Week the Eighteenth

So, last week, I made mention that there was a bit of a shotgun approach in terms of addressing pieces and parts of the project, and that this week I would have to move back into the more sharply focused attention onto one objective.

And boy did I. This week was all about getting mission 1 out the door, and that is pretty much all I did. At the beginning of the week, I started with three distinct missions that were relatively disjointed. The week was, then, all about making these three missions playable as one mission. This presented a challenge because this was not technically something the game supports out-of-the-box. What this really means was that there was a lot of overhead to address to make sure that the mission came together, far more than just simply polishing and testing it.

Over the course of this week, we managed to address not only the issue of attaching the missions together, but also the issues of recording and adding dialogue, getting new scenery in, setting up working cockpits/gauges for the craft, and getting the working animated models in game. This was all in addition to actually fleshing out the functionality of the mission. It was a lot of work, but we got it done, and I feel pretty good about the end product.

The overview of the mission, then, is this: there are three phases to the mission. In the first phase (which is narrated by the Wright Brothers), the player "flies" an albatross to learn about the principles of flight and learn how to control an aircraft in Flight Simulator. At the end of that phase, there is a short cutscene in which the Wrights talk about adapting the principles of flight to their gliders, and then the game transitions to a scene of them completing their first flight. The second phase of the mission involves the player participating in a fictitious contest to fly a Wright flyer farther than the original Wright flight. After completing that, the player takes control of a later version of the Wright Flyer in an expedition the Wrights put on for a crowd. All in all, the mission takes about 20-30 minutes to play through, and I'm looking forward to seeing what our client thinks about it.