ARGH the gaming deadline is little over a week away! And the stress is kicking in. All the graphics are completed and now it basically rests on the shoulders of Steve to program it, it’s all been sort of left to the last minute which is worrying as we don’t know if it is something we can actually program in a week. Michelle and Steve are worried about being able to make the glove after the first attempt failed and are now on the second remote and once again time may prove against us! SO fingers crossed for it all.

Today our group submitted a mini presspack of ourselves to advertise our game and if we are lucky we are hoping that it will get submitted into Feb’s addition of Computer Arts magazine but we are up against the rest of our gaming group so I am not holding out much hope that we will get in.

I have been working on our mini site for the past week or so reccently trying to get it up to scratch but am having issues with the pre-loader not actually working at all or it’s not loading the mini site SWF. So am bugging people from my placement to help me out with it. Soon you will be able to find it on www.absent-caller.co.uk

The programming is finally starting to kick off but am still worried that we won’t get it completed because it not a easy walk in the park with what we want to do.

I made this for our gaming presentation a while back but as like anything with flash it went a bit wrong in parts so ended up having to leave it out but I thought I would post it up here so you can get a feel for our game. It is in no way perfect this trailer but it is a good start.

Trailer

I haven’t posted in a while about the progress in gaming. Well the critique was handed in last thursday which was a huge relief but now am just worried about what mark I will get!!!

I’ve started on the final gaming graphics right now it’s mainly just peicing a bit of a storyline together with the photos and imagining what the user can see at each point. Which is proving to be harder than I first thought as at every point that they stand there needs to be 4 other photos surrounding them. I think we should of storyboarded the game first before we headed off  but we can head back after christmas and scale the heights again.

Also it would be good to go when the tide is out - as then we can get around to photograph the other half of the barn which right now we only have the shots I took when I was with my family.

On the technical side of the game nothing has really been done as we have been caught up on other projects and as gaming as no major deadlines as of yet it has been put off.

This morning our gaming group travelled to polperro (for all those who don’t know where it is - it’s a tiny small town in cornwall) to take photos of a barn that is set in some cliffs by some the sea. Last time I visited the place I wasn’t allowed to walk down to properly see it and so didn’t quite realise how much of a cliff it was on!

HOLY CRIPS walking on slippery rocks after it had been raining the group tred carefully around and were disappointed to see it all locked but but we got some good shots of the outside. Steve who is not so scared of heights managed to climb up around and take some good over head shots and I stuck to the ground where there wasn’t a shear drop down both sides!

We got all the photos we needed and a cornish pasty on the way back but I think we deserve bonus points on for dangerous tasks. Now all I need to do is go home for christmas and take photos of the inside of a barn.

Also take a look at the new PS3 Eye Toy - I am never too excited about gaming but I want one if it lives up to the adverts.

You Tube

Holly crips I never knew writting 2,000 words on the Eye Toys interactivity, playability and immersion could be soooo long and also sort of boring. But here it is two days later… I thought I would post it up just in case anyone in the world needs to read about the greatness of Sony. Not too sure if it is really a critique right now and may need some tweaking at some point but for now I am happy!

http://www.all-thumbs.co.uk/Critiques/katy/katylilley_critique.html

I am really excited about our game. We have finally developed our narrative and everything is being set in motion. I am currently creating an introduction to the game in Flash with Michelle helping me out with the sound. Whilst Steve is getting settled on creating the mainframe for the gaming and finishing off the website.

Both Dan and Gareth seem impressed with our idea and progress so hopefully shall score well out of this module.

The gaming module at the moment seems to be eatting up most of my time. We have finally come up with a narrative that allows the user to explore through a barn in search of clues to find their missing friend. As I am the Creative Director I have been experiment with different types of graphics - so far have settled for photographs manipulated in photoshop. Have found the bonuses of photoshop stamps which allow high quality graphics in half the time.

Were now looking at the hardware and are planning to take apart a wireless controller and attached the sensors through analog and digital. The sensors being used are tilt and light.

After some debating our group decided to go for the idea of creating a ‘glove’ that would let you interact with objects within a game. After some research  we managed to find the most complicated way to do it and after a little advice from Dan we found a really easy way which let us hi-jack a keyboard.

After I donated my old PC keyboard we headed off to Maplins to get some tilt senors, soldering iron and metres of copper wire - for free we also managed to get Maplins extra rude staff who were as much help as a chocolate tea pot.

We got straight to work only to find out that the cheap soldering iron was as much good as the staff at Maplins and would not stick anything together so being resouceful we ended up with selotape holding the title senors to the circuit board. Steve managed to map out the key presses, which is attached to this blog.

Now we have a working prototype we are getting ready to move onto the next stage of programming a small game to react to the tilt sensors. Also our website is now up at www.all-thumbs.co.uk - just need to get started on producing a design.