Happycake Development Notes
The Project
The Happycake project is done now. Here's a summary of the game taken from the design document:
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A group of mech-style robots, varying in size (from twice human size, up to about 100 feet tall for the master robot) are moving across the terrain to attack a human city. When they get to the city, they will destroy it. The players are humans trying to halt this attack. The robots are generally too big and well-armored to be destroyed outright, so the humans must focus their weapons on soft points like the robots' joints. The goal is to damage and destabilize the robots enough that they fall. Secondary attacks should play a large role, such as blocking or tripping robots with other fallen robots, or knocking heavy pieces of the environment onto the robots to damage them. Robots attack players with ballistic weaponry, and also try to crush players beneath legs and wheels. |
(Unfortunately, some aspects of the design document are secret so I can't post the whole thing.)
Other people involved with the game were: Atman Binstock as the other main
programmer; Jennifer Estaris in a production role; Ethan Abramson, Clay Sparks,
Matt Vitalone, Jorge Hernandez, and Peter Kim doing the various kinds of visual
art; and the folks at dSonic doing audio.
Development Log Entries
Final Notes (11 November 2005)
Smoker, new Roller (14 February 2005)
Retextured Big Robot, Specular Map Tests (10
February 2005)
Normal Mapping In-Game (4 February 2005)
Normal-Mapped Robot Renders (31 January 2005)
Rough Demo Movies (11 November 2004)
Sparkimus Prime (9 November 2004)
HDR, Audio, Many Buildings (6 November 2004)
More Shadows, Buildings, Translucency, Geforce
FX6800 (1 October 2004)
Player, City Assets (23 September 2004)
Player Mesh, Rockets (30 August 2004)
Materials (28 August 2004)
Shadows (26 August 2004)
Character Concept Art (11 August 2004)
Further City Concept Art (25 July 2004)
City Jam, Day 2 (21 July 2004) (updated
22 July 2004)
City Jam, Day 1 (20 July 2004)
City Concept, Hexapod (1 July 2004)
Vehicle Concept Art (29 June 2004)
Rough-Draft Vehicle Designs (25 June 2004)
If you'd like to understand where the name Happycake comes from, you can watch this video (though be warned, it's over 100 megabytes).
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