With the Alpha deadline approaching, this was absolutely the most productive sprint of the quarter. As a team, we have a combined 272 hours of tracked work for the past two weeks. For the Alpha build, the programming team did a ton of bug fixes, but ultimately spent it's time getting in as many of the mechanics in the game as possible, as thoroughly as could be done. Because of that, we've ended up with working shooting on both the human and dragon, a health framework, a newly functioning HUD, a new map layout, and many updates to old features. The art team also did a fantastic job updating from our old graybox the real aesthetic. The Human character is fully textured with a glowing bow, the dragon has blue flames coming from it's body, and most noticeably the environment is now vibrant and filled with art assets. The old hexagons are now stylized islands with ruins spread across them, and both our characters have original animations in them (some hand made, some motion captured) Pros: The team was incredibly productive this sprint. We took the game from a jumbled mess of a graybox to a genuine representation of our game. While there are still many bugs, and plenty of the features are incomplete, the amount of work put in to this was incredible and we believe it shows.
Cons: Not all of the mechanics are finished, and plenty are buggy. Not all of our art made it's way in to the game as we'd hoped, and integrating ended up taking longer than expected.
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On the programming side of our team a lot of things were accomplished. First and foremost, our 3 main programmers worked together for many hours and were able to find a fix for our biggest game breaking bug, hooray! This bug made it so the inputs done on the client side game was not being read by the server. The fixes were applied to all the characters and we no longer have this issue. Kevin also continued his work on the AI behavior trees for our island movement and made great progress. The islands will now move around each other when connected to the main base islands instead of just getting stuck. Josh spent time getting combat into the game, as well as working to retarget the default Unreal animations to the male character that Sally brought into the game. Pat worked on remaking the main menu UI for the game. Ruben updated our menu AI so that IPs can now be manually entered in the game instead of hard coding it into the game like it was previously done.
On the art side a lot of progress was also made. Ricardo and Rob did another motion capture session and were able to clean up all the data and even started applying it to our male character. Ricardo worked on rigging our alpha dragon in preparation for the animations and implementation into the game. Sally worked on finishing up the rig for the female character as well as going back and adding additional armor to both the male and female character. Healthy started work on environmental ruins for the game as well as creating monoliths and altars for the island capturing system. Matt and Rob worked on creating modular building assets so that buildings can easily be created in engine. Riley finished up the rough alpha dragon model and created a bow and arrow model for the male character.
In other news!! We were contacted by the Drexel Audio Post Club and we were assigned 3 juniors and 1 senior! We can't wait to get to know them and know what they are focusing on so we can figure out all of the audio for the game. Starting at Week 3, most of the time was spent in our individual programming/art teams, where the programming team focused discussing changes to the game play, trying to figure out exactly how we wanted this game to play, along with adjusting our initial game design based on the Week 2 presentation with the faculty. On the art side it has been mostly been concepting, with creation of character and environmental concept art, as well as some rough models for the greybox. After the disastrous presentation, we had spent a lot of time pulling ourselves together. We still believe we have a good game idea, but lack of sleep and practice is what led to the failure we had for communicating this idea. After meeting with Wagner, we took a step back to nail down the details of the pitch, game idea, and game concept in general. With Wagner’s advice, we developed a paper prototype, to try and test different game mechanics and design choices, and made significant progress on how the respawning and Island movement will work, along with how combat encounters between 2 teams will work We also developed our GDD (see below), which has almost all of the primary design choices for the game, and will help guide the programmers with their work. As for the programming side, there has been some progress, with Networking IPConnection working, as well as more work on the primary game mode, with more progress on capturing islands and monolith building.
-Insert Network IPConnection picture here- https://docs.google.com/document/d/13H5HFZIjrCVwLf61U1Nqzdoz6kGS2KMzmQpwi87XvwU/edit?usp=sharing This week was really productive meeting wise. Ruben, Riley, Robert, Matt, and Ricardo had a meeting with Tony Rowe to discuss game design and mechanics. Some massive changes happened to the game which brought us back to the drawing board. We got rid of the objective system and focused on only one objective game mode. We also took feedback from some of the professors in the first pitch presentation and decided to start investigating networking within Unreal Engine 4. If the testing and demoing turns out to be successful our game will be a networked online game.
Our concept artists also started working on more designs for the small enemies in the game. They also went back and revised past concept art. Positive: We decided on the new direction for the game and a lot of us think it is going in a much stronger direction. The concept art for the new enemies turned out great. Negative: Sadly our adviser was away from campus this week so we were not able to meet with him to discuss all of the changes that were made to the game. |
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