Grimm Journey Old and New

Before logging off for the night I wanted to make one last post and be all reflective. I know what you're thinking "Just finish importing the narration already!" and to that I say, "I'm working on it! GOSH!"

We started this as part of the Ludum Dare 31 game jam. We started with nothing, just a blank screen in Unity. Then we started doing awesome things to it.

I found one of our early GJ pictures and thought it would be neat to compare. Images don't do the functionality justice though. In the old image the giant troll had no movement, the enemies didnt patrol or have much AI. The Big Bad Wolf couldn't attack yet and the Character Swap was a white cube and didn't work properly yet. There were also no victory points. The game had no audio or sound effects.

A Grimm Journey during the Ludum Dare 31 game jam:

The latest commit had all enemies with their attacks / audio. Rob added some great AI and basic pathfinding. I put in out artists assets and created the level animations. Made the pause menu actually work. I added attacks for the Big Bad Wolf and Rob made it possible for the Big Bad Wolf to attack whilst remaining still. We added the Darkness into the game which rises from below the level. Laura grabbed and formatted all our audio and Rob added the audio into the game, with awesome timing on the audio queues. There are many, many other features and bug fixes which slip my mind at the moment.

A Grimm Journey today (commit 3d140fff89)

 

I think that even though we are making slow progress, we are making progress all the same! And I am super proud of what we have managed to accomplish thus far. And things are only getting better! Rob has been working really hard on adding some UI elements into the game (such as health bars) and I have been slowly adding narration and voice acting elements to the different levels, which our designer Laura made. They are really, really awesome and add a lot to the game! Our artist is working on some assets for Robs UI stuff.

Our bug list is looking good with 15 open and 27 closed bugs. I'm gonna post an example below:

 

I think I've finished about 3 games and I have like 6 prototypes/unfinished games. But this is the first game I have worked on that made me feel really good about what we've accomplished. When play testing a build with my girlfriend (its mutliplayer after all) we had so much fun! It was the first time I felt like this was a game and not 'another game project I have to debug and balance'. We all started with nothing and made something that is becoming more and more awesome as we go :D 

To the team - great job guys. Out of all the teams I've worked with, I want to murder you guys the least ;)

 

Grimm Journey Project page

Quick update, to show that I still live!

I refactored the sound manager, in our game into three different ones, and I am in the process on implementing them. Unfortunately as usual my University studies are keeping me pretty busy.

Apart from that I have set up a basic frame work for a project site for our little game project. It is pretty simple, has a few tabs. Currently these read About, Media, Play and Contact. It's not live yet since it still needs to be filled in and I want to grab some art for it to make it look nicer. I also want to set up a different page style as I just use the CSS from my main site at the moment. I am waiting for our artist to get back in touch so I can ask her advice. Will run this by the rest of the team as well.

I think it's important that we have one solid place to show people our stuff. At the moment it's all grape vined through blogs and links and repos. Hopefully this will be a solution and rather than try and explain to people we can just show em :)

Not heard anything from Leftfield peoples yet. Wondering if I should shoot them a mail or not. Will look into this.

That's it for tonight! 
Rob