12/4 Meeting

[christopherspeed]

Basic Agenda just to give some structure

As far as today goes I'm going to list out some goals (some more practical than others), so that we can just get the ball rolling. Fair warning: I'm pretty terrible about underestimating how long things take, so this is more of a wishlist.

Things to accomplish/discuss

1. Settle on an artstyle and theme. We already discussed this at our impromptu meeting on Thursday I believe, but we should try to settle on something definitive today. I'll have some drawings that hopefully will convey what I'm thinking, and if anyone else has time feel free to whip some stuff up. We should discuss how feasible implementing uhhhh... any of our ideas is, and possibly start experimenting with threejs' built-in shaders during the meeting to see what we can accomplish. Maybe one person can work on that while the others do something else.
2. [this one is definitely a stretch] Get a basic first person camera and movement setup working. No collisions, no gravity, no nothing. Just simple WASD movement confined to a plane, with camera movement. We probably can look at the example threejs projects and the code for the orbit camera to get something working. Since it seems like the car idea will be an extension/constraining of a basic FP movement system, this seems like a good place to start.
3. Look at the Glider writeup to see their approach to handling collisions, and discuss. It seems like we'll need to implement a custom (likely raytracing-based) system if we want to fulfill the "collision detection" requirement, rather than make use of threejs' existing solutions. Looking at the slides from precept is also likely a good starting point. Another person can possibly start playing around with the raycasts, and implementing some conditional logic, etc. to understand what those methods will allow us to do.

Final Note

I'm sorry for springing this on y'all, but I think we really need to start moving, and this agenda hopefully encompasses at least some of what we need to get moving for our MVP. I don't know how feasible it is to have our MVP kinda done ahead of Thursday's presentation (not at all, lol, wtf am I saying), but if we can have a solid plan and some stuff done for when we create our elevator pitch I think we'll be in okay shape.

[Ryan-Gibbons]

ARTSTYLE AND THEME

ATMOSPHERE:

• Urban hell
• Dusk
• View distance

VIEW ELEMENTS:

• Car HUD
• minimap
• best time stats on car dashboard
• funny road signs
• some road signs corresponding to future hazards

GAME CONCEPT

• Fog chasing player
• gas collectible pickups
• fog rises, upward movement in ascending chunks
• difficulty scaling: frequency of gas/obstacles, pace of fog rising/approaching
• obstacles: tree branches, potholes, rock slide, sharp turns, etc.
• more damage to car -> handles worse, less speed
• people standing in the road
• forks in the road