2010 September | Brandon's Blog

Right now I’m on vacation and we’re driving from New York to Washington DC. I’m just relaxing in the back seat so I figured I could take a few minutes to update you peeps on what I’m up to.

We’re at the tail end of finishing Zinger. I can’t believe we’re the last gamemode to be submitted to Garry, but then again I guess it isn’t that big of a surprise. We have an incredible amount of custom content and we’re also OCD kind of perfectionists. It’s a curse really.

In between our workings on Zinger, we are also revamping an old website and converting it into an HTML5 web app. I don’t want to indulge everyone with all the details just yet, but those of you who use LuaBin will really be excited about this product. It’s going to have a community integrated into it as well… it’s super cool. We’ve already invited a few people into the alpha testing phase and we’ll invite more as we progress.

I’ve also been playing a bunch of games recently, mainly games I’ve owned for a while but never got around to playing.

Oh and I picked up Halo: Reach the other day but haven’t had a chance to play it yet because my Xbox RROD’d right when I put the disc in. No big deal because it’s under warranty. It just gives me more time to catch up on PC games, even though I’ve got a small collection of unplayed Xbox games building up (Reach, Splinter Cell, etc)

Anyway, more to come later…

We’re in the final stretch! I don’t want to say we have a finish date, but we’re close. Here’s a rundown:

Theme, Teams & Colors

We changed the team names and colors and got rid of the silly team flags. No longer is it Red vs Blue, but it has become Purple Bandits vs Orange Sandbaggers. Why the change? Well, we wanted team colors to stand out against the rest of the world easier. Naturally, there are lots of red and blue elements everywhere in the environment and on your HUD. So to help distinguish between everything, we made the team colors completely unique.

But our changes are not limited to team colors. We’ve done a lot of color tweaking in these final step with various color matching techniques. We tried to bring everything together by ensuring we had a consistent pallet throughout the game.

Battle Rules

We implemented something dubbed Battle Rules. Its a way to plug new rules into the game. Think of it like a hook system… sorta. Previously, when a player went through a ring, we called the function GM:RingPassed( ring, pl ) or something like that. Instead of hard coding how that event is handled, we now do rules.Call( “RingPassed”, ring, pl ). The Battle Rules system checks whatever rules have been loaded (they could change randomly each hole if we wanted) and lets it do all the work.

There’s events called everywhere, even in some areas we don’t even currently handle. But down the road if we/someone else wanted to make a new set of rules for the game, they could manage that event. Its pretty sweet.

Statistics

After we got the Battle Rules working, it was really easy to pump in the stats system. All we did was feed every event from the Battle Rules into the stats. If there is a stat handler for the event, it manages the information passed. Pretty cut and dry but it allows us to track everything the teams/players are doing and give some cool bonuses based off the collected data.

HUD

We totally reworked the HUD in this version. In the first revision of Zinger we used monotone colors on the HUD… mainly white. It looked good but it just seemed “unfinished”. We went back and reevaluated the theme and began using some earth tones and it really looked good (not to mention the fact we completely redesigned almost every HUD element).

Then we started to look at how the HUD was arranged and it made us wonder… why don’t we just allow people to arrange it how they like? So we did…

Help

We did manage to work in a fully functional help system. Its 3D->2D based, which means you see the tips in 3D but when you read them they show up in a 2D panel. Some tips will purely be 2D, but we tried adding 3D hints all around the game to help new players understand what’s going on.

More information to come…

Monthly Archive for September, 2010

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