Planning the race track's map | A romp with Kismit | Incredible news from The Land of Clam Chowder

 Because ALL racing should be this epic!

God, I love that scene..

Alright! So, my class is doin' a jungle theme that can best be described as James Cameron's Avatar with a red/gold color scheme and 1940's equipment.

The color palette.

Lots of little glowing fungi.

Vietnamese temples.

These elevated yurt huts.

That lovely era of aviation that evoked the spirit of adventure!

With this in mind, I built an extremely rough outline of the track:

Don't worry if you don't get what's on this paper, it's chicken scratch; it's supposed to only make sense to me!

Basically, I narrow down an idea of what the track would look like. If you've ever played ModNation Racers, it's like when you first pave the track's basic shape.

An orthographic view!

From there, I realized I'd never be able grasp what the player would be experiencing on the track so, I created an extremely simple level layout in Maya:

 ...and got it somewhat playable in UDK:

With Notes!

I also added a really quick bit of concept art:

Because UDK doesn't come with a 1940's cargo plane, or huts..

So basically, you start the race on a mesa plateau, speed off into a winding jungle to come across a temple entrance which you, of course, enter. Crossing an old bridge, you drift around the temple's main atrium to come across an abandoned cargo plane wreck from the 40's. You then proceed to race up a tree vine into the plane and come racing out of the back onto a treehouse settlement from long ago. Bouncing from one to the other, you make your way back on the mesa plateau you started on.

I'm worried that I over-scoped. If needed, I'll trim it down in some places, but for now this is what I've got! Also, we were told that the textures had to look hand-painted so it's probably gonna look like a beta WOW racing game, lol.

IN OTHER NEWS...

IIIIIIIITTTTSSSS... KISMET!!!

Kismet is.. actually a lot of fun! It's a lot like playing Pokemon; You have a lot of different characters that, if you know how to use correctly, you can use together to create something that is Super Effective in the game!

Here's a pic of the level that uses that Kismet:

Don't worry, It's supposed to look like that!

A top-down view!

Bascially, you walk through the gate, which opens and shuts behind you. Then, you press a button on the wall a few times with increasingly irritated prompts. Then, the lights flicker on, the camera pans to a robot taunting you, pans to a rocket launcher upgrade that appears, and pans back to the player. From there, you get to fight the robot! There was more I wanted to do with this demo, but it would require me to go under the hood of UDK and create custom code. So, for now I'll let it be.

The other Kismet system I made was far easier to create: A spike pad death demo!

Basically, drive forward, shoot off of a ramp, and get killed instantly by a spike trap! All ya really need to make is the spike trap:

Yup, that's pretty much it.

 Lastly...

This bit of info seems to have slipped a lot of peoples minds about this years GDC (Game Developer's Conference) and my inner fanboy is screaming: Yu Suzuki is doing a post-mortem on Shenmue!! http://www.gdconf.com/news/yu_suzuki_revisits_shenmue_in_.html

If you don't know anything about Shenmue, well, besides being one of three Dreamcast games featured at the Smithonian's "Art of Video Games" Exhibit, it's a BFD in the SEGA fandom that SEGA hates talking about. So, to avoid tripling the size of this post, I'll just direct you to the Shenmue Dojo to browse at your leisure: http://shenmuedojo.net/

Now, this wouldn't have impressed me on it's own. What impressed me is who is going to be his translator: none other than the lead architect for the PS4, Mark Cerny! You see, SEGA usually just hires a professional translator when their Japanese employees have to go international, like at Summer of Sonic or Sonic Boom, so why specifically Mark? I know they are close friends and it would be very likely that both would be attending the event..

Still, with the history of this game, I'd be surprised if something wasn't up.

Regardless of what happens, I'll be watching the livestream in March on GameSpot.com! (And my school gives me acess to the GDC Vaults! Haha!)

Welp, that's about it for now! I'll post again when I have more progress to report on!

Until next time! ;D
(Awesome musics be here)