So we’re back after a longer break and as a result, this post should be just a bit longer. As I mentioned in the last post, Thanksgiving was a much-needed holiday for all of us. We’ve been working not just on Capstone, but also other classes, pretty hard all semester and it was nice to take a bit of a break, even if we didn’t stop working completely.
All in all, most of the progress we made over break was development-related. We (John) made a ton of progress towards fully implementing enemies in our project. We now have a great base to start from with basic enemy behavior, and once that’s finished, we should be able to start on other enemies. Nick has also been hard at work on implementation of the boss because he’s using it for another class project so hopefully we’ll have something to show with that soon. Kyle also worked a bunch on a new implementation of our health bar that we’ve been designing for a while now and we’re really happy with how it turned out.
Overall though, the biggest news of this post is that we conducted our third playtest on Thursday, December 2! And we’re really happy with how it went. The issues that came up the most were balancing and control-related, and most of them we knew were issues, or we knew could be potential issues. So nothing really too surprising. As always though, we got tons of great feedback and we’re really excited to start implementing some of the changes we’ve discussed in response to this feedback. Things are really starting to come together.
Moving forward, we’re still trying to work out how the development blog will look over Winter Break, and this may actually turn out to be the last weekly update until spring, as we’re going to try to take a step back from constant updates and allow everyone to spend some time with their families. Rest assured, we will still be working on things, but we’re going to try to find some bigger projects that we’ve been putting off so that everyone can come back with some big tangible progress. And the next week will be mostly presentation updates anyway, as our final semester presentation to our faculty committee is scheduled for Monday, December 13 at 1:00 pm. Assuming we pass this, we’re good to go on ramping up development for the spring semester. We’re not really anticipating any issues because none of our committee members have had any problems yet, but we’ll see next Monday.
In any case, moving on to specific progress:
Art
- Sofia iterated on the Basic Enemy concept again, adding more detailed views from different angles
- Sofia also iterated on the concept for the Player’s mask again
- Xy started working on assets for the trail that will follow the sword when you swing it
- And Xy also worked on the basic enemy model, adding some foliage and reshaping some things from the first version
- Michal continued working on refining the Player model and rig
- John finally found some instruments that he thinks he might use for the project’s main track
Design
- Nick worked a lot this week on the design of the boss and its behavior tree
- This is an AI term that refers to the actions the boss can take in combat and what determines which actions happen when
Development
- John finished the enemies’ surround behavior
- John also started working on a larger AIDirector class to manage all the enemies
- And on a NavMesh system to go with this
- This will allow our enemies to find paths around the level much easier
- Kyle worked a bunch on Health Bar UI implementation
- I fixed some bugs with the Take Damage and Death animations
- Back to John, he also created a gizmo in Unity to help us visualize enemy pathfinding and movement easier
- Gizmos are used to give visual debugging or setup aids in Unity’s Scene (editing) view
- And John also implemented initial enemy attack behavior
- Rudy started implementing a custom stylized PBR shader for the project
- This will change the visuals of the objects in the game and hopefully make them look less like plastic
- I implemented a bunch of new animations so that the combat actions look different depending on which sword you’re using
- Kyle updated the onboarding in our playtest level
- John added some new logic related to enemies at the end of our playtest level
- Rudy changed a ton of stuff in the playtesting level related to graphics and lighting
- Just a few of these things: post processing volumes, global fog, added glow to swords, and replaced UI screens with a new theme
- After finishing the Behavior Tree, Nick implemented the first phase of the boss battle
- Everything here is placeholder for right now
- It’s just testing logic to make sure that everything is working properly
Management
- We conducted our third playtest on Thursday, December 2
- Mostly we were testing new animations, health bar UI, and enemy AI
- I made the survey for the playtest and posted the release of this build on GitHub
Documentation
- We all wrote up notes that we took on the Playtest so that everyone else on the team could read them
- We all also answered a bunch of questions in our Design Doc from the 1st year masters students who were reviewing it
- I made some documentation updates because we finished another milestone (Playtest 3) and started on some end of sprint things
- More to come on the end of sprint things, we might have some bigger updates here soon
- We all worked on our individual research proposals
- Adding literature reviews to these to help faculty reviewers understand our goals
And that’s all for now folks! Have a great holiday!