Introducing...

The Emo-unicorn!

He's now been handed off to Tom for rigging and animating, so hopefully we'll see him in action before too long.

One thing we're still not sure of is how he should attack, we have 3 options. Should he shoot a rainbow out of his:

• Horn
• Mouth
• Bum

Answers in the comments or on twitter please.

Emo-Unicorn's Castle

Above you can see the asset set we'll be using for our first level, the home of our Emo-unicorn. This is just a quick layout to get scale right and see how everything fits together, but soon we'll have it ingame and will modify the layout for gameplay.

The unicorn prince is a spoilt brat who lives with his royal parents in what can only be described as a bloody huge castle. Since he turned 13 he started listening to the kind of music that makes the Beatles cry and subsequently decided that he wants to be more alternative, hence the half-pipe and ridiculous Hifi his parents have bought for their heir. The usually well behaved prince was left home-alone (apart from the 234 live in staff) when his parents went on holiday to Nania and he decided to hold a party, unfortunately this party was gatecrashed by various evil doers, and now a fight has broken out. A fight which you must win.

Here are some closeups of some of the assets:

Shark Animations!!!!

Introducing RoboShark!

RoboShark's goal is to infiltrate the human world by creating the perfect land suit so no one will suspect that he is from the sea. However, this isn't easy as he has a huge blue head full of evil teeth and has to shower every 10 minutes.

BEWARE!

He is very resourceful with disguises and can blend into any environment, he may even be standing next to you right now!!!!

Develop-online

This morning we woke up to find a feature on Develop-Online about all the Dare teams, which you can find here.

We will be writing a 500-800 word article about our game which will be published around the 16th July so keeps your eyes open for that.

We're nearly at the stage now where we have something properly playable which will be a huge relief as so far we've had nothing to really show for our efforts apart from art assets and lots and lots of C++.


Edit:

The blog is now online and can be seen at:
http://www.develop-online.net/blog/135/Dare-Blogs-Bears-with-Jetpacks

The Scuttle!

As promised, here is our much beloved Cannon Crab scuttling around. You will usually find the Cannon Crab loitering outside Seafood restaurants, attacking any customer who orders crab sticks or doesn't tip properly.

Promotional Stuff

Today we had to submit our material for the Protoplay program. This consisted of a 100 word summary of our game, a 10 word tagline, and an image to represent us.

Above you can see our final image, although we decided to go with a slightly less racy tagline:

Fuzzy, Huggable, Jet-propelled Fury

after all this will be read by (hopefully) hundreds of children, and we'd rather not be the source of all those awkward conversations with their parents.

Our 100 word prasie was just a re-work of our existing 150 word summary on the team-page on Dare.

Grrr! is an easy to pick up, 2-player, action strategy game.

Choose a squad from a cast of quirky fantasy characters to do battle

with your opponent. Start the fight on one of the vibrant and dynamic

maps, trying to destroy your opponent’s squad before losing you own.

Use the Wii-remote to send commands to each of your characters,

telling them to move, attack and take cover as you try to outmanouver

and outgun your enemy in a battle to the death.

Matches are played in a best-of-3 system, with each round taking

around 60 seconds. 

Progress has been good; the first environment is nearly done and all the characters are ready to get going in-game as soon as we integrate all our engine chunks together. The engine is progressing well with stuff moving around controlled by the Wii-remotes and realtime shadows rendering as they go. We're still on course for our week-4 deadline so hopefully this time next week we'll have our first gameplay video for you to watch.

It was Stefan's birthday on Sunday so we all went out to Dundee's premier steakhouse on Satuday night and tackled the 18oz T-bones. Fantastic meat, but it meant we couldn't even touch his birthday cake until Monday as we were all in bed with meat comas and hangovers after the subsequent house party.

2nd week in the bag

So we've now reached the end of the 2nd week, it's been tougher than week one, and the initial honeymoon period has ended leaving us all a bit knackered, but still enjoying ourselves. We're still loving Dundee, it's a great city with everything within walk of our accomodation. We've also discovered a few beaches nearby and a football pitch just up the road, so can hopefully get some sun during the weekends to try to counteract the vitamin-D deficiencies I'm sure we'll all be suffering from soon.

Progress has been good on all accounts, with the pathfinding and event management systems working, and 2 wii-remotes working simultaneously on the same machine, moving pointers around the screen. Art wise, 3 characters are now modelled and textured, with 2 of them rigged and the animations started on one, so we can start to see how the game is going to look, fairly exciting stuff.

Below (and at the top) are some renders of our characters in their current states. It remains to be seen how well they fit with our environments, so they could end up looking pretty different to this if they don't fit in (or fit in too well). The small images are around the size we expect to see them finally on screen (when viewed on our monitors) so getting the silhouettes right has been something we've really worked on. Each character has to be immediately recognisable as we can't have the player getting confused during a game, we only want 2 emotions during our game; excitement, and the pure unadulterated fear of losing to your mate.