Sunline Devlog #2

Sprint 8 3/9/2022

We have officially started, and are almost done with, alpha development

For our alpha development to be complete we need to make sure that every piece of the game is fleshed out at least partially, and we have an idea of how the rest of our development will go. We only had 4 sprints to complete this process, so we needed to work efficiently and well.

These past few weeks have been a bit rocky. There was a significant amount of work to get done, but many people were also experiencing delays in what they could do for one reason or another. Because of this, we were not quite on the same track as before, so we slightly cut our scope. Instead of the original plan of six levels, we have combined the story elements from five and six so we will end up with a total of five. Everyone is onboard with decision, and it has allowed us to reach our alpha target on time.

Unlike pre-production, during alpha I got to dedicate my time to the few things, and had to time to hopefully see them through to a great level of polish.

We rigged our main character model with IKs, so we can accurately place hands and other body parts around the environment and reduce clipping. I was in charge of the hand retargeting to the correct part of the mesh, fixing clipping that occurs without IKs.

Because sunline is all about level feel, I am also created a "QA Tool" that tracks player movements in levels, making it easier for our designers to find pain points and hold ups in the levels. This tool takes data every few frames and lets us import this data into unity to re-watch players movement.

However, with Alpha not going to plan for our team, of course there were some issues with my mechanics

IK Rigging

When doing my initial research for how to do IK animations in Unity, from what I gathered a lot of it was very similar to all other unity animations, so I told my artists to go ahead and create the animations, and I will take it from there.

However, Maya and Unity use different default rotations for bones, meaning that while the animations were imported into unity just fine, when it came to trying to give them Inverse kinematic bones we ran into a few issues

2022-02-24_21-01-01.mp4

Luckily, Liminal Loop studios has some amazing animators, and with a few meetings together we were able to work out the bone rotations, and by the end of the next sprint our models hands are no longer clipping through the environment when she mantles or wall runs.

QA Tool (QATT)

I designed QATT with our easy flow level feel in mind. It is super important to the overall feel of the game that levels are hard, but not confusing. They are completable, and feel good to complete. Because of this ideal feel for the levels, our designers are constantly iterating on their levels based on tester feedback and what they observe during QA.

QATT allows designers to see testers movements after the fact, and in bulk. It tracks each of our players through the level, uploads their data to google drive, which the designers can then download and view inside of unity to see how their level is preforming. This tool has already come to great use, and our designers greatly appreciate this extra level of QA depth they can get.

loader 2.mp4

*An example of tester data loaded into unity, you can see the average paths of about 20 players here

*Video demonstrating the ease of, and in game look of the QA loader

There is always more work to do

And with Sunline now entering Beta, it is important that we do it well and efficiently. We have now defined all our mechanics, gotten every process started, and many things finished, and reassessed our development scope. Now we need to stay on track and complete all our goals.

For me personally this means going back and adding needed features to my tools, and fixing any bugs that have been discovered in the mechanics I created during pre-alpha.

Personally I feel confident about hitting beta, and I believe a lot of the team is onboard with this as well. Knowing that everything is on track to create an finished product in the next few weeks is exciting and important for our team!

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