Final Stages

Final aspects of the game have come together and it all looks great. The flash HUD that I worked on this week has been completely finalized and works to perfection. The timer was surprisingly pretty easy to integrate and interact with UDK from flash. The fuel gauge for the weapon ammo information was a tedious task, but causing it to scale required some research through old files from previous work.
The most troubling thing to work with was the score aspect of the HUD. Calculations and increments were working fine on the player's HUD, but I was having trouble carrying that score over to the other flash file that opens up after the time expires. I finally resolved the issue by incorporating the final flash file and the HUD into the same file which made carrying over the variable data much easier.
We could have added some more elements such as more bugs, but it came to a time where we just had to stop. Another issue that I regret not researching more and resolving was increasing the amount of points each bug rewards the player with. In the current version, all bugs just reward the player with one point.
All in all, the game turned out pretty well and I'm extremely happy with the final build of the game. Xtreme Xtermination is one for the books now!

Finalized Production...One More to Go!

This week I finalized production on my level that I've been working on. Had to add some last finishing touches to really make the level playable and interactive. I incorporated some AI scripts for the enemies in the level. So now they don't just stand there. If you happen to get near them, then you will get hurt and getting surrounded by three or four enemies is not a good idea.
Also added in my own weapon. I created a model of a pistol in 3DS Max and imported it into UDK. After adjusting some scripts files, I have my own weapon in the level now as well. Along with my own weapon, I've also imported a custom vehicle into the level as well. I had some issues with the wheels for the vehicle for a bit but that was easily solved by changing the rotation axis.
After all of that, the game was ready to be packaged and set up as an executable. It has officially been finalized and everything is complete. I can always go back and add/delete things, but for now, this level is complete.

As for Xtreme Xtermination, production is now being 100% focused on all team members. We've divided up the work to get the Alpha build ready for Tuesday June 12. I have lots of work to do for the main menus, restart screen and the HUD. Flash here I come.....

UDK Mod? No, this is my OWN creation

We're trying to tear ourselves away from just modding UDK to giving our level our own look and feel instead of what UDK provides. That involved some of our own menus, scripts, game-types, audio, and camera set ups is what will help us achieve that.
Creating a menu for the level proved harder that I thought, as far as creativity goes. I didn't want just the title of the game and some plain buttons, but also a graphic or more interactivity for the user. In the end I sort of settled for just that, the title of the game and some buttons. It had been a while since I worked with flash and scaleform menus so it was a good refreshment for me in that area. The incorporation and implementing the UDK and flash "handshake" was relatively simple to set up.
The game type and camera scripts that needed to be set up were simple to use, but hard to turn into my own. For the camera scripts, I had trouble trying to set it up to my own third-person view. The rotation of the camera wasn't being handled correctly and I eventually found out that I was using the wrong variables to tweak its location. The audio scripts are the only ones left to customize for me.
As a designer/programmer modeling isn't something I'm great at, but that's what is expected of me this week. We have to start creating some of the enemy models for our level and I've been tasked with the stage one level enemies: ants and cockroaches. This is going to be fun...