Week Five

Wednesday 10th March

Progress Update

Today Emilia supplied the team with an art bible that she has created, as the lead artist, to help maintain a consistent art style for every asset as we individually create them. This art bible consists of details to create all game assets to stay consistent with the intended style and tone of the game, including references and tutorials for the production of each asset through the means of mood-boards, brush types and colour palettes. Each member of the team will be able to refer to this to guide their own development of creations for the vertical slice.

At this point in the project, we have basic assets designed and completed such as the platforms the player will walk on, the lanterns and the character design. We are also in the process of designing the ability animations, working on the complete structure for the build of the game and planning the controller mapping for mobile use so we can make thoughtful design choices for movement and actions with that in mind.

Communication between members of the team is effective and they are sharing work to inform each others designs. However I have found that for this effective communication to actually happen, encouraging the sharing of work and progress in slack is essential. Some members of the team will not actively contribute to discussion without a push.

Here are some screenshots from our progress update. On the left is an example where Molly has used Charisma's environment concepts to experiment with her design for the boulder throw ability. Combining our work like this and adapting our designs so they are consistent with others work has shown to be helpful for all members of the group, showing how important it is to continuously update each-other with what we are working on.

Here I have responded to Molly's design, making sure that the asset has been designed so that is functional for each of its purposes, specifically for the gap-filling puzzle interaction.

I asked Daniella to make a new character sprite where the Shaman was facing sideways as a front view of him would not be useful to Molly when it came to rigging it, because of course the game is designed to be side scrolling. She also added some colour customisation to the shaft so when it comes to animating the ability movement there will be visual difference for the player, to see what animation was in action.

Communication between the group definitely has lots of room for improvement. More thorough feedback is necessarily as quite often we are all too comfortable with just using reactions rather than our words.

I am pleased with how regularly we update each other on our work. When we require feedback we can ask for it but I believe all members of the team, myself included, could provide more meaningful and helpful contributions during our discussions and when responding to each others work. I intend to bring up this concern in the next meeting.

To summarise what we're working on this week:

Daniella - has supplied Molly with new character concept to use for rigging, and is working on the controller mapping, adapting it for mobile devices. This includes sourcing of scripts and how to program it.

Charisma - working on the list of assets, getting feedback from the team as they are created and making any adaptions that are required.

Molly - rigging character movement (idle, walking, jumping, falling).

Emilia - creation of assets, work on art style guide and quality control.

Me - Unity development

Thursday 11th March

Team Meeting with James

During this meeting with the Anima Mundi team and James, we went over our progress individually and as a group. I went over what we were supposed to have achieved that week and our plans for the next week. By now we should have fully grey boxed the game in unity. I am a little behind on this but have a put in a basic guide for where the platform will go and have managed to code player movement. We should have basic assets such as islands, the character and items such as the bridge and lanterns finished and ready to go into unity (Charisma and Emilia), and have the character movement (walk and jump) animations finalised and ready to be implemented (Molly) and have finished player controller design for the player movement and use of abilities (Daniella). Charisma and Emilias have made great progress on asset design and creations. But I am still waiting on the character animations and the controller mapping has not yet been completed.

Throughout the meeting we went over what was still in progress and after showing James that physical work, discussed feedback for those assets. We had a further discussion about the brightness of the game and how this would look with the lanterns switching on. At the moment it seems as though the game is going to be far too bright for the lanterns to really have an effect on the visuals. So we spoke about how we could possibly implement light in the game while keeping our assets consistent, not having to make too many changes or re-design the assets.

Thankfully, after the meeting, Molly had a possible solution for our concerns regarding how we will implememnt lighting later on in development.

It had honestly been a slower week for progress but it's still difficult to organise what needs to be done and when, without a full plan for how the game will be structured in unity. Targets for the next few days include creating a full storyboard for the game which will make assigning tasks far easier and give everyone a greater sense of how the game will look, scene by scene.

Game Testing - 3rd years FMP's

This afternoon, we tested the third years final major project games. This was helpful to learn more about game testing as I was able to reflect on the user testing lecture from last week to think about what I needed to do while playing the games, in order to give the most helpful feedback. It was also very insightful to see what third years were working on as that will soon be us in their position.

Friday 12th March

Development Surgery

Today I booked a development session with James to get some of the basic coding down for our unity build. Part one of my unity development and my notes on this surgery session can be found on my blog, using this link: https://kw4u19.wixsite.com/gamedevelopment/post/game-development-starting-the-unity-build

At this point of the unity development, I had put in some template assets such as grey boxes for the game platforms and a simple cube for the player. As far as programming goes, I had been able to code the player movement but had already come across a few problems. So the intention of this development surgery was to fix the problems I had come across, such as the player rotating when they jumped, and also writing some scripts for some other features I needed to work on such as camera movement. The process of my independent work as well as this development surgery is documented in the blog post linked above.

Furthermore, here are some things I need to think about/plan for further development:

Parallax scrolling - how can this be implemented? I think this is as simple as creating a series of backgrounds for each parallax layer and having them move at different speeds behind the player. The closer they are to the player, the slower they will move.
Grey boxing - I need to grey box the entire game and leave markers for where interactions will take place/where assets need to be placed.
Abilities - Need to source/write scripts for each puzzle interaction with the abilities. It is mostly the case of detecting an object with a trigger box and then having things happen (animation/asset movement).
How to prevent the player from progressing - perhaps I could place invisible barriers at the end of each puzzle so the player wouldn't be able to progress until they had completed the puzzle. Puzzle completion would result in the invisible barrier being turned off.
How the lanterns are switched on. As explained above, the lantern will switch on upon the player completing the puzzle.
Re-spawn/death - speak to James about the best way to implement this.

I have not had any previous experience with unity other than the lectures we had during the first year of this course. So I am learning as I go. This is evidence of training for this project and it will all be documented in parts on my blog. While I am excited to be learning more about unity and levelling up, I do have concerns about getting development done but thankfully do have James as a helping hand as well as other more experienced programmers amongst my classmates.

Week Five Reflection

This week the team have achieved the development of some concepts for the animations sprites for the game. This includes visual demonstrations or how the boulder throw and gust will look. We also have some assets such as the game platforms and lanterns which I will be able to implement in unity soon and get started on the game build. But first I need to finish the grey box after finalising the series of events that will take place. Daniella has provided a new concept for the shaman so also Molly can get started on rigging the movement animations so they will soon be implemented too, once they are finalised. This is all great progress and it means we are ahead on our schedule.

My personal progress this week was getting a head start on the unity development. I spent some time watching tutorials and working some bits out by myself as well as taking some time to speak to our tech consultant (James) who helped me with some further programming. Of course, this is all documented in my blog post (Unity Development Part 1). I also researched and planned for parallax scrolling and the blog post for that development can be found here: https://kw4u19.wixsite.com/gamedevelopment/post/gameplay-design-parallax-scrolling

The next set of tasks for the team are as follows:

Daniella - is still working on controller mapping so I have asked for an update on her progress and an estimation of when that will be finished.

Charisma - further asset production using the art bible guide and game storyboard. Charisma has a very good pace for getting assets created so I trust her to decide which order she gets those done.

Molly - further rigging of the Shamans movement. Still to do; Jumping and Ability movement.

Emilia - Asset creation including the bridge puzzle.

Next Steps and progress review

Create a refined story board for the full game which will act as a guide for the structure of the game in my unity development. It should include where each puzzle will take place, what interactions will happen and how they will look, as well as the location of all game assets. The next steps for the unity build are summarised above and in my Unity Development Part 1 blog post. While asset creation is under way, I will be working on behind the scenes features such as movement, checkpoints and player death. I will also be undertaking some research and training to prepare for future processes.

This week was our final week for design and next week we will step right into development. No further changes, specifically additions, will be made to the vertical slice as it would not be beneficial or time efficient for us to have to re-asses project pipelines. We now have four weeks of development to come which will be broken apart by the three weeks of easter.