These are some of the textures I made for our Boulder Puzzle!
Top Row (Left to Right): Brick Wall, Wooden Door, Rocks
Bottom Row (Left to Right): Golden Door frame, Ruby Button, Pebbled Ground
The table of contents was completely out of whack in the GDD so I updated that. I further updated the GDD contents regarding the new/changed mechanics to get a clearer picture of how they work. I also removed some segments which did not seem useful for us or felt like clutter.
10/28/21Added a version 2.00 summary in GDD. Started messing with some audio for the boomerang as well, although I'm not very experienced with audio so it's been hard to make it sound decent. I also reached out to some friends and family get them to playtest our build. 10/29/21Made some serviceable audio tracks for throwing a boomerang as well as a track for footsteps. I will come back to these later but they get the job done for now.Updated our Play our Game section! Players are able to download our recent build and fill out our survey too. We also added pictures of ourselves to the Meet the Team section!
It's currently Sunday night and I have done some quick bug fixes and minor quality of life implementations. They include adding a mouse sensitivity slider to the parameter menu and allowing the UI elements to scale properly with screen resolution. Preliminary tests of these changes show successful results!
It turned out that I accidentally swapped a few of the sliders in the parameters menu so some were either not working or doing unexpected things.
It's the end of the week, and I implemented some basic visual differentiation between Elsend and the mortal world using the SetActive = true/false system that I laid the groundwork for last week. I did some really gross hardcoding to get it all done on time. Streamlining that will be my #1 priority for next week. What I do have right now, though is that some ethereal purple lights and a (admittedly hard to discern) change in materials is what differentiates Elsend from the mortal world.
This week was a big week for me. We met as a team on Saturday and put together a whole puzzle design which, by the end of that same day, I had blocked out in-engine. The puzzle involved a boulder that, once a button was pressed, would roll down towards the player Indiana Jones style. However, if the player managed to dodge the boulder, they would be able to use it as a platform to get across the wide gap to the door on the other side. This means that the boulder would need to simultaneously need to be able to kill the player if it was moving, and be harmless once stationary. This means that I needed to learn how to activate and deactivate a triggering collider based on the velocity of the object.
I implemented the use of buttons that the player could use to trigger events. I reconfigured how player death would work. Now instead of sending the player to a different scene, it just activates and deactivates a series of objects to make the space that the player is in function differently. One of the other design decisions we made on Saturday was the decision to implement "Destabilization" in Elsend, which adds a drawback to Elsend to balance it out so that it is not always the player's go-to solution to a puzzle. In correspondence with this decision, I added a 90-second countdown timer for whenever the player is in Elsend. Once it reaches zero, whatever puzzle the player is playing in resets.
One of our goals this week was playtesting, which meant implementing a Parameter menu. This means that if a player doesn't like the way that one of the variables in our game is set, they can modify it to fit what feels best for them. Hopefully this means that over the course of our playtests, we will find out what movement and settings feel best for the player. Implementing the menu took longer than expected, but even considering that, was finished by Wednesday morning. Unfortunately, the build for our game did not work in itch, so we due to that one issue we did not have as much time for playtesting as we would have liked, and didn't have anybody fill out the playtesting forms.
Thankfully, next week playtesting should be happening throughout the week. The only modifications necessary for me to make before we get started is adding a Mouse Sensitivity slider to the Parameters menu and allow for proper UI scaling. Other than that I hope to implement basic tutorial instructions so that we don't need to explain everything to our playtesters every time going in, making the portal from Elsend back to the mortal world more obvious, improve boulder collision and add a concrete respawn location, death screen and fail screen to the game.
This week, we made a few rather substantial changes to some of the core mechanics. I made sure the GDD reflected these changes and was also able to edit and clean up the GDD a bit further. This week I also got to think up a few more ideas and sketches for more puzzles as well as some concepts for how story will be delivered throughout the gameplay.
This week, I focused on character modeling. I started the first pass for Morgan's human form, and I wish it had come out better. Since I haven't used Maya since early 2020, I'd forgotten how unforgiving the software is. I lost a lot of progress, but the setback has retaught me a valuable lesson about saving your work.
This week I focused entirely on the boomerang and made sure that I could have it curve in mid air and and have it track the mouse position to go where it needs to. I also made sure that it could collide with objects and stick there as well as you could teleport to it using the Q key. So the boomerang now works as planned and I can not tell you how happy I am that it works.
This week, I focused solely on models. I did a second pass on some of the forest environmental models and the boomerang, changing the style a bit from low-poly quads to low-poly tris. I also did a first pass on the models for our first puzzle, the boulder puzzle. Since I did the puzzle models first, those have not been converted into tris yet.
For this week, I have added previous builds to the website and created a google drive for all our documentation. As a team, we did have a minor setback on our game concept, so I changed some of our scopes in our Gantt chart to ensure we can still be on schedule for future builds.
This week, I focused on a few minor additions and revisions of the GDD and level design. For level design, I concepted the structure of the generic level and made a flow chart of how to navigate this generic level. I also revised the story segment of the sell presentation to be more specific to our story and less vague.
This week, I focused on concept art for the main character, Morgan, and the spirit world NPCs, who will mostly look the same aside from maybe color and facial expressions. Morgan was drawn in a human form with legs for the real world with earthy tones like green and brown. Morgan's spirit form lacks legs and is an ethereal pastel green. I also finalized the art for the Boomerang, so the orthographics could be used for modeling.
I implemented a sprinting mechanic, the first iteration of the spirit world and death. I also helped put together the scrum presentation. I polished the sprinting mechanic with an FOV shift to ensure that the player knew when they were sprinting. I also constructed some platforms to be used in the video demo for class.
I finished up the boomerang mechanics and made sure it was possible to get the boomerang behind objects as well as created a system for summoning the player and having the boomerang follow the player. I also did a rudimentary collision system with the boomerang, and helped with the scrum and sell presentations.
Like last week, I did a bit of everything. I modelled some environmental pieces to populate the forest level, specifically some trees, rocks, and a fallen log. I also set them up in a little diorama to better display them since we do not have an official level yet. I modelled the boomerang as well with the help of Erika's orthographics. I created the third sell presentation and assisted on the second scrum presentation as well.
For this week I worked on the website by adding more of our documentation and adding a deliverable feedback section for the team. I helped work on the scrum presentation with Vicky and Henry. I made a google form for playtesting, as of right now it is a general playtesting survey but over time I will make a narrow down survey as the game progresses. I also worked on updating our Gantt chart.
This week was mostly focused on the GDD. I focused on its formatting and organization as well as writing any content pertaining to gameplay mechanics, story and level design as well as any general game information. I was also responsible for collecting placeholder audio to implement into the current build. Finally, I further developed the story by giving it's setting some background information for purposes of worldbuilding and character development.
-Jacob
For this week, I worked mainly on concept art. I drew up an idea of how Elsend, the spirit world, would feel. I used a combination of bright colors to create an ethereal look. I was inspired by my Feywild Honey D&D dice that are mainly gold but have all these pretty pinks, purples, blues, and yellows when rolled in the light. I later added in some whitish wispy plants, a suggestion from Jacob, just to fill the landscape out a little more and add to the look. I also found placeholder assets and placed them in Unity so they could be implemented by Henry.
-Erika
This week I worked collaboratively with Serena to put together our team's Gantt chart, and worked with both Serena and Victoria to construct the team's scrum presentation. In addition to these collaborative tasks, I implemented a first person character controller into our most recent version of Quietus as well as full-range movement and jumping. I tested and polished the jumping a bit to make sure it felt good to use. A couple of more minor features I implemented are placeholder assets, as well as a small crosshair at the center of the player's screen to make testing and aiming our boomerang more easy.
-Henry
For this week, I modified the boomerang mechanic so it travels in a curved path. That is pretty much it although I did do some minor work on the GDD, Gantt chart, and presentation along with recording the demo. I spent the entire week trying to figure out the boomerang mechanic and got a little bit of help on that after trying five different methods.
-Grace
For this week, I dabbled in a bit of everything. I drew up some rough concept art for the forest level to get an idea for the ambient mood and tone. I also drew up a concept for the boomerang and a very short gif of a possible puzzle or it can at least act as an example of our puzzles would look like. I created the second sell presentation and assisted on the first scrum presentation as well.
-Vicky
This past week, I switched our website from Wix to google site since our team has been using the google suite to collaborate. Google sites allow us to plug in all of our documentation and work with ease. Besides the website, I worked on the scrum presentation with Henry and Vicky, created the Gantt chart with Henry, and kept track of where everyone was at in their work.
-Serena