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Project Production Journals Week 3

Mia Capoli, #1

Tasks Completed

Brainstormed for inspiration, ~1hr
Created background, 1 hr
Created Tv, 45 min
Created One Pager, 30 min
Met with team (2 times), 2.5 hrs
Elevator pitch, 5 min
Website: 1.5 hrs

Total: ~7.5 hrs

Positive

I think we are off to a great start! I feel that my teammates are excited to work on this project and put in time to make it successful! We got a lot accomplished with art assets as well as our tech demo.

Negative

I don’t think much went wrong, but our first full team meeting took some time to fully flesh out exactly what we wanted. I also felt a little bit of a lack of communication from some parts of the group.

Upcoming

I plan on developing more level design, as well as more art assets. I also plan on fleshing out the story and designing a mechanic to convey the story that is both fun and follows the theme of the game/game-play. I also plan on heading any administrative duties.

Drew, #1

Tasks Completed

Implemented camera controller system - 1.5 hours
Integrated sprites/music: 1 hour
Player movement/animation controller - 1 hour
Main menu - .5 hours
Helped draft up scriptable interaction system with Rush - 1 hour
Helped design teammates get comfortable using git - 2 hours
Created & hosted WebGL build - .5 hours

Total: 7.5 hours

Positive

I put together our initial scene in Unity, importing the designer's assets into the environment and setting up some basic systems to facilitate moving around it. I made the basic ghost movement controller - we decided to allow the player to float around the level to feel more like a ghost (I also made the vertical move speed slower than the horizontal to make it more convincing). I also set up the animation controller with a looping floaty animation (provided by James).

Most of my development time was spent on the camera system. We wanted the camera to follow the player between rooms, but we weren't sure how we wanted the camera transitions to work. I decided to implement options for either a snap transition or a smooth pan between rooms; these options are exposed in the inspector to be modified by designers. I like making tools to empower our designers. They should be able to work in Unity and toy with settings to make the game feel just right, rather than just creating assets and passing them down the pipe to the coders.

I met with Rush for an hour to discuss a general system to handle all of the player's interactions with the environment. He took the lead on implementing that, but we managed to foresee the variety of interactions we'll have to handle and pitfalls we'll face.

Negative

I met with Rush over discord voice chat, so we had trouble communicating about the system design. Next time we have that sort of meeting, we'll make sure to meet in person so we can visualize our solutions with whiteboards.

Upcoming

I'll likely be working with Rush on the scriptable interaction system he started putting together, as well as integrating more of our designer's assets/animations into the project.

Rush, #1

Tasks Completed

Prototype Character Controller (Deprecated/Tossed Out) ~ 1hr
Meetings ~1.5 hr
Designed and Coded Interactable Object System ~6.5 hrs

total: ~9 hrs

Positive

Taking the extra time to code all the class structure, instead of spaghetti-coding the concept and then have that habit following us into the hectic time of pushing weekly updates , was well worth it.

Negative

Explaining why it is important to implement coding/software design concepts into the foundation of the game can be very difficult, as it is very abstract, hard to picture, and over-necessary for a concept demo. Likewise, getting a work pipeline that works for everyone involved took some time, but we settled with a public git, github desktop, and unity 2018.

Upcoming

Start creating and coding other scenarios, beyond the concept code. Create a Win and Lose state that is practical for both the narrative and the code. Possibly create the ScareTarget() Abstract Base Class.

To the left is a snippet of the class structure I’ve implemented, which should make creating/implementing new objects, and electronic objects with wall plugs, very easy.

Again, the point here isn’t so much the code (it’s about as basic and bare as possible), but rather the structure that will allow us to simply code the object-specific aspect of the object and allow us to avoid copying and pasting the pluggedIn to turn on, unplug to turn off aspect over and over again.

Lange, #1

Tasks Completed

Team Meeting - 2.0 hours
Created counter - 30 minutes
Created saltshaker - 20 minutes
Created saltshaker with salt trail - 10 minutes
Created refrigerator - 30 minutes
Re-organized website - 30 minutes

Total Hours: 4.0 hours

Positive

We met as a team, discussed the inner workings of the game and art style, and delegated tasks to each of the members of the team. We also made sure to have and answer questions that usually go unanswered. I created the assets on time to be made for the build and communicate with my team on a daily basis.

Negative

I had some issues with pushing changes to the GitHub repository, but it turned out that all I needed was contributor access to the repository. It took a while to solve, but it all worked out.

Upcoming

I know I haven't worked as hard as my teammates have for this past week (and for that I am very grateful), but I plan to work on any new secondary props and assets that need to be created for this week or updated from the previous week. I also want to create a cover image and/or logo for the game and some nice concept art at some point.

Nazifa, #1

Tasks Completed

Met with team - 1hr
Starting sketch examples of ghost - 15 min
Drawing human animation stripes - 6.5 hours

Total Hours:

Positive

Great suportive team with all different aspects of art and tech. Working on the strips felt rewarding.

Negative

I kind of put it on myself but I made the strips sorta detailed and it took a lot longer than my original plan of just doing stick figures this week and expand upon it later.

Upcoming

Working on the look of the UI and any other art like logos.

James, #1

Tasks Completed

Concept Design: 1 hour
Ghost animations: 5 hours

Total Hours: 6 hours

Positive

This week we hammered down our concepts and it finally set of off in a positive direction. We have a better idea of what we want to accomplish and design as well as a solid direction that we want to head in. On a personal note my preliminary animations came out pretty decent and the set up for future animation is done so it shouldn’t be too much of a hassle to produce more.

Negative

This week was crunched for time a little bit. I think our meeting time on Sunday was a little too late. I would rather have a weekend of project work so that my other classes can be handled during the week. Because of the time crunch I didn’t get to do as many animations as I would have liked. Two of the ones I completed are still missing the transition phase back to idle.

Upcoming

This next week I need to make the appropriate changes to the preliminary animations. Once that is done the character’s look should be finished so I plan on producing completed animations as well as the new ones we will need for next week.

Tyler, #1

Tasks Completed

2 Prop Assets Creation: 4 hours
Art Meeting: 2 hours

Total Hours: 6 Hours

Positive

Everyone did what they were supposed to and the meeting went well. Everyone was clear on what direction we're heading in and what they had to do for this coming week

Negative

Personally, I spent a lot more time working on the fan than I should have because of perspective issues. The only other thing that went wrong was that we weren't able to meet asa full group because of conflicting schedules in the short term. I wasn't able to work much in-engine because I didn't know how to use git and now that I do, I'll be able to help more this week.

Upcoming

I need to make the fan animation better and not awkward. I'll be able to polish the assets I have in order to solidify our style. Other than that I'll be working on filler assets that don't have any affect on gameplay until we decide to create a new level.

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