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. A TON of new work was done throughout these last two weeks. We had a few meetings and realized we weren't in too good of shape and had a lot of catch up to do. And I am hopeful that that is what we did. A lot of our mechanics had basic framework done but either didn't work or had a ton of bugs to fix. Bugs. Bugs. And bugs. I think the majority of the programming team's time was on fixing bugs. Honestly, I think we might have to set some guidelines or do something because we seem to have a routine of adding code into the game that we know either doesn't work, has a lot of bugs, or without testing. These last two weeks I spent the majority of my time trying to get the capturing system down on both server and client. This includes UI work, adding the monoliths and alter, creating and setting destructible meshes, and more. Holy crap did this take a lot of work. Unfortunately, I was unable to get the whole system working. NETWORKING IS TERRIBLE. The other time was spent on the dragon projectile(for combat and destruction of monoliths) and bug fixes. Pros:
Got A LOT of stuff done. The logic is done for capturing, destroying, recapturing islands. Lots of bug fixes. Cons: Networking is our biggest enemy. Lots more bugs. Habit of pushing bad code into projects, leading to more time on bug fixing. Lots of little bugs/code we didn't fix because of time constraints. The team can be a little hostile at times. HOURS WORKED: 40 HOURS The last two weeks were very productive for finishing/adding features to the game. I got the shooting to the point where it's a complete representation of the mechanic fit for the Alpha build. The health system is also implemented (although only complete enough to show the mechanic in the build). One of the biggest problems I had was making events that worked perfectly on the server work on the client as well. Sometimes I'd get just the server working, other times the client would seem like it worked but not show on the server, vice versa, and more. Looking back near the end of the quarter, despite fixing a lot of our gameplay design, adding networking to the game was a huge challenge. We understood it would be, but it's still impossible to have predicted the amount of time that went in.
Along with the implemented mechanics, I finally fixed a ton of bugs that were in the game. The HUD now works client side and on the dragon, no grappling to yourself or falling while grappling, and lots of other small less noticeable bugs that piled up. Pros: Many bugs fixed Health and Shooting in the game (albeit still buggy) Very productive Cons: Not as many features as I hoped by now Always more bugs Despite being productive when I was on campus, when I was away for the vacation I didn't have access to Unreal. Thankfully my computer just got fixed and it won't be a problem for winter break. Hours Worked: 38 These passed 2 weeks were suffering. After meeting with our Adviser last week following our previous presentation, we set up a large amount of milestones to achieve before the Alpha pitch. A crazy amount of time was spent all over the project, adding new feature, fixing bugs, and integrating art assets to try and reach the alpha deadline. Personally, I spent majority of my time on many new features, including fixing timer/win state, working on dragon combat/cross hair aiming, large amount of bug fixing, and integrating both the new environmental art assets and dragon effects/animations into unreal. New Map with Environment: Part of the Dragon BP Pros: More work has been done, art has finally been integrated, networking in better condition, nearly all functionality of dragon and riders in, Island vertical movement integrated, code not fully implemented yet though. Although rough, we have enough functions in to get a good game in for beta.
Cons: Networking is destroying us. Every function we try to add, we must spend another day or two figuring out how to get it to work over the server. Just getting everything to work on both server and client has severely affected our progress, and there is no easy solution to it. I am wholly convinced that if we weren't convinced by the faculty in week 4 to adopt networking and have local multiplayer, we would have nearly all of the functions we cut already. Hours worked over passed 2 weeks: 39 hours
These past two weeks were actually so incredibly productive for me! I spent a lot of my time the first week finishing up cleaning up my animations in MotionBuilder and getting them ready to bring into the game. Since I already had experience of using motion capture in games from my game workshop game, I had somewhat of a sense of how to do this process, but I had always had trouble perfectly looping animations so my walk cycles were never 100% perfect. However late one night while I was working and following a tutorial that Steve Pettit sent me I stumbled upon a feature that was not taught in that tutorial. Basically what it does is that it easily and painlessly transfers the rotation and transformations of a keyframe from the first part of an animation to the very last frame of an animation, resulting in a perfect loop! This literally made me cry tears of joy because it is going to make my life so much easier as we continue to go through our motion capture pipeline. The animation I am most proud of is the male walk cycle because I was able to go through the base animation in MotionBuilder and then add a whole bunch of supporting key framed animation on top of that to give it a much more realistic look. The resulting walk cycle was pretty good! I’m uploading that to SketchFab and will be showing that below. (I just realized the animation on SketchFab has some skipping at the end. I promise this is not the case in game.
I spent the second week while on Thanksgiving break learning how to implement characters and animations into Unreal Engine 4 using Persona. This took a lot of time but I was finally able to implement the male character animations into the game. I ran into some problems with Persona automatically blending two animations together, but I found out that making those motion capture clips longer could sometimes fix the problem! I also got all of the dragon animations into the game.
Pros: I was so productive and spent the majority of my Thanksgiving break working because going home to visit "family" is overrated. I was also able to learn Persona and I feel like I'll be a lot more helpful to the programming team when I'm working in engine now. I also found that it's so much fun to work in engine! Cons: The blending between some the run and sprint animation is not perfect and it really irks me, but it shows that our pipeline work so this will be fixed during winter break. The idle animation looping is broken now also... I will also fix this over break. Time spent: 30 hours. Up next: MORE ANIMATION INTEGRATION. ALSO I'M GOING TO CUBA THIS WEEKEND AND IT'S GONNA BE AWESOME AND I'M GONNA BUY SOME CUBAN CIGARS. For last few weeks, I have focused on getting in new UI assets into the game. I have redesigned the mainmenu level and redesigning the settings to match our theme of the game. All the UI assets are in for the Alpha besides the settings. I will work on with this issue as soon as possible. The blueprints wouldn't migrate and if it migrates, there were tons of errors that shows up on the compile. I will have to rework on the blueprints. I wish I got the settings in by alpha but it is too late right now. The settings match the game and the mini map is there to prove that we have the mini map for our game.
Pro: Most UI for the Alpha is in Mini Map needs work but it is in the build This would be the last term that I will take 20 credits Cons: Should of finished the settings but Unreal is being unreal Mini Map should be more like MOBA mini map type Should of worked on HUD this week but didn't have enough time because of other finals. Last Two Weeks Hour Spent: 22hours and 4minutes So the brunt of my work this last two weeks was creating and applying an animated texture to the dragon character for the magic effects. Originally this was planned to be particles, however using an animated texture instead will be overall easier to implement into other parts of the game such as the weapons and human characters, along with being far more efficient when compared to using particles. The effect produced is similar, and is easy to modify as the effect is created using a series of alpha masks that can easily be swapped out. For the alpha build, planes were made with the texture applied and parented to the dragon rig. However, I was having issues using perforce on my computer, and having trouble uploading the files on other computers, so I pretty much had to remake the plane setup. Pros: Rather Productive Week, Fall term is ending so no more production classes, meaning more focus can be placed on the project from now on.
Cons: overall not as much work done or implemented as I'd have hoped.
I had to make adjustments to the rig so I would be able to have decent animations for alpha. I also started on making more environmental assets. Although I did not need to work on those, I believe they helped our game a lot. Each environmental piece took me some time, but in the end, they do help our game. I also was able to start animations. I struggled getting decent animations. I complied a list of things that need to change. I’ve done more than usual, but I’ve done so little in comparison to Sally. But going forward, I will have more time and no excuses for how much work I get done. Here are some of my things and scroll down all the way for my pros and cons!
Pros:
We are in an okay state for Alpha Going forward, I know what needs to change for our rig. I know what needs to be changed for our dragon. I know what I want for a dragon animation and how I can get there. I just need more than one week to do it. NO MORE PRODUCTION HEAVY CLASSES! SPROJ GETS ALL MY ATTENTION NOW! Just like the clingy boyfriend I never wanted. Con: Our rig will most likely be completely redone. But that was inevitable since I was able to figure out what needs to be adjusted on our dragon proportion-wise. I am terrified that the process for me to get the new dragon and rig will take 8 weeks to get to me for clean up… This was the worst Thanksgiving ever. After our previous presentation, I made sure to address as many concerns about our game as I could during the thanksgiving break. I think I could’ve done even more, but as an animator who has little experience with games I did spend a great teaching myself more about substance painter, zbrush, and how to transfer maps to keep our game relatively low poly than what I’m used to. Pros: I added alpha textures, normals, and ambient occlusion onto the characters. I made some environmental models such as trees and a new island that I quickly threw together. I was also able to texture Healthy’s existing buildings although everything is still very rough people can have a better idea of what to expect our game to look like. Cons: Spent time learning programs set me back a bit. I think about a fourth of the time spent on the game this week was just getting comfortable with the programs, but now that I understand them a lot better production will become more efficient. Also I think my mom hates me now because I didn’t go home for the holidays and I didn’t answer her calls because I was working on this game. It’s great for the game, but bad for me... Total hours: 35+ hours (I didn’t track my hours accurately this week because I was just working constantly on the game throughout the day)
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