Hey everyone! This week was a big one. Primarily, it was the end of our first (at least somewhat) formal sprint. As a reminder, a sprint (for us) is a 2 week block of work with a set goal. This means that we started the week by combining pretty much all of the work from the last 2 weeks into our main development branch on GitHub (the system we use to keep track of all of our code). As expected, this resulted in a few bugs, but we got those taken care of and then got back to work.
We ended up making quite a bit of progress on the prototype after stomping those bugs, but design and art are really the gems of this week. Our artists knocked it out of the park this week, delivering a bunch of new and updated work, giving us some really great feedback on our ideas so far, and leaving us with even more great questions to think about when discussing design. And in terms of design, we made a bunch of progress on the Boss, elaborating quite a bit on their character and the mechanics of their fight at the end of the game. And the details of all of these discussions now have a new document to live in too because Kyle has started working on a Lore Bible for our project.
Finally, I mentioned last week that one of the big things we’ll be doing at the end of every sprint is reviewing our progress and the goals we had at the beginning of the sprint. In addition to this, we’ll also be reviewing the process that we used to arrive there in a meeting called a Sprint Retrospective. We didn’t want to make too many changes too soon, but the changes we did decide to implement are detailed below in the Management section.
Beyond that, we’ll move onto specific progress:
Art
- Sofia further revised the bracer concepts from last week, simplifying it just a bit further.
- Sofia also created some initial concepts for the buildings in the character’s home village and the shrine that houses the sacred sword.
- Xy continued working on the character model, adding a lot more detail from last week.
- Rudy, Kyle, and our artists worked on defining a color palette for TSS, based on some concepts from the Shin-Hanga art style.
- Colors are typically the colors people think of, not necessarily realistic colors (Ex. Water is blue, Leaves are green).
- Rudy worked on creating a shader in Substance Painter to replicate the appearance of Unity’s shader.
- So that textures will look closer to what they’ll look like in-game (Unity HDRP Lit shading model).
- We chose temporary animations from Mixamo to use in playtests, and Rudy and Effy started tweaking them to account for combat.
Design
- We all did a bit of brainstorming for some of the most important animations in our game: changing swords.
- Tons of Boss Design this week, both for the Boss’ Background and for the mechanics of the Boss Fight.
Development
- We started Development this week by merging in a bunch of work from the previous sprint.
- Some of it was conflicting so it took a bit longer than it probably should have, but this should improve with time.
- Any images from this sprint will have a new character model.
- We changed it to one from Mixamo that should work better with our temporary animations.
- Lots of bug-fixing this week.
- Mostly movement and jump bugs, trying to get the transitions to work correctly.
- Our next build should look much prettier than last time.
- We upgraded our Render Pipeline to HDRP.
- The Player’s Block Behavior has been started now.
- We also setup a new scene for our first playtest and started on a framework to collect data from this scene.
- Tailored to provide insight on the specific things we’re testing for.
Management
- We looked a bit into some other Design Docs this week, both from other teams this year and teams in previous years.
- Looking for any ideas for possible improvements, and just to see what other teams have done.
- We also started a new meeting this week specifically for artists with a couple members of the Development team.
- Should allow for more time for Art discussion and more targeted Design & Development discussion.
- A couple new updates to our process this week:
- Accounting for In-Class Deadlines when assigning and defining work.
- No Stand-ups on Saturday.
- Stand-ups are quick progress update and planning sessions (We do our’s on weekdays at 6:15 pm).
- Hard time-boxed meetings to make sure we at least touch on everything we want to talk about.
- Time estimations will now be 50% bigger because we kept under-estimating.
Documentation
- More updates to the Design Doc:
- Better defining our Aesthetics section, updating from our discussions last week.
- The Market Influence section is starting to get some attention.
- We have a new document! A Lore Bible.
- Kyle’s taking this one on.
- Info on the backstory of our game and the characters within.
- Mostly to inform the artists as we likely won’t have time to implement much of it in-game.
And with that, I think we’re about out of updates for the week. See you next time!