Development Log 2 (31 Oct-6 Nov)

Hello all, and welcome back to the development of Primed State. We had a good week with lots of progress and only a few times was I left pulling my hair out!

Art

We had Emily produce some more concept art and begin work on the assets to match. I really can’t praise her skill enough for taking an empty space and working out how to make it look interesting without it becoming excessively cluttered.

Polina had the pleasure of creating our game’s logo on top of the other tasks she was managing. Below we can also see the progress of the UV unwrapping and the AO (ambient occlusion) baking.

Finn continued work on the character model and finalised all the greater detail pieces. He also had to rerig the character a few times due to some initial animation bugs, but we will get to that in a moment.

Hazel’s work on the enemy continued as well, giving it greater detail and a proper rig to help us work out how it would animate later.

Programming

Gary took the enemy and gave it life! The enemy has several states it can be in, and now, they are fully functional. A simple patrolling along a path, moving towards the player and firing, a malfunctioning state where it fires everywhere rapidly and a stunned state when hit by the ERD three times.

Lachlan began work on optimising the game, by recycling the enemy shots through a pool, along with giving us designers a visual tool for the magnets’ effect range. Both of these changes will help us in the long term and I can say that the visual range is far easier to use than relying on numerical values.

Andrew has been getting the UI elements to work for us, this includes features such as the EMP, hearts and a simple start menu.

Design

Our animations, while only being placeholders for now, give the game some life rather than just the character T-posing and enemies sliding along the floor.

That's not to say that getting the animations to work was an easy task. Here are just two of the bugs that happened whilst trying to implement them.

Greyboxing the next stage of our level is coming along. I had to rework some of the level several times while discussing with Aruna, who drew the paper plans, to get a more natural flow and difficulty curve. The first room following the tutorial areas was much too difficult before alteration.

Our dialogue and narrative has also progressed with the decisions of what lines will be needed to teach the player the game’s mechanics. Because the tutorial is part of the game’s environment, consideration has to be made about how it fits the narrative.

Our sound design continues to progress, with several sounds nearing finalisation. A major focus with this section is to ensure the sound groups are cohesive, with each sound feeling like it makes sense as part of the group without any standing out as odd. Implementation of sounds into Unity has also begun, though placeholders are being used for now.