Day three. Wednesday. The middle. The hump. The days with two days either side. Whatever - This is an important day, because it means that time is fast running out for the three teams in the UWE mod-jam. Read about Day 1/Day 2.

Brian watching his newly born AI from a safe distance

All teams are proceeding well. Both the survival and fighter teams did battle with some crashes throughout the day, but had achieved solid stability by nightfall. The fighter team is suffering a little for their choice of genre: Fighting games require precise and rich animation to facilitate gameplay. Creating and hooking up those animations within such a short amount of time is proving difficult. Nevertheless, Fighter is starting to shape up. The combined artistic firepower of Cory and community-artist-extraordinaire Rantology promise spectacular visuals.

The survival team has a poster, which means the mod is pretty much finished.

Speaking of Rantology, the survival team (creating Last Stand) went home around lunchtime. After Rantology created the above awesome poster, they figure there really was not much else to do. Last Stand received full-bore playtesting today. Two maps, Hangar and Pad, have been substantially fleshed out by Olmy and Jonacrab.

An early version of Pad, since updated significantly

At the core of each Last Stand map is an arena in which the marine team fights desperately for survival. Getting this area set up right is crucial to good gameplay, and much time is being spent painting-over and iterating on maps. Dushan has also been working hard on the alien spawn system, which ramps up the strength of aliens over time, even as the equipment, supplies and numbers of the marines dwindle during the round (can you see where this is going?).

Max shows off a very cool new feature: Cameras

Heist is shaping up to be an absolutely intriguing piece of multiplayer gameplay. Today, Max got a cool new feature working: In game cameras. Players can use these cameras to spy on other parts of the map, watching security guards, systems, and even their teammates.

Brian working on scenario design for Heist

 

Today, none of the three team made it to a public release on Steam Workshop. Last Stand did come close, but some last minute version compatibility issues meant it did not run properly on the Steam version of NS2. Tomorrow, some of the mods may start going public. Tomorrow will also mark the last full day before each team must release on Friday. The clock is ticking and there is much to be done!