Different Version's of Maps.

I've started and completed the Points of Interest and Item's map, and plan to do a Wildlife map, and Cave systems map. I've also completed some write up to help support the Points of Interest and item's map, including locations and explanations of what certain items do. It's the same scale as the Natural Geography map so the distance is the same.

Write up:

Points of Interest and Items map notes:

This is a list of some of the items and points of interest we’ve decided we want in the game, certain items have uses and some are useless, and almost all of the points of interest are from the film and have been left behind from Chuck Noland just slightly altered

Items:
FedEx Debris
FedEx Packages
Wilson
Ice skate
Ice skate spear

Points of Interest:
Tree Statue
Caves
Waterfalls
Cave Paintings
Amelia’s Crashsite
Help Sign
Rivers

FedEx Package Contents:

Useful Packages:

1. Leather Pointed Shoes

2. Walkman and CD’s

3. Playing Cards

4. Arts and Craft’s Kit

5. Ladies Clothing

6. Jar of Boiled Sweets

7. Poncho’s

Useless Packages:

8. Broken GPS (Reference to the director)

9. Smudged – Island Survival for Dummies.

10. Slinky

Western and Eastern Islands:

They will both have small caves inside the rocky outcrop, with an air pocket inside so the player will be able to swim underwater find the entrance and get inside and find certain items inside such as, Mushrooms, Moss and other rare hidden items that could spawn inside a closed of moist cave. The Eastern island will have a FedEx Package inside and the Western island will have a FedEx package just north in between it and the main land.

Amelia Earhart’s plane crash:

Disappeared on June 2^nd 1937 (Age 39) and was announced dead 2 years later, she disappeared over the Howland Island whilst she was attempting the first solo circumnavigation of the globe. Amelia was already renowned for solo flying across the Atlantic Ocean, and she also held many other awards for aviation.

She flew a custom Lockheed Model 10 Electra plane and has had many pictures next to it; her spouse was George P. Putnam.

We’ve decided our island is the perfect location for Amelia’s plane to of crashed on, she will be on the southern island with her plane crashed and she will have died on impact and have all of her equipment left on the southern island, she will be near a FedEx Package.

I plan to do the Wildlife map when Luke's research is completed and the cave systems map on Thursday or before Thursday. At home I'm going to start work on both maps and do some more concept drawings for things we will need to model.

-Adam

Sketchbook update

 I have taken some pictures from the file josh linked in the previous post and printed them out. We then all put the pictures in our sketch books and wrote a brief description of what is in the screen shot and why they are good for us to use as reference.

Here are a couple of the piuctures that all of us stuck in to our sketchbooks.

 -Ryan

Third attempt..

My third attempt at the water, I'm going to leave it for now and work on everything else.

- Josh

First and Second attempt at pixel sea

I started this yesterday morning but forgot to post and then touched it up a bit yesterday night and today, I'm still not 100% happy with it though so I may change it again.


                                                                         First attempt

Second attempt

- Josh

Map continued..

I've fully completed the map now, including a key, scale and a section of information explaining how big each area of the map is individually in length and width. We tested the size of the beach in CryEngine, having one half of the beach as 1 mile long. The results were quite shocking from one end to the other constantly sprinting it took about a day and a half (in-game time) to reach the end. We knew straight away everything had to be scaled down, So we decided if everything got scaled down to about 33% of the original it would probably still be big enough to let the player have enough content, without boring them with constant sprinting.

The map I drew was a basic natural geography map, it shows the size and scale of the map and how the areas are split up and a small section between each area that would be a transition e.g. the beach and jungle we'd have the sand right up to the edge of the trees with some palms coming out onto the beach to not make it look like, there's a block of sand and block of trees. Also some of the rocky areas around the coast of the island have some parts big enough to be explored, I've included three mini-islands one with a small jungle and two with small rock areas that will have caves.

I plan on drawing up another couple of maps, one for points of interest and where key parts of the map will be e.g. a waterfall or a clearing in a jungle, and another for where items and key resources will be, which I will draw in the near future and post here.

-Adam

Developments on Gameplay

We all spoke to Drew on Tuesday (20th Sept), and decided a few things about the game didn't make sense, or just didn't work well enough, so we decided to change a few things. I wrote down notes from the conversation and there is a few things we have definitely decided to change.

Conversation with Drew:

- Change to the main characters story, from a local fisherman on a small trawler because the open sea would be too deep for the size of boat we were thinking about, we've decided to make him a solo sailor circumnavigating the world, he's already been at sea for 90 days, and checks in every 12 hours. A storm hits and the character is swept overboard and his boat carries on the way it was headed and he had only just checked, he had his life preserver on with his basic equipment. After 12 hours passed he didn't check in, but because of how far the boat had travelled in the storm, chance of being found in a search is very low. The main character wakes up being washed upon the shores of the island.

- Basic equipment such as; a Knife, his life preserver, cigarettes, a Zippo Lighter, a GPS, Flare, Glowsticks, Whistle and a Flashlight.

- Coconuts that have fallen from a tree and left out in the sun ferment, and if drank make the player drunk, the more consumed the more drunk the player gets, this will be a good way of teaching the player they have to think about what items they are getting, and how they are using them.

- We want the intellect and originality of the player to be a large part of the game, and make it so if you do something in a clever way, and a way that makes sense it's easier, an example of this would be if a player found out that coconuts ferment, they would know they need fresh coconuts from a tree, so they would have to find a way of climbing the tree to pick the fresh ones out, if they decided to use no items to climb the tree, it could start a mini-game that makes you have to balance, whereas a player that would create a harness some how to support there weight, they would be quickly able to climb the tree with no obstacles.

-Adam

The Map

After Luke drew up the draft map, and we all decided on where everything on the island is from the film, and expanded the island slightly, I took the map home with me to draw up a larger size map (A4).

I've just completed the map, and wrote out the key, all is needed is to decide the scale of the map. I've also wrote notes from all the conversations which I'm going to finish typing up by the early hours of thursday.

-Adam

Goals for Thursday

We've all set some goals for thursday,

Ryan is going to be using the CryEngine to make a mock up of the map or just to practice using the software.

Adam will be re-drawing the map to a larger scale and hopefully type up the notes made in class.

Luke and Josh will be creating ATLEAST 1 piece of pixel art each out of the items we have decided upon.

- The Team

Modelling so far..

I've started modelling the fishing boat that our character would be on in the 3D version of the game, i've pretty much got it finished, just waiting for simon's help.

In the mean time, i've done a few drawings and development sketches and research on how the boat would work and look, I also wrote notes on the 2D side for Luke and Josh.

I'm going to start doing more sketches for the 3D side, and then start modelling some other assets.

-Adam

Sprite Resources

http://gas13.ru/v3/tutorials/sywtbapa_making_fighting_game_sprite.php
http://www.derekyu.com/?page_id=218

Some great resources for character sprites.

- Josh

Notes

Some really rough notes that I took during Thursday and decided I might as well type up, we talk about some of the features we'd like to see in-game.


Some kind of indication for each of these maybe on the UI unless we could think of a smarter way to implement these


Drinking
Seeing hallucinations when you're very thirsty, maybe waterfalls and lakes, unless that only happens with mirages I'm not sure.

Distil seawater by boiling it with a cloth covering the bowl, catching rain water, water springs in caves, coconuts, sucking moss.

Eating

Weaker, not able to perform tasks as fast. This will go down a lot slower than the thirst indicator because a human can survive for around 3 weeks without food {{citation needed}} but water is significantly less.

Crabs, fish, other animals.

Entertainment/companionship/sanity
Get bored if you do the same thing over and over for a long time, using wilson as companionship.

Poisonous spiders that bite you, you have to suck the poision out.
Spider bites can cause weakness, tremors, vomiting, sweating, chills. Depending on what spider
Snake poision can be sucked out in most cases. {{citation needed}}

Cutscenes that show emotion towards Wilson.
Idea: Your character is dreaming about Wilson burning down the shelter? storage? and being a traitor, sabotaging your efforts to leave the island. The scene shows what's happening back in real life and the shelter/storage gets hit by lightning and burns down when your character wakes up he starts yelling at Wilson.

Idea: There is a thunderstorm, rain is hammering down. The camera angle is from the characters eyes he is lying down under a shelter wrapped in something to keep himself warm and he is looking down his body and past his feet to the entrance of the small shelter. Outside in the rain Wilson is sitting in the rain staring at the character it will be made to look like Wilson is cold and unhappy by being left outside, the character will get up and go outside to pick Wilson up to bring him into the shelter where he will wrap tuck him in.

Adam's notes:

Randomized weather conditions, such as a heatwave, rain, snow and hail etc., which would affect the player, such as rain would let the player be able to get more water if they've set-up some sort of water containers outside, and snow may freeze the same water containers if they are left for long periods of time.

Items disappear in natural ways, such as if something is near the coast and it's left for a long period of time will get washed into the sea as an example.

Also the game is set in the Cast away universe, but couple of months after the film was set and Chuck Noland has already left the island, but still left some things there such as the cave paintings, his life raft on the beach and other things from the film.

- Josh and Adam

Cast Away Screenshots

I watched the Cast Away movie and took a few screenies, some of them turned out very well and others not to much. But it's safe to say they'll help a lot with the geography of the island and I can confirm that the island is 600 miles south of the cook islands according to the movie.

There's around 93 I think I rar'd them and uploaded them to mediafire, link should be below.
http://www.mediafire.com/?qbte8sde6q71ewm

Here's 2 or 3 of the ones that turned out fairly well.

- Josh

3D And 2D

3D game- Overall objective, escape the island, survive. Secondary objective general survival and crafting etc. Replayability.

Exploration, multiple ways to complate the game, complexity if wanted.

Genre - First person survival adventure

License - Castaway FedEx and wilson. Cast away made $429,632,142 worldwide FedEx distribution company that is well know. Wilson the brand became more popular because of wilson and even brought out a line of volleyballs.

Target Gamer - People that liked the film, survival genre fans, people who like a challenge and to solve stuff, 19-35 fans of minecraft.

Competition - Minecraft, sims castaway, lost the game.

Unique selling point - Unusual, intelligent crafting system, realist survival.

Target hardware - Target playerbase mostly have an xbox 360 or PS3 when they come home from work they want to sit on the couch to relax and play, PS3 would be able to handle the more complex graphics. Also for the PC version, it will have the complex graphics, better controls and an advanced version of the crafting system, the consoles will have a dumbed down version of the crafting.

2D Game
Player motivations - Satisfaction of completing challenging puzzles, escaping the island
Repeatability, exploration and multiple ways of completing tasks and completing the game.

Genre - Point and click adventure and puzzle game.

License - The same things that were mentioned for the 3D version of the game.

Target customer - 2D fans, Point and click fans, adventure fans, people who like to do puzzles and have a challenge to overcome and for gender and age we thought both genders would be targeted and for the platforms we chose Nintendo Ds would target 12-16 years old and for the pc -16-25.

Competition - Lost in the blue is a similar game so we thought it might be competition, monkey island is a point and click adventure game, machinarium and dream machine.

Unique selling point - It is a old genre but we think we have modernised it a bit and we think the old genre would be a unique selling point also.

Target Hardware - Pc and Nintendo Ds, Ds because puzzle games sell well on the Ds and the touch screen would help the player move around. For the Pc we thought of this because the point and click genre originated from the Pc and a lot of the market is on the Pc because a lot of people grew up with it on the Pc.

If any of you want to make changes to this to make it a bit more clear if needed, feel free to do so.

- Josh, Ryan, Adam, Luke

Parrot

Made a parrot, it took way longer than it should've.

- Josh

First attempt at pixel art

My first attempt at pixel art, when we knew we were doing castaway I tried making a palm tree.

I used this guide, it was incredibly helpful.
http://www.pixeljoint.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=11299

- Josh

Level Design Project is a go.

We began the Level Design project on Tuesday 13th of September, first order of business was to pick a film that we were supposed to design a 3D and a 2D level for, we ended up settling on The Castaway because we thought it could be quite interesting to develop a game based on events that occur after the film took place, we came up with some good ideas and noted them down and i think were planning on watching the Film tomorrow (Thursday 15th September).

- Luke