My time working on final project is just about complete. Our game, Beatdown, is done - all that remains is to actually present the game to everybody and their friends/families (wednesday) and archive the game.

Archiving involves cleaning up any small remaining glitches and printing out the ENTIRE game bible: all the gameplay and technical documents and ALL of the source code is printed out and bound into the game bible. We also get a printed CD for the game as well.



Gameplay video of me (player 1) getting whooped by our AI (player 2)
http://binarydemons.com/~strike/files/beatdown_gameplay.wmv (30 sec, 5.3mb)


Screenshot of one of E-Liz's special moves

Damn, you got owned.

I remember this. Cool! I'll play it in a bit!

How, Zloc? He never gave us a link to download it

he'll play, of course... THE VIDEO

One day we are all gonna be wondering where you went. Only to have on eof your games released the next day and have our socks rocked off.

During the video, the light seems to randomly switch on and off. Is this a recording error, intentional, or a bug?

Surely you could've gotten a girl who would sound at least a bit more spirited. >_>;;

Not bad though, other than that lighting issue. Probably plays better than your average MK methinks.

Nevermind, I thought he linked to a copy of the game or something, not a video.

The lighting is a bit screwy in general. The game is cel-shaded which turned out to be a huge performance hit (the slowest calculation in the game).

Why? We are doing the cel-shading in software. Well, why in software instead of using a blazing fast shader? There are arcade machines here at Full Sail that students are able to put their final projects onto, and unfortunately even though the arcade machines have pretty decent specs, they amazingly don't support vertex or fragment shaders

So not only does the cel shading look a little crappy, it's a big performance penalty - especially when multiple lights come into play. We're using multi-pass rendering to draw the cel shaded entities (the level is textured and not cel shaded). Initially we render a black silhouette of the character then use additive blending to render the cel-shaded character over the silhouette; once per light. So as you can imagine, for every light we toss in the game the framerate drops.

Another disadvantage with our less-than-par rendering system is the light's inability to be colored or even have a range or intensity. Yup, you just drop in a position light or two and there are no other parameters to set.

The 'lighting glitch' is not so much a glitch; The fireball attack has a light attached to the fireball, which of course is destroyed when the fireball is blown up. This is probably the lighting issue you were referring to.



The game really doesn't look all that great, in terms of visual appeal. I guess the audio isn't terrific as well (the team agrees with those of you who said the girl's voice sucked.. she is the wife of the sound asset guy lol). We recieved a bunch more dialogue from her that we didn't even plug into the game simply because it was that annoying to listen to.



I gaurantee that any future projects from me are going to have a much higher grade of visual quality


Hopefully, that promise will be delivered sooner than later. I am officially done with Full Sail in just a matter of a week or two, and after some car repairs I'll be moving up to Vermont for several months; probably working at a sandwhich shop and spending the rest of my time developing an impressive and [hopefully] polished game to append to my resume before embarking on the real job hunt. I won't leak the game idea I'm cooking up for this personal project just yet, however.