We started Monday, with all the expected introductory talks, a bongo drumming session [rolleyes], and finally a buffet of free food [grin]
At the start of Dare, each team is assigned an international scholar to take part and help with development.
For us, I'd like to introduce Simon from Hong Kong. Simon's a programmer, and will most likely be doing some NPC AI - a little bit dependent on how we work that into our game and level design.
The first week's been expectedly busy. Tuesday and Wednesday we had Instinct Technologies up from Ireland to give us training sessions in using their engine, which we've adopted as the platform for prototyping our game. Their engine is still in beta, and a very lacking in documentation. On the up side, they provide us full proper support, including a support forum for us and the 2 other Dare teams uing their technologies, and later on telephone support for urgent matters. Their training sessions have been most helpful, and the best of luck to them for the upcoming Develop conference in Brighton!
As mentionened (I think), I'll be working on physics and movement for the game. Bringing magnetic ability to the main character, with racing style fast manouvers. The engine wraps around AGEIA PhysX, so anything available there should be easy enough for the engine team to expose. I'm still brainstorming how to implement the character. It has full freedom of orientation, so I'm unsure wether I'll have to write my own character controller, or if I'll be able to extend the one in provided by PhysX.
I'll write something more detailed once I get around to implementing the basics and have a better feel for it myself, but the general idea is you have a humanoid-like robot, with a magnetic ball for legs. You speed around an environment where most buildings have curved edges so you can smoothly manouver around. You can perform jumps, change orientation mid-air and pull yourself towards surfaces, etc. If anyone has any suggestions or experience working with characters and physics, comments are much appriciated [smile]
That's all for today. I'll see if I can get some concept art posted up soon. Something graphic is always good for portraying games and ideas.
