Logan's Dev Blog

Date: October, 1st 2023

This week consisted of brainstorming a creating our game pitch. We all came to the table with different ideas and worked together to pick two good ones. Once that was over we set up the presentation for this. I worked on the slides for our stealth game idea. The concept art for these slides was AI generated, here are some examples of what we got.

The top one went into our sell presentation and the bottom one did not. The difficulty with using AI for concept art that I ended up finding is that getting the model to give images that evoked any idea of the gameplay concepts we had put together was impossible. It could at best be used to get images of a guy stealing things, which did work with our game, but failed to deliver a lot of meaning to onlookers other than reinforcing this heist idea for the game's objectives and themes.

Date: October, 8th 2023

This was a week of concept solidification and write ups. I mainly worked this week on both the one and five pagers. I set up the skeleton of the one pager and filled in the gameplay and level design sections. For the five pager I wrote up an expanded section for level design in addition to the overview of the progression of the day which is analogous to seeing how our vertical slice would progress.

Date: October 15th, 2023

This week I worked on both the sell presentation and the first draft of our game design document. The preset listed is from all the way back in 2004! This meant that there were a lot of sections that make a bit less sense now then they did back then. There are a lot of question about the engine we'd be using for rendering, lighting, physics, ect. Today Unity is free bundles all of these into one. While it's good to still list these, they certainly aren't worth their own section. Another thing that got cut down was all the talk about the world of our game. Because we've limited our game to one restaurant and the player doesn't have freedom to move around it this section was also chopped down. What was left after that are, I think, good bones for our GDD. I'll be working on expanding this as we progress with our game.

Date: October 22nd, 2023

The core of this week was finding a solid moment to moment gameplay model as a team and stick to it. After a big brainstorming session we settled on a line that moves down the screen over a series of dots and the player must hit the spacebar when the dot is under the line. I then solidified this idea into our GDD into a more specific and refined gameplay section. I also worked on the scrum presentation for this week.

Date: October 29th, 2023

This week I worked on meeting with the team to brainstorm and get the gameplay down for our GDD. We outlined all of the stations and I took those outlines. In addition the existing gameplay sections needed to be reworked since we have new gameplay! So now the player uses moving the mouse against a line in order to hit the beats. The name of our game has changed to be completely different from waffle house. We are now BEAT Flavor: Breakfast Boogie. This meant some other changes had to be made to put the GDD in line with this change.

Date: November 5th, 2023

This week I got a very simple, but easy to build on parameter screen going! It pauses all gameplay when in use. It can only affect the sensitivity and overall volume right now, but we can get some other features onto there with little problem. Short update, but that's because it was a decently simple addition.

Date: November 12th, 2023

This week I started on some improvements to the score system. This should have been very simple, but it actually meant I had to go into some of our existing code and try to work on it. To start, we wanted to have the player's streak, the number of notes they hit in succession, to affect the score value of notes hit. This week I got stuck on implementing the streak itself. See our hit detection only counted misses at the end of a plate/measure. This meant that I had to try to modify it to instead count misses as they occurred. This script doesn't use collision but instead bounds and position, so I had to dive into that logic and see what needed to be done. The good news is that streaks work now! The bad news is that they work now, sometimes. There is weird behavior when plates swap, but it should be solvable next week.

Date: November 19th, 2023

I was a little too optimistic last week about the scoring system. It works now completely for like the first four plates... then it goes back to the old problems I was experiencing with it. This whole debacle and the time it's taken have gotten us as a team to start discussing if the way we have hit detection set up is something we want to expand to other stations and the answer is no. We will be moving over to a collision based hit detection system. Some of my work on the score system can be implemented once that script has been made In better news I made a new prefab for plates and an accompanying script which allows for different plate art to be randomly displayed each time the prefab is spawned in. This will add some visual variety to the game.

Date: November 26th, 2023

This week was a lot of us trying to really get the visuals of the game together. To help with this I animated and implemented a waffle maker for our griddle station. I hadn't used Unity's 3D animation system before, but honestly it wasn't too hard especially with some advice from Will. I also fixed some issues that came along with all of the updates since I was just about the last person to work on the main scene. Stuff like our particle effect and sponge disappearing.