Animal Frenzy Progress Update

    I thought I'd change this post to an update on how we're getting on since my last Animal Frenzy Progress report as a fair bit has been developed. Basically now we're at the stage where we are starting to create all the assets for the game, which includes more animal vectors, environments, sounds, scripts and any interface elements needed. Each group member is working on a different task, I'm still producing animal vectors as there's still quite a few to do and I've just written a draft version of the script for our Europe level which is what we are all focusing on at the moment. Our milestone at the moment is to have all of the assets ready to go and start scripting by tomorrow, currently we've got enough animal vectors and I've sorted out a task bar for the bottom of the screen which we can use for now as well as the script however I'm not sure whether some of the other assets needed are complete.
    Just referring back the the vectorising process, I'm comfortably bashing them out now, I've got my head round Illustrator and have sort of made a template on how to make them based on what Dan explained to me as well as a few tricks I've figured out in the process. Here are the vectors that I've produced so far which were done in preparation for tomorrows deadline (excluding the whale):

(Click the image for a bigger picture)

    Another aspect of the game that has been sorted since last time is how the animal choices were going to be displayed. We initially had the idea of animal icons but were unsure on how to show them in a way that would be obvious to a player what they were but also without taking up too much screen space. So we discussed the idea of simply having the heads of the animals in small icons so here are a few examples of the icons that may be used. Basically all they are are two different sized/coloured circles with a section of the animal tucked in between. The create the slight border overlap which you can see I just cut a the section of the animal that was overlapping and pasted it onto its own layer on top of the others and moved it about until it lined up. There's probably a better way of doing it without having to do that but it seemed to work ok for now.  If you can figure out what animals they are then I've done my job!

(Click the image for a bigger picture)

    On the level objective/mechanics issue we were having, that has also been resolved. We took a few hours in one of the group meetings to just sort it out once and for all what was going to happen and produced a new level structure. What we came up with was a sort of alternating level objective scheme, where one level would simply be place the animals in their right environment and the next would have an objective which would change the mechanics slightly and with it a new objective. For example putting out a bushfire on the Australia level by clicking on fires to make it safe for the animals before proceeding to start placing them. This reduces the amount of vectorising we previously thought we had to do whilst also keeping the varying level objectives in, it will still be a fair bit of work however on a manageable scale.

    That's really all there is to report, everything's going fairly smoothly at the moment so I can't see any reasons why Team Frenzy won't succeed!