Assigning of Things!

This week we assigned the various aspects of our project to the team members who will do them. It was particularly exciting because not only did I get the parts I wanted to do, nobody else even wanted to do them! (Maybe that should have been a hint?) Either way, I was assigned to work on Tower Design and Level Design for the Tower Defense Game. Designing environments is one of my favorite things to do in video games and I believe that I will be able to do some really awesome things for the maps in our game. (I mean, there has to be some benefit to having played Minecraft for 10+ years, right? …..right?)

Other than that, we were not able to do much for the project this week. Unfortunately, our meeting with the project sponsor got rescheduled to do some communication errors, so we wont be meeting with him until tomorrow.

I am very excited about Halloween this coming weekend. My costume is a Ring Wraith from Lord of the Rings. So I hope to be able to go out and be spooky! Happy Halloween!

Blog Post #4!

That is a rather boring title to the post and that’s because nothing much of note happened during the past week in relation to the project. The team collectively completed a very long and slightly boring document detailing our plans and how we will accomplish them. Many of the questions were not intended for a game design project, so we had so sort of make some of it up. Otherwise, we are currently in the middle of deciding the overall theme for the game, whether it be Medieval, Sci-fi, Western, etc. We hope to have this narrowed down by next Monday. This will be exciting because once we have chosen a theme, I can start to experiment with blender and see what I can do in terms of creating our own assets for the game. This will be a huge deciding factor in how our development goes and whether we can implement some of the things we want to. That is pretty much all I have to say for this post, and I still am so excited to be working on this project! Looking forward to coming Halloween in a week or so as well! 🙂

Project Ideas Coming Together

This week marked the first video meeting between the whole group as well as the first meeting with the project sponsor, our instructor. We were able to introduce ourselves and I was right that the whole group seems to get along together really well. We talked about what we wanted from the project and threw together ideas until we had something of a rough outline.

We came up with the idea of a somewhat double sided tower defense with a top down approach. Normally only the player has towers and something to defend, however in our game we wanted the enemy side to also have a base and be able to place towers to defend it. This will end up something similar to a tower-defense capture-the-flag game. This rough outline will be the basis for our future design. We have started talking about the art style for the game and what we want to go with. Creating our own art assets would be difficult for the majority of the game and so our best approach will be to find an art style we like and making our own assets to supplement it.

The project is slowly coming together and we have a solid idea of what the game will be.

First Days of the Project

The instructors were able to assign us to groups this week and so I got to meet the people I will be working with along with the project we will be doing. I am excited, as I was able to get the number one project I had listed, which was “Build a Top-Down Shooter/Tower Defense in Unreal Engine 4”. This project sounded really interesting to me as I have experience in UE4 but I have never gotten to actually make a game. I am excited to get a small idea of what game dev is actually like and what it entails.

My teammates so far are very friendly and everyone seems to get along quite well. Ian Gaither is one of my teammates and he has been doing a great job leading the project and communicating with the professor on our behalf. Then we have Brian who also seems very nice and motivated to work on the project. And finally there is Satoru, who actually has some experience in AI, which will be very useful for the type of game we plan to make.

This week we will be going over ideas for the project and deciding what type and style of game we wish to make. Our inspiration is “Orcs Must Die” however we want to make sure to differentiate from that and incorporate more Tower Defense style in order to make something unique. Overall, I am very excited to work on this and I think the following year is gonna be really helpful in gaining experience. 🙂

Capstone Start! – First Blog Post

Hello World! This is the first post of my blog for the OSU Capstone project! My name is Colin Kasowski, an online Game and Simulation CS student here at Oregon State University, These first posts will chronicle my experience going through the capstone project and documenting my likely panic about it. Outside of school, I am a 2nd Degree Black Belt in the martial art of Taekwondo and I train and teach classes at my local Taekwondo dojang. (Or at least I did, before Covid). I hope that I can track the world getting back to normal through the course of this blog and that by the end, I can reflect back with a smile on the things I have been through. Thanks for reading and I hope you enjoy. 🙂