This was kickoff week, but I am already quite excited to be working with the new team. Despite it only being week one we managed to get quite a good amount of work done. I started by cleaning up the plastic, then me and Walter worked together to get everybody on the server. We also worked together to get a basic form of multiplayer up and running which allows players to select what color they want to be and then play in the game together. It is not fully functional yet as the delivery manager is broken and we have a lot of work to do refactoring systems to work with two or more players. That was were most of my time went this week, but I also worked with the other team leads to make the scrum prez and get everything set up for the coming weeks.
Week 2: For me, week 2 was spent getting started on the delivery manager rework. I made the game multiplayer last week, and now its time to rework all of the game mechanics as well. I changed the delivery manager to be built around a more ‘Overcooked’ style system where orders come in 1 by 1 and you can click on them to show you where to go. Next week I will hook it up to the actual shops as well and make it so you can pick up and drop off orders. I also held a number of meetings this week and worked on the scrum prez.
Week 3: This week was more delivery manager. I am quite happy with the progress I made on it this week. You can now interact with all of the pickup and dropoff points to see what deliveries they have available and picking up/ dropping off works as well. I hope to get it so that the deliveries actually effect your score as well next week. I also spend a lot of time this week creating a master schedule up through our first alpha. We hope to have everything in the game and working by week 6-7.
Week 4: This week as all about score. I think the delivery manager is basically done. All of the systems work and player score is now being tracked across all of the clients in the room. There is still a lot to do though as I think the UI is going to need an overhaul to be functional. I unfortunately was not able to make it to the weekly meeting this week but I think Walter handled it well. I would like to rework out pipeline to allow for more time for feedback as well. Currently we are taking much longer then we need to to get assets into the game because we only really have one time a week to critique each other's work. I would like to shift to a system of immediate feedback through the discord or a google doc so people can get more done in a week.
Week 5: This week was a lot of miscellaneous tasks. I started with a delivery manager UI rework, making it all just a whole lot more readable and efficient. I am having a bit of a bug right now where things are not showing up on the minimap, but hopefully I will have that fixed by the morning. I also met with Christian this week to get more of a head start on level design as I think that is going to be our next big effort. We started our level design document where we are planning out how the whole game loop is going to be. I also updated the GDD to work with the new game concept, but it is going to be a long process to get everyone's work from this term represented in there.
Week 6: This was a very large level design week. Me and Christian worked together to fully remake the level so we had something up to our standards for the playtesters to use. A lot of work went into making the layout and creating all of the platforming sections. Many late nights. I also finished the gameloop, so you can now go from the menu all the way into the game and there is a timer that will bring you to the scorboard although that is broken right now so I need to fix it.
Week 7: This week I made the new level difficulty system. This system allows the whole level to change/increase in difficulty as the time progresses. Each platforming element is set to have three levels of difficulty, for example the platforms that you jump on get progressively smaller. I also hooked it up to the main menu and made different modes that the players can choose from, increasing which does what it sounds like. Manual which lets you set it to what you would like. And random which picks random paths across the city and changes them at random based off of a set interval so chaos insues.
Week 8: This was a tech art week. The majority of my time was spent on the new building shader that you can see everywhere and I am really proud of the results. I learned shadergraph and followed some tutorials to make a custom shader that allows for cubemapped interiors on all of the windows. And it is super inexpensive, taking in 2 small textures for the albedo and normals, and 1 cubmap for the interiors. And on top of that all the geo that the buildings need is ligit 1 poly. This shader is going to be a massive gamechanger and I think is gonna help bring the game to life.
Week 9: I was so busy this week I cant even possibly talk about everything I did. Every day I have spent 6+ hours working on this game trying to get everything done. New lobbies, new menus, new characters, new animations, audio, lighting, reflections, I can keep going. All I know is I need sleep.
Week 10: Final push. Lets do this.