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    Project Spark

    Game » consists of 11 releases. Released Oct 07, 2014

    A free-to-play content creation sandbox game where players can generate their own miniature games, for the Xbox One, Xbox 360, and PC.

    Project Spark - Pax Dev Team Stream(56k warning)

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    AlexGlass

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    #1  Edited By AlexGlass

    Alright another 1 hour stream. After messing around with Kodu, they are a lot easier to keep up with for me but they go over stuff so fast, I'm posting overviews and screens of these, especially for those of you that don't want to sit through the entire thing. I highly recommend downloading and playing around with Kodu from Microsoft Research Fuse Labs in the mean time though. It's a very lite version of this mainly geared towards kids and it's free but still pretty cool to play with. It's available on 360 as well.

    -First thing's first.With a bit of a workaround using timers and musical notes, they had people able to reproduce the Star Wars theme. They go on to say "Now all bets are off that you can record your own audio with Kinect." Sweet! Though I would prefer to be able to just upload sound samples in mp3 or some other format, as I'm not sure about the quality by using Kinect.

    -They first go over custom world creation. Instead of just starting with an empty canvas you can set a few parameters and it randomly generates a starting world. If you know what type of game you're going to make, it allows you to pick a default character and viewpoint, like first person shooter, action adventure, isometric shooter, etc. This is particularly useful to just quickly try out certain ideas and not have to start from scratch every time, or if you don't have ideas, you can create this random world and begin editing from a starting point.

    -They go over again the level creation tools, which include Expand, Add, Smooth, Plateau and Cubify. They demonstrate the ease of creating flat and winded terrain at different height levels. They also demonstrate the Biome tool for adding random environment objects. They demonstrate the material swapping tool, which also works for Biomes. Basically it selects a connected portion of your world painted with 1 type of material, and allows you to swap for another. Similar to the magic brush in Kodu for those that are familiar.

    -Ok now on to one of the most important part. Character customization. They mention this is more of a "sneak preview" not the full editor.

    -Female, and male characters supported, multiple outfits to start off with, etc.

    Some of the different chest outfits currently shown for this male character:

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    Love the fact they support RGB numbered color codes so we can just type them in as well as an alpha transparency slider. The helmet had about 3 color customizable sections.

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    You can color customize 9 different pieces of just the chest piece on this particular outfit.

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    Ok well if this is the sneak preview then it's a great start. This was my most pressing concern. If they allow this type of color scale for other objects and terrain materials as well, then this game is going to be awesome. So even if they won't let you make custom textures, giving us the ability to use custom color scales on the textures already available would provide enough variety for me to start off and take it seriously. If they also provide basic flat texture palettes similar to Kodu with no designs at all and just flat shaded materials with this type of custom colorization then you could basically create any type of unique cartoon or colorful world. It would be nice though if they also include just basic, noise, bumps, cloud, textures without any of the styling we have seen so far to really open it up. That along with colorization should allow you to get all kinds of unique looks.

    They decided to make a bee colored-themed minigame. So they colored the diki bird and gave it a brain and set its damage values(looks like they're split up in light, medium, heavy each with their own value meters). The brain included the instructions to fly, detect and attack the troll until it destroys it.

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    I took some screens of some different dials to show some of the features and how it works and expands, but they turned out to be a bit hard to make out so I wrote them out underneath. Those of you who used Kodu before should find some of these familiar. This one appears to be one of the main dials, if not the starting dial:

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    -Objects, Values, Movement, Combat, Positioning, Brain Flow, Controls, Create.

    This is a subset of the Movement tile, so it opens up after selecting Movement on the first dial. Note the pitch, roll and yaw options for flying games or enemies.

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    -Move, Turn, Jump, Yaw, Pitch, Roll, Fall(?), Movement Event

    Subset of the Move:

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    -Modifiers, Objects, Positioning

    Subset of Modifiers:

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    -at speed, towards, away from, in direction, with flying, with strafing, with swimming, forward and backward

    Subset of At Speed:

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    -left and right, up and down, directly, on land, max distance, min distance, on path, on relative path

    Each time you select a tile, when you click the plus sign, it brings up another dial with a different subset of tiles that are allowed for that selection. And you just simply go down the line.

    Similar to Kodu Project Spark has the very powerful "Create" tile, which allows you to instruct the game, game characters or objects, to basically create an object or another character you created or customized.

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    So you can program it to spawn custom objects or characters with custom A.I. In this case, they actually assigned the create function to the Y button, so when they press the Y button it creates a Dikie bird. They ended up actually creating a swarm of bees that attack the troll every time you push Y.

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    -In addition to a much bigger programming tile set than Kodu, they have in fact added tiles to give you the ability to actually begin programming various math and trigonometry functions.

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    -camera, items, physics, interface, appearance, math, interactions, power

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    -set, trigonometry, functions, negative, square root

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    -sine, cosine, tangent, arcsine, arcosine, arctangent

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    -toggle, absolute value, floor, ceiling, round, sign

    Physics:

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    -push, colidable, velocity, gravity factor, density, mass, bounciness, friction (Not seeing acceleration...it better be in there somewhere. Perhaps under velocity.)

    -You can have hundreds of pages of code. Combined with the above, it looks like Project Spark will really allow you to put together some very complex programming, if you decide to get ambitious.

    -They show off their coin brain and meteor shower again, and point out the fact the falling rocks are programmed to actually deform and destruct the terrain.

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    -Then they take it a step further and change it from a rock based meteor shower to kamikaze flaming birds meteors!

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    -Yes, you can control multiple characters, or at least in this case clones. This one was done using the Create tile to spawn multiple copies of the main character every time his punch lands a hit...It ended up growing exonentially and if you keep punching you're going to create so many clones you could very easily crash it. So yes, you can create programming that can crash your engine if you so desire :) Which is awesome. If you haven't crashed it, you aren't trying hard enough!

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    -Similar to Kodu's resources meter, there is a prop count, or object count and the limit is currently around 3000-4000 but it varies depending on the type of props. They are not done optimizing it.

    -They go over some of the physics properties panel and adjusted the gravity for the boulder. (And of course some of these settings can be tapped into with programming and function tiles from above. So they can be dynamic, in-game, adjustable and programmable variables. Gravity guns, tractor beams, portals.... Imagine the possibilities!)

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    -They go over the hover/fly tile.

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    -And eventually create a Space Harrier clone out of it.

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    -They demonstrate level linking. Very easy and pretty much like Kodu. You can just program it to move on to the next level virtually anytime or anyway you wish with the use of a simple tile. When an object is detected. When an objective is met. When you destroy something. Etc. They mention that by default they don't bring characters/objects across but they are working on ways of allowing you to do that as well as check points, hubs, overworlds, but are not ready to unveil all of it. I know even Kodu has score persistence from one level to another so they should have similar features.

    Some of the overworlds examples the devs put together:

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    -Next, they demonstrated a Shadow of the Colossus inspired level called Bone Dragon. The snake body was made out of about 100 spheres or rubber balls. They designed so you would have to destroy the fins on his back individually, before defeating the snake.

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    -You can change the color and size of fonts as well as define the placement of UI elements like life bars, score placement, etc.

    -You can also change the entire color scheme of your world by using the color correction setting and adding various filters and hues. In Kodu even some of these are programmable so I imagine the same case here, where you can program your world lighting, sun, etc to change dynamically in the game.

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    -First person shooters games will allow you to display the weapon.

    -The final thing they showed was that you can use the time factor tile to do slow motion.

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    Blu3V3nom07

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    Fucking cool.

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    ll_Exile_ll

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    People still use 56k?

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