This week my group and I spent most of class pitching ideas to each other for our project, finally settling on an idea I pitched about a fishing competition that devolves into a Lovecraftian horror. We set up a discord server to communicate and quickly wrote down our 1 pager document for our initial pitch. After it was reviewed by the professor we got down our 5 pager expansion of our idea. Since I pitched the concept I was spearheading the story/concept side of the project. Despite just starting we had a lot to do for next week, including a demo, which put a huge strain on the coding team of the group which I felt was pretty unfair. Hopefully the work will be more evenly divided in later weeks, and that the workload will be less hefty overall.
This week was pretty rough, despite how much we all liked the original idea, we had to scrap it. It was too big and with the weekly workload the way that it is, we wouldn't have been able to accomplish it in time. We settled on an idea that was pitched earlier by Walter centered around a grappling hook mechanic. We brainstormed off of this, jumping from a portal-like test chamber gauntlet to infiltrating an enemy base. We eventually settled on the idea of a food delivery game, where the player navigates a sci-fi cityscape to deliver food between skyscrapers. I quickly got to work getting references for the buildings I wanted to make and blocked out some basic models. The main issue was reformatting the Game Design Document, replacing our old ideas with the new ones, we had to rush to get our 1 and 5 pagers in, since we were a week behind, but we managed to do it. Despite not getting to do the idea I originally pitched, I'm still confidant in where the project is going.
This week was primarily cranking out models and sending them to the unity build. We're having major issues with perforce so we're unable to synchronize the versions of our builds so I had to send my models over google drive. The team wanted me to be able to link my models up with the models made by another person on the art team, which was pretty meticulous without a proper sharing network. After modeling, we documented out builds on the Gantt chart and GDD, hopefully perforce is more cooperative in coming weeks.
Been having issues with the gantt chart, I might be on the wrong document but if I'm not, I'm unable to mark my progress for some reason, maybe a permissions issue? Regardless, the other modelers and I managed to make a more standardized template for the models, including a system where we divide each building into 3 segments which can be interchanged with each other to create multiple different combinations. The coding team is talking about a script to randomly generate these combinations so hopefully that turns out well.
This week was mostly tidying up documents and refining the models we have before deciding to make more assets. Perforce is busted so we decided to use a system called plastic which does roughly the same thing. Until now I hadn't been able to even see the project in unity so it was good to see how progress is going with other areas of the assignment. Now I'm going to focus on trying to refine some shaders, but without and solid textures, and some models still being placeholders, I'm not sure where to go with it, the task seemed to just be thrown at us and since we haven't had stable access to the unity project I'm worried about my effectiveness in this task.
This week Heidi and I made textures for the modular buildings we made last week, however, I experienced a huge issue with my plastic so I'm not able to edit the unity project or recieve other's work. I was able to share the textures I made via google drive, but I have to try getting this fixed first before I can really contribute more.
This week I made some new model assets. I made 4 different food carts, each with a different type of food. One is a hotdog/burger cart, another is a noodle cart, there's a halal/shwarma cart, and finally a pizza cart. This is to work with a new system the group has been working on, instead of levels being to deliver a single order to a single objective, it's more open-world-esque. Basically the carts are located throughout the world and the player can go to each to accept a new order, which gives them a new objective to deliver it to for extra money, all against a time limit. I also made some sound effects, some basic pings + the sound of coins clinking, its supposed to be a notification for every time the player completes a delivery.
This week was a bit of a mess for me. Not being able to work with the group via plastic is a bigger problem than I admitted earlier, its making me feel a bit of a disconnect with the overall project, but I'm determined to push through and get back on track. This week we got some feedback about consolidating the overall theme of the models, and one of the targets was my food cards which didn't really fit the setting. So instead I recreated them as food trucks. To save time I made a base model for the truck and reused assets from the carts to make each type of cart distinct. Unfortunately, other things got the better of me this week and I didn't get the assets in on time to be included in this week's build and presentation. They'll be included in next week's versions though.
This was thanksgiving break so mostly we spent time with family and relaxed, but we still met to plan on what to do for next week, and worked on minor tweaks individually
This week was the final stretch, I got all the food trucks textured and imported to the project, and we made plans to finalize our game and plan for future editions.