Week Eight

Thursday 22nd April

Team Meeting with James

In todays meeting there were two main issues to address; the waterfall puzzle and the eagle animation.

The waterfall puzzle is the 4th out of the six puzzles we have planned to include in the vertical slice. It involves throwing a boulder at a build up of debris that is causing a blockage. The aim is to break through the debris in order to direct the water flow. There are a few problems that we have established with this puzzle. It has been incredibly difficult for us to work out how we will actually visualise this interaction and how many assets would be requires. Simply we could have one animation playing of the water flow blocked by the debris and then once the player throws the boulder, a new animation plays with the redirected water flow. There could have been an invisible box collider to stop the player from progressing until they had triggered the new animation to play. This is rather simple to put into unity but it is a lot of work to put onto the teams artists. So to summarise that, two complex animation would need to be created. It would require a lot of work and admittedly we don't have the time to fit it in. During the call the group decided that the puzzle is not vital for the vertical slice and the experience will not be greatly affected if it will be missing.

The eagle animation has been on hold for the last week because no members of the team has felt confident enough to take on the challenge so I have considered seeking help from the head of the 2D animation department - Lio. However, during the meeting, after some discussion and James point that Molly had successfully completed many animations already this project, Molly did decide to take on the task. Charisma has already created the eagle asset so it will just need to be rigged. There are three animations required for the eagle; its idle animation, taking off and then just flying along a horizontal axis. I have great confidence in Molly and I think this task will be great challenge as well as an opportunity to level up.

Another point of discussion was how the vertical slice experience will end. The idea was proposed that the Shaman could take a leap of faith off the final floating island (as detailed in my game structure posts) but instead of descending into the mysterious fall below, he can jump onto some clouds and be flown away into the distance. I really loved this idea because I think it is suggestive to the player, that the journey is to be continued, that the story had not yet ended.

There is also the concern of how lighting will be implemented and who will take on that task. James has suggested that we hire Nerice, the head of VFX to complete the task, but I know that Molly has mentioned several times about her knowledge of post-processing and her other ideas for lighting. I know it is a task that she is interested in doing herself because she is excited to and wants to learn how to do it. Therefore, I suggest that she have a training call with Nerice, who will show her how to implement lighting in unity and then she can take from that what she needs to complete the task herself.

The meeting ended with an update of our progress and how we were each doing with our current tasks. Everyone is getting on fine and there are no concerns or worries about getting anything done. We are still on track and next weeks we plan to have a group call to look over the progress in unity and discuss the structure together. It has been difficult to share my progress with the build as some things, such as learning how to use the animator are time consuming, and there isn't much to share about those small progress points.

Class Meeting

During the reconvene meeting, after every team had their team meetings with James, we had a brief talk about what we should be including in our development journals. So here are some key points to remind myself what I need to be doing throughout:

Document every little mistake! Describe how you overcame it to show your knowledge of pipeline processes and testing.
Test assets together to ensure that they work in harmony because that is what the vertical slice is about.
Make sure the key features of the vertical slice are perfect and executed as they were planned to work in the project scope. Other accompanying details just need to work.
Evidence that you are aware of the needs of the vertical slice and you're aware of the pipeline processes and can take your designs and turn them into real game assets.

Team Meeting

After the call with James in the morning we came to some realisations, that we were still missing some key features that need to be worked on and that some assets had not been produced as they were designed. The first point of discussion was the blossom trees. The first blossom animation that Charisma produced was completely different to the decorative blossom trees that she handed in today and they also did not reflect the art style that we had decided on at the beginning of the project. Therefore we established that some changes needed to be made. As Emilia had some extra time to help, she worked on two new blossoms for the decorative purpose and Charisma refined her tree restoration animation the same day. A reference image was pulled up and they both worked from an agreed design. The problem was solved within a few hours which I think reflects how driven these members of the team really are. The evidence of this pipeline process is shown below:

Before Discussion

Assets are not consistent and don't follow the colour scheme we decided on.

After Discussion

Both artist were able to revisit the work and create new beautiful assets that show consistency and have the correct colour scheme.

We also discussed in the call that we still require a rain cloud animation for the same tree restoration above. This needs to be consistent with the final cloud assets that were created by Charisma this week. To make sure that the style is consistent between the rain clouds, puzzle clouds and background clouds, Charisma has been tasked with creating all three. Therefore there is far less risk with there being any inconsistencies.

Friday 23rd April

Scene Tests with My Backgrounds

It has been my job to create the sky for the background of our vertical slice. This task has taken me a while since I got unwell but I have been determined to get it done myself despite offers from other members of the team to take on the task for me. The first sky I proposed last week was too bright for the lanterns to have a significant effect on the lighting in the game. Therefore this past week I have been working on a new set of sky concepts to share with the group, and hopefully work out what the best colour scheme we should use for the final sky. Below are some experiments that I created in Procreate and sent to Emilia for some scene testing.

This set of sky paintings were done to experiment with style, colour combinations and different cloud compositions. They are not my best work but have worked fine for experimenting with style and great for quick scene testing before I spend a larger amount of time on a more refined sky painting. The process of this experimentation is documented in blog posts.

Below are the same sky experiments but Emilia has put a mock up of a scene over the top of them to get a good idea of how it will all look together. This way I could get the appropriate feedback from the rest of the team.

My favourites were the 1st, 3rd and 4th experiments because I liked how the sun was setting at the bottom of the screen. The 1st one admittedly gives off some space vibes, with the presence of stars, the moon and an almost galaxy look with the blend of colour across the screen. I absolutely love the yellow/orange glow at the bottom of the 1st and 3rd ones while still keeping a blue sky that contrasts so well against the pink leaves on the blossom trees. My feedback to myself is that I think a darker blue sky in the 3rd on would be great but with some cotton-like cloud detail and more orange/red tones in the sunset rather than brighter yellows as the sky definitely needs to tie in more with the assets in the scene.

This process was useful to re-familiarise myself with painting, especially digitally because I have not done it in so long. It was also useful to work out what colours are going to work best with the assets and how much detail I want to provide in the sky. I don't think the sky should be too cloudy considering two of the puzzle in our vertical slice include the use of clouds and it would be a shame if clarity was lost because the foreground blended into the background. Therefore cloud formations should be kept subtle.

As a group we decided the colour combinations in the experiments that I provided were not suitable for the vertical slice. Charisma wished the sky composition to be relatively simple with not too much cloud formation. She preferred the experiment that was very light but we decided that sunset would be more appropriate. Molly preferred the night sky with subtle sunset colours at the bottom of the screen.

As we were all so torn on what would look best, Emilia quickly put in different sunset photographs taken from the internet and overlaid her

mock up to test which sunset colours would look best with the assets. With careful consideration and discussion we decided that a light blue sky in the upper two thirds of the screen would be perfect with a subtle sunset in the bottom of the screen that had orange tones and more red tones to match the rest of the assets that we are using.

I do not think the sunset tones should be too similar to the bridge red we have in the scene because I feel like it will be lost into the background. However I can see the sun having a bright red glow that could match the lanterns that will hang from the trees, instead. We all really liked the idea of having a large sun in the background that could look as though it were following the player along.

The example Emilia has provided on the left is still far too bright but the composition of where the sunset colour are is great. I think the darkest red tones should be below the islands so they do not interfere too much with the harmony of the other assets together. The blossoms do not look against the dark red and blue in the photograph examples. And then the sky should get brighter, the higher up the screen.

Week Eight Reflection

We achieved a lot as a team this week and made great progress. Firstly we refined the project scope so that we have removed the waterfall puzzle, giving us more time to make sure all of our other important features are perfect. The eagle animations have begun development and are underway, as well as a new refined sky being created by Molly and I respectively. These will be done by the beginning of next week. The blossom trees were successfully refined and we have final designs for the clouds, by Charisma, that will just need to be tinted depending on the colours of the sunset. She has also created the animation for the rain cloud which is part of the tree restoration puzzle. She taught herself how to animate this and has therefore levelled up!

The end scene of the vertical slice has also been decided upon, the player will take one final leap of the last platform and land onto some clouds that will wist him away onto his next journey (into the fire region! Uh oh). The scene will then fade to black, the last thing the player seeing will be the tranquil sunset. I am not sure how I would do this in unity but I will make sure it is covered in one of the development sessions with James as he inspired the idea.

Personal Progress: This week I created a series of sky experiments to share with the team and get feedback on colour choice, compositions and how the clouds should be presented. After receiving the feedback detailed above, I have began working on a refined sky painting and will be presenting that to the team on Mundi for further feedback. Also this week, I have made further progress on the unity build, completing the player animators after doing some self-training on how to use the animator, it's parameters and how to write those into the script, to create the transitions between different movements upon the respective player actions. This is all detailed in my blog post "Unity Development Part 5", linked here.

The next steps are to test the clouds that have been created against the new sky I am creating and then of course do further scene testing for that against the rest of the game assets. In unity I need to think about beginning the puzzle creation, using all the assets we have so far, beginning with the bridge repair puzzle. The animations also need some further refinement because at the moment they are not all in scale. I need to see if there is quick way to do this in unity or if I need to move them into photoshop and resize them all.

The current set of tasks being worked on by the team are as follows:

Daniella - still working on the windmill. I have let her know that if she ever needs a hand with something, she can speak to me and we'll work it out together.

Molly - working on the eagle animations and a new idle animation.

Charisma - making adaptions to assets such as the clouds and doing composition tests with all our assets.

Emilia - scene and depth testing, how we can create a beautiful background environment, alongside sound design.

Me - continued unity development and sky refinement.

This next week will be our final week of scheduled development so all assets should be finalised and all assets need to be moved into unity so as a group we can do a walk though over slack and a full game-test to make sure we are all happy with the composition and functionality of all the assets. We were aiming for the version 1 of the game to be complete by the end of next week but I know that I will not have all the puzzles completed and it be ready to play. But it will be a good activity to do to just see how the game looks at this point. I am trying my best to pick up the pace with the unity development but of course everything I do is a lesson and it will take more time than I initially expected.