Plan for Cory Osborn

IGDA, Zelda-style Target-locking, Melee Combat and other goodness

Lots of things going on and I can see the start of great things for me. Last night I attended the monthly meeting of the Phoenix IGDA chapter. I had met the chapter's coordinator at the GDC and I'm glad I did. Not surprising is the fact that probably 75% percent of the attendees are students because they alternate meetings between the Art Institute of Phoenix and the University of Advancing Technology which both have Game Design/Programming programs. Some may see this as a downside because you are not able to talk with too many people who have actually produced games. I see this as a positive because it gives me the opportunity to find artists that are eager to build a portfolio and work on projects such as my own. Having the Art Institute connection, I can actually work with the school to bring on interns from their game design program - the students get course credit, additions to their portfolio, possible royalties, and I get low-cost content creation. Sounds like a win-win situation to me.

On my own development progress, I thought I'd show off a small movie that shows off RW Melee combat combined with Zelda-style target locking and a true 3rd person camera, so here you go:
DivX 5.1 AVI | Windows Media.

Since, this is a .plan and not a .report, I better lay down where I'm going now.

First off, I'm meddling with my camera code so I can handle better transitions between modes. Right now it "pops" between positions too much.

From there I'm going to try to improve on the melee implementation. It seems like the RW resource makes too many script calls when nothing is happening (every tick if you're holding a melee weapon). Plus I need to have some animations for the shield to have a "defense" posturing.

Once those are there, its on to AI and having some of the bots actually fighting back.

Until next time,

Cory