Alright, so it’s been a while. Sorry for the long wait everyone, but it’s been a busy couple weeks. On Thursday, the 28th, we presented a new, longer pitch to department faculty. As you’ll see below, this won’t be our last faculty pitch by any means, but it’s primarily to start familiarizing faculty with our projects and so we can get some practice in and see what to expect from a faculty pitch. Some teams in the class don’t have full committees yet, so this was also for them so they could hopefully hook some interested parties to fill those spots. After that, over half of our team also had a midterm to study for/work on, which took quite a bit of time, and I had some other commitments in my role as a department ambassador. Coming up though, and this is the exciting bit, we, along with the rest of our capstone class, will be presenting our pitches to some employees of Rockstar Games. We have to update our pitch again so that it’s shorter and fits in the time frame provided for this, but we’re very excited.
However, because of it, we wanted to finish up development on some features we’ve been working on so that we could record them in action and include them in the pitch. As a result, we’ve done quite a bit of development work in the past couple weeks. It’s all summarized in the details below to avoid taking up too much space. We also did a bunch of work on better defining our enemy design in the past few weeks. We got some faculty feedback during our pitch and I’m excited to finally show some concepts of those down below.
On that note, art. There’s a ton of updates here. I don’t have space to really mention all of them, but all or most of them should be included below.
Hope everyone’s had a great few weeks. We’ll let you know next week how this next pitch went. Now, on to detailed progress:
Art
- Sofia did a ton of work on enemy concepts
- We have a few different designs for the different enemy types we’ll have in-game, but we’re really excited about them
- Sofia also updated sword concepts again
- This should be the final version of these
- Xy updated our character model again with some guidance from one of our faculty committee members, David Sanchez
- This also includes updates to the player’s belt and bracer models
- Xy also started working on an arch model, one of the few environmental assets, we know we want in-game
- Xy also started on creating the models for the player’s swords and they are looking great
- Effy M. did some more work on walking animations for the player
- Rudy & Effie W. worked on updating the health bar UI
- Rudy & Effie W. also worked on updating our UI designs in general
- We have a new UI scheme and some new examples of how we want things like settings to look in-game
- Kyle & Nick worked on getting some reference videos to Effy to help with player animations
Design
- After receiving some feedback about our new enemy design, we had a few discussions about these and how we can change them to make them more interesting and fit in our world better
- We also all worked on trying to connect our gameplay and supporting narrative better
Development
- John made a bunch of updates to the camera
- We’ve decided to switch to fully using Cinemachine rather than the split between the systems that that was in the starter code we had
- This should help improve some of the sensitivity issues that we were having before
- I finished up with the Parry Timing updates we’ve been working on
- We should now be able to balance the different timings involved with parrying much easier
- Nick & John both worked a bunch on trying to fix some issues we’ve been having with how the player turns or at least how the player’s turn is perceived
- I implemented chip damage finally
- This is one of the things that makes our game unique. The player takes chip damage while blocking, but can regain it on a successful parry
- I also finally got started on sword implementation
- Part of this was setting up architecture, but towards the end of last week, I also set up the inputs and code behind-the-scenes so that the player can actually switch swords and it has an effect on gameplay
- In response to some faculty feedback, Nick did some work on Level Design, updating our current level so that the trees have varied sizes and look more natural
Management
- We had a Faculty Pitch on Thursday, October 28th
- We’ll have another during finals week to get approval of our idea before starting in on full-steam development in the spring, but this was meant as a trial run so we’d know what to expect
- And so the faculty becomes somewhat familiar with what we’re doing
- Kyle & Rudy set up a new Artist meeting on Wednesdays so we can better coordinate with our art team and stay updated with their progress
Documentation
- Everyone, though mostly Kyle, did lots of work on a new presentation with more detail than our old one to use for the pitch to faculty last Thursday
- Everyone also worked on developing their ideas for individual research more so that we can better keep that in mind during development and better present these ideas
- Rudy wrote up a page in our Confluence space about our Asset Pipeline
- This will be moved to our Design Doc as well once its finished
- Kyle wrote up a page about our proposed Health UI in our confluence space
- Included in this is how we want to represent chip damage in the UI
- I updated the documentation for Object Management by creating a class diagram to better visualize the architecture of this system
- Rudy added a tag system to this dev blog to allow for better organization
- Kyle started addressing some comments in our Design Doc that we’ve been putting off
- We’ll be working more on this in the coming weeks
- Kyle also worked on revamping our current lore bible with the concept updates we’ve made in recent weeks in preparation for another pitch this coming Wednesday, the 10th
- Rudy also worked on documentation for Cross Scene References
- This should help us improve our workflow with working in multiple scenes
That’s all for this week! See you next week after Rockstar!