Back to our regularly scheduled updates, this week has finally been a bit more relaxed. After our pitch to Rockstar last week we finally had a chance to catch up on some much needed documentation updates and start developing some features we’ve been working towards, but didn’t want to actually start until we had a larger block of time to develop, like enemies. We also finished development on a bunch of stuff that we started on last week as well.
In terms of art, Sofia made some more updates to the enemies and Xy started working on fractured versions of the sword models. Once they’re finished, we’ll use these in the shattering effect we’re planning on doing when the sword switches modes. There are also some other art updates in the pipeline still, but hopefully we’ll have some animation updates coming in soon.
Really that’s about it for this week’s updates. We spent the first half of the week working on the Rockstar Pitch, and with only the latter half of the week there wasn’t a ton of stuff that we could continue working on, especially considering our code freeze on Sunday nights. However, on the 15th, we’ll be starting a new sprint, so next week we should have some updates from that and way more development updates as well, since we’ll have more time to do so.
Specific Progress:
Art
- Sofia made some updates to the enemy concepts
- A couple concepts for the basic enemy have been combined
- The shield enemy’s weapon has been revamped
- A couple concepts of the glaive enemy’s weapon have been combined
- Sofia also worked on creating some hand painted designs for the health bar
- Xy worked on fracturing the sword models
- We’re planning to use these fractured versions for the shattering effect that should happen when the sword mode is switched
- Effy updated the walking animation based on Kyle’s recordings.
- Rudy worked on more UI Design with Effie
- John started working on audio for the game
- Right now, it’s mostly just trying to find the right instruments and sound produces the vibe we want
Design
- Nick started working on the Behavior Tree for the boss
- He’s working on this as part of his AI class, so it still won’t be under active development for a while
Development
- John finished the updates to the camera from last week and merged it all into our main development branch
- Nick finished up his work with fixing the level we’ll be using for testing in the foreseeable future, making it look more natural
- I finished implementing sword switching, adding the UI and making it respond to what’s going on behind the scenes
- John made some organizational fixes to our code, doing some cleanup and removing some things we’ve been meaning to remove for a while
- John started working on enemies
- At this point it’s mostly in the code design phase. We’re trying to figure out the best way to architect them so that we can manage their behaviour efficiently and minimize the things we have to change in the future
- Rudy fixed some bugs in his Multi-Scene editor
Management
- We delivered a successful pitch to Rockstar on Wednesday, November 10th
- Mostly just pitched the concept itself, they seemed excited and liked the idea
- The only concern was the amount of animations we’ll need to make it look polished, which is something we’ve been working on finding a solution for
- We’re very thankful for Kyle as he’s been doing most of the speaking for all of our pitches
- Rudy updated some things in the art section of our Discord
Documentation
- John recorded some gameplay footage to use in our Rockstar Pitch
- Kyle did a ton of work updating our previous presentation to a new format for Rockstar
- We wanted this pitch to focus much more on the concept itself rather than our implementation and the progress we’ve made so there were a lot of changes
- Rudy also helped with the look of the presentation, updating it to make it look more professional
- Kyle added narrative pages to our Confluence space from the lore doc he’s been working on
- I’ve made a bunch of updates to our Design Doc recently
- Mostly this has just been updating my sections to the actual current state of the project since we haven’t been able to spend much time doing this the past few weeks
- I also added a new page to our Confluence space for Sword Architecture
That’s all for this week, folks. Thanks again!