sometimes it may seem that its easy to just say something and say that you will do it, the hard part is giving a correct estimate and following through.

An example of what I'm referring to would be a milestone deliverable. The idea of a milestone deliverable is that you set a goal for yourself first, tell the people above you( the people who expect work from you), plan out a decent schedule, and follow through. For our POC( Proof Of Concept ) we promised the following....

"For POC, we’re shooting for our AI to attack the player when they come within a designated distance of the enemy. The player will be represented by a place holder mesh, and an enemy will be able to spawn at a basic spawn point in the area, represented by a position in space. Pressing the space bar will spawn an enemy. The enemy will be represented by the same mesh as the player with a different color. The world will be a simple piece of terrain, 30x30 ft for the player and enemies to stand on...
The collision in the POC will be basic ground clamping to the terrain, combat collision for attacking, and taking damage - you’ll be able to view these collisions by basic spheres or quads. The enemy will be able to die and attack, so the player may lose if their hp reaches 0. The player will win if they reach level three, by killing 10-11 enemies. The player will be able to move throughout the area, with the basic mouse and keyboard controls, and the camera will follow the player with the ability to rotate around the player. The player’s stats will be displayed on the HUD, including stats, gold, exp and level. The main menu layout will be present, although not everything will be complete. The options, scoreboard and credits wont be functional, but begin game will be. The player will be able to start the POC game from this menu. In game, the pause menu will be functional as far as leaving the game and resuming the game. The area will have some music in the background, to show we have audio and some combat and menu sound effects as well. ..."

Proof Of Concept basically shows that the team is making progress on the game and that they have the ability to create and implement the basic of the game promised. That large wall of text is exactly what we said we would have for our Proof Of Concept. What we did, and that benifited us in the long run was our wording. We specifically tried to word things to be vague, but still specific and not misleading. "The world will be a simple piece of terrain, 30x30 ft for the player and enemies to stand on." This statement was not completely tru, but was vague(relitively), but specific. That statement was primarily worded that way as a fallback, so just in case we had some issue that came up we could have something very simple to do last minute.

When we presented our Proof Of Concept, this was greatly exceeded. We had a full mesh of triangles loaded with the player walking correctly on it. For those unsure of that i mean by a mesh, think of the gound you walk on, in a game world it could potentially be made out of over 9000 triangles, sadly ours was only over 5000, but maybe one day. The whole point of this is to show that the attention to detail as a programmer is EXTREMELY important, and it has hurt us a few times, but it hasn't been anything we couldnt overcome as a team.

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Technical Roles

Here is a quick post to explain the technical roles of the different lead positions of our group.

Project lead, Darren Palmer. His responsibilities include, leading group meetings, managing work schedules, and being the main point of contact between the rest of the team and the producers. Darren is also responsible for the sounds and music in the game, the collision system, and camera scripting.

Game-play lead, Bryan Seabury. His responsibilities are making sure the rules of the game are followed. For our project he is creating the combat system, managing the objects of the game, as well as developing the artificial intelligence the enemies will use.

Asset lead, Andrew Corren. He is responsible for being the point of contact between the development team and the team of artist, this is to insure that requests aren't made that conflict or repeat. On our team this person also works on the menu systems, HUD (heads up display), File I/O, and 2D art work.

Design lead, Chris Scribner, is responsible for the overall idea of the game and making sure everything works together as planned. This person on our team is responsible for creating the objects in the game, creating the exporters for the artist, Documentation, Animation systems, and loading the art assets into the game.

QA (Quality Assurance) Lead, Jonathan Blacky, This person's main responsibilities are game testing and bug reports. This member of our team is also responsible for the leveling system, the vendor system, the font system, stat tracking, buffs and abilities, and positions.

Technology Lead, Timothy Trott. He is responsible for creating the tech needed to build the game, and providing answers about the tech. In our team this person is responsible for creating the game engine, camera system, rendering, creating particle engine, building AABBs (Axis Aligned Bounding Box) .