Ideas about levels

PRISON LEVEL
I was thinking about prison walls and how prisoners do engravings either from boredom or from desperation. This may be cool to show like instructions in game or directions where to go. I found this cool 500 year old engraving  from Puerto Rico.

This was scrawled into prison cell wall in 1500's by pirate in Puerto Rico

CHARACTER ANIMATIONS

I was wondering how difficult would be to zoom camera on the character during its animated action (sitting down or being killed). This way it can show nice closeups of the model and make the game more immersive. During those short zooms player would lost control for a couple of seconds.

Thoughts about ninja AI

I was sifting through some online resources about combat AI and of course I found an interesting one from Wikipedia's at Video game combat AI. It looks like the very popular approach is called

HUNTING STATE

• Giving AI character (enemy) eyes and ears - start fighting player when enemy sees or hears him/her approaching (or wait behind some cover object for a player and then jump him/her with surprise attack :-) ), another option would be implementing flash or smoke bombs when enemies eyesight or hearing is impaired
• Enemy can pickup health, guns or other items to utilize
• Enemy can check on its health or other status and behave accordingly (defense, offense, pickup health-pack or search for cover)
•  "Monster infighting" - cool would be to allow enemies fight one another or can be even provoked by the smart player approach ("drag" enemies behind so they converge together)

1st Sprint

QUEST MANAGER
My task was to create a quest manager, something that would manage chaining quests for the game level, popup messages for each new quest, populate the HUD minimap, and let player know that the quests are successfully finished. Blake and Ron were nice and helped me and gave some ideas how to do this.
 
IMPLEMENTATION
I am assuming this QuestManager object will be inside the Level.cs where all items to collect will be available and passed through the quest manager's constructor. I think I have a working skeleton I just need to pull some data from Ron's new Level object to populate collectibles (items to pickup)

PROBLEMS
I am having problem with figuring out what collectibles (items to pickup) are for which quest though. Also I am still trying to understand the code. I was updated on the new ways of doing things in game development. It looks like class inheritance may be replaced with components and factories. 

IDEAS
I am starting getting ideas how things with quests may be simpler but don't know yet how to implement it. For example popup messages and actions when picking up the quest may be automated inside the onCollide method of each collectible item. Then there may be some global listener listening for this collisions and firing (or incrementing some counter for) the next quest and also checking on if this is the last quest.

英語 (ninja)

BACK TO SCHOOL FOR THE SENIOR CAPSTONE PROJECT
So back to school and it is the Spring semester 2013 and the 2nd part of my Senior Capstone project! I just plunged in and was in-grafted to Ninja-Royale team as a programmer. The team is a bunch of EAE students full of great ideas and with a good sense of humor. I promised to do the least damage to their current development :-) and hopefully add some of my things there. This game has its potential it sounds to me like RPG in 3D environment and if there is some interesting storytelling this can be very playable.

I was always interested in old BW Japanese movies about samurais, about quiet men following their codes of honor and combat. Especially how they with a lighting speed, guttural shout, and swishing sound of their samurai sword detach the heads of their enemies :-). Here I found some interesting info about differences between ninja and samurai:

"A ninja (忍者) or shinobi (忍び) was a covert agent or mercenary in feudal Japan who specialized in unorthodox warfare. The functions of the ninja included espionage, sabotage, infiltration, and assassination, and open combat in certain situations.[1] Their covert methods of waging war contrasted the ninja with the samurai, who observed strict rules about honor and combat"
Wikipedia at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ninja






As of now I am trying to catch up with their project they already spent 5 months in.

IMPORTANT INFO
Class page: http://capstone.eae.utah.edu/
Student blogs: http://eae.utah.edu/current-students/undergraduate/
Google group: https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups#!forum/ninjaroyale
Github versioning: https://github.com/
Gitextensions: http://code.google.com/p/gitextensions/
Project tracking: http://www.asana.com