Week Twelve
Monday 17th May
Team Meeting
This afternoon we had a quick team call to discussed an opportunity Emilia had come across where we can submit our work as a team into a competition run by Adobe called the Adobe Digital Edge award. It was nice to talk to the team about something a little bit exciting to look forward to because I know we have all been feeling very stressed in the last weeks leading up to the deadline.
​
During this call I also shared my screen to show the rest of the team the progress I had made in the unity build. I played through the full game for them to see how each of the puzzles were functioning and it was an opportunity to get some feedback too. At this point almost everything had been put into the game. I had not yet got the panpipe puzzle functioning or the lantern system and the lighting had not yet been implemented by Molly. But the rest of the puzzles were in and for the first time they got to see the new process for how the bridge puzzle worked. It got the whole team excited about the game being playable and finally all coming together.
​
I did make a request for some feedback from the rest of the team but there were no suggestions, everyone was happy for me to just continue getting it all done. Charisma asked if the lantern system was going to be put in and I assured her that all the features would be there. I also explained the plans for the next few days, being that Emilia and I were working hard on making sure the composition of the surrounding game world was sound and beautiful and as soon as Molly had put the lighting in there would be another update.
Wednesday 19th May
Final Development Surgery
Todays development session with James is the last one before we hand in the vertical slice tomorrow evening. My aims for this session were to ask James to show me how to implement the different types sound we had ready to put in and how to put in a functioning start screen and other UI.
​
We achieved both of those things during the session and on top of that, we created a beautiful final scene to see the player off at the end of the game. The player takes the final courageous leap off the final floating platform but rather than just descending and the game fading to black, the Shaman is carried away into the distance on a floating cloud. It was a really lovely addition to make to the game and was a more appropriate end for a game that promises an experience of beauty and tranquility.
​
The plan for UI was to implement a start screen, prompts for new players on how to play and what the objective are, pause and setting screens and a final end game scene. However after discussing these intentions with James, he let me know that this was not in fact necessary for the vertical slice so not to bother. I do agree that the extra UI is not essential but initially thought that they really were requirements.
​
The development notes in detail can be found in my blog post titled Development Surgery 19/05. And here is a summary of what was implemented during that session:
- Start screen with play button
- Soundtrack and boulder thump sound effect
- End scene; CloudFloat script and particle system experiment
- Placement of tutorial UI
​
Wednesday 19th - Thursday 20th May
Final Changes
The day is Wednesday the 19th of March, one day before the vertical slice hand-in. The game is complete; all the features we planned to include in the project scope are in and functioning, except the few that James deemed unnecessary. Those being the extra UI. There was also a problem today where the jump animation was not functioning but the jump still looks smooth and normal without the animation playing so I did not stress too long trying to fix it.
​
The final changes we made were creating the surrounding game environment with blossom trees, clouds, Japanese huts, Torri gates and mountain scapes. These were all original assets developed by the Anima Mundi team and were implemented during a session with Emilia and I. This is documented in Unity Development Post Part 13. As time was cut close for this piece of work, I decided not to incorporate parallax scrolling as we planned to. The sky as a constant does support parallax view in a way but there just was not time to separate layers of the background to make a fully functioning parallax scroller.
UI
Arrow keys
More UI designs, by Charisma
Pause and setting screen pop-ups
Charisma worked hard to develop UI, firstly designed for mobile devices and secondly for PC, to prepare for the arcade event at the end of the project. During my development session James, I was told not to implement the UI, other than the start screen and tutorial prompts because they were not necessary. However, it was still good for Charisma to take the time to do them and for us to see what they would add to the game. We decided as a team that the rounder icons were best for the abilities, consistent with the round movement arrows. It was kept minimum as we realised as a team that for our game we did not want to clutter the screen with unnecessary/non-essential details and take away from the experience and beauty of the game.
User Manuals
User manual volume 1, my feedback and user manual volume 2 created by Daniella. When assigning this task, I gave Daniella the guideline of three key points to cover; a game description, how to play (with controls) and the players objectives.
The user manual serves the purpose of informing new players what the game is about, what their objectives are and how to play. The game manuals made by Daniella meet all these requirements and it is an important technical document to have. The second version that she made featured so many improvements, featuring a mock-up where she had bought some of the game elements that we had created all together.
Throughout this project I have tried my best to give the most valuable feedback I can but it has been difficult to ask so much from people. I think we have done mostly well as a development team with communicating both problems and great success, but I would stress that the feedback I was giving sometimes would be perceived the wrong way and that can definitely be off-putting.
Lighting!
.png)
Today, Molly finished implementing the lighting in the unity project and it was so successful! The self-training and consultation with Nerice definitely paid off and it's safe to say that Molly has levelled up over his project! Lighting in a 2D game was a first for her and she has done a really good job of it.
The lighting brings so much dimension the game. It once look a little flat, but even just the additions of the shadows and highlights on the platforms has improved the look of the game. We were concerned that we should have incorporated highlights and shadows into our individual assets throughput development and were worried that we would have to go back and make changes but thankfully Molly found a way to accomplish the desired effect in unity. There is a rose glow over the whole game and then Molly has a variation of point, parametric and freeform lights to achieve different effects on the game objects.
Promotional Material
Anima Mundi has an instagram account, run by Emilia (head of marketing), where we have been posting the content that we have been creating, including video clips of the interactions in the game. We also have a website that gives an insight into our development process, as well as information about each member of the team so our audience can get to know us develop a relationship with our studio. My favourite feature of this website is the women. in games section where each of us have given a statement about what it means to us to be a women working within the games industry. As an all female studio, we share a collective desire to encourage more female creators to join us by stepping foot into the world of games.
​
Here is my statement from the website: "As an aspiring game designer, it is exciting for me to see other women killing it in this male-dominated field. I'd love to do what I can to pass on that inspiration to the next generation of female gamers."
Above are the posters that have been created by Emilia and Charisma. The game posters are stunning and give an insight to what the game is really about: an experience of true beauty and immersion. I thought it was really great to see these at it's a realisation to what we have accomplished as a development team.
​
The image on the far right was designed for the display image on Itch.io. As soon as we had finished the vertical slice, I uploaded the build onto itch for both mac and windows so all of our friends and families could take a look and we could show them this amazing thing that we had created. It was amazing to hear back from people about what they thought and felt good to know that people were enjoying it.
​
What I should have done is made a survey in advance and got people to give refined feedback after playing but unfortunately there was not enough time at the end of the project to do this, as I still needed to write up the progress of the day and make sure everything in the vertical slice was working smoothly before the hand-in. Because of course, if there is still time to be working, why not try to make it the best it can be.
Fin
The vertical slice is complete! I spent most of Thursday making sure everything was in place, where it was supposed to be, checking off our asset and feature lists and just making sure it all ran smoothly when the game was exported as the build. I then provided the team with a full walkthrough video before submission to make sure everyone was happy. Below are some sweet messages of the team celebrating! WE DID IT!
Week Twelve Reflection
This week was packed with work, adding in the final features and fixes to the unity project. The team worked so hard this week and it has really payed off. We have a stunning vertical slice which was really bought to life with the final changes made this week, being the lighting, the UI and the uniquely composed soundtrack. I really hope everyone on the Anima Mundi team are proud of what we have accomplished together. The documentation for the work that I did in unity this week is spread across the blog posts Unity Development Part 13, Development surgery 19/05 and Part 14
​
On the last day, I went through unity one last time and did some general clean up tasks such as checking all the box collider were in the right place and not preventing the player jumping. I had this issue earlier on in the project for this reason as well as not tagging objects properly. I also looked through the entire background scene again and moved or changed parts where it was overcrowded or it looked as though assets were floating in mid air and not grounded at all. Also added clouds higher up in the scene in places where there was elevation in the platforms because those parts of the sky looked rather bare compared to others.
​
Finally, I attempted to put some delays (Coroutine's) on some of the puzzle where the consequences of interaction on screen, played ahead of the gust ability animation. It is visibly out of sync so I put delays in where I thought they were supposed to go and sometimes it worked and other times it did not. I think because sometimes the build acts a bit slow, things look as though they are happening out of order. Because of this, I wasn't sure how to measure the success of the change.
​
Communication between the team definitely took a swift turn int he final few weeks of the project. All members became far more talkative and productive, myself included, especially during group discussions and team calls. I am not sure if it took that long for the group to become comfortable with each other or if perhaps the deadline was a motivator, but I like to think that having regular discussions over team calls was a confidence boost for everyone and that we made progress within ourselves as well as in our abilities over the course of this project.
​
To summarise, in week 12 we finished and implemented the final few features as expressed in the project pipeline, achieving all we set out to within the final milestone: the deadline.