I made good progress with the PS4 version of the game this week. The performance is stable now, except for one part of the level I need to improve. I also fixed the menus not working on PS4. Just a few more tweaks and that will be fine. I spent a lot of time this week populating Zac’s level with props, continued from last week. The theme of this level is rotating platforms so I incorporated cogs into many parts of the level. I also had to make sure that rooms that structurally looked similar were easy to tell apart. This meant I would make one look very green with an abundance of vines and ferns, and the other would be filled with other props such as vases. Additionally, instead of an endless pit, this temple is filled with water which will kill the player upon contact. I added the Arcade Token in the level atop some fires. It is not immediately obvious how to access this coin. The player must glide from a higher platform to a rock then climb a series of bricks to reach the token.
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Over the weekend, the entire group (save Dylan) jetted over to Melbourne, where we exhibited at PAX Australia, courtesy of Media Design School.
The 3 days on the booth provided a huge amount of information for us - namely, that the first level actually serves as a poor introduction in a convention space. Players want to get into the game quickly, spend a short while playing, and then move on to the next booth or stand. The first level only has movement around and jumping, so it is not that great for showing off what is unique about KLEPTO. From Saturday onwards, every time I reset the game, I would set it to one of the later levels (3/4/5) because players found it way easier to get into the title and play for a while, because the first level was not only boring but weirdly designed. Some other issues I found included explaining the pressure plates to players - explained in the second level and very few actually played that - and general mechanical mastery. I expect that if players had to play through all 5 levels sequentially, they would not have an issue progressing eventually. The convention setting means that many players simply don’t ‘get into’ the title as much when they are pressed for time or eager to go and see another stand. Smaller-scale playtests with other students result in the majority of them pressing through the first two levels to get to the more structured and interesting levels - much like a properly structured title. Another issue I noticed was the way that the levels were presented - currently the jungle levels we are working on look much better, because of our usage of assets. The transition to closed-area environments definitely helped the presentation of the next world, and pending the move into accelerator we will certainly be changing the different ways that we approach level design - mainly looking at it from an environmental perspective first, before diving in and adding puzzles in each area. Weeks 7 & 8 should be all polish polish polish, and make sure that we're ready for the final submission, which we are on the verge of already. This week I spent primarily working on my own assignments that I had put on hold in order to work on Klepto. The following weeks will be similar.
For the art team, it was getting ready for PAX where we were could to display our game at the MDS booth. There were not a lot of touch ups in terms of art, just filling up the world which Corne and the programmers were able to do as the build for Armageddon was going to be the same build we would take to PAX. Dylan was able to change the title screen to be more captivating by adding different variations of Klepto being chased by the security guard. He also was able to fill out the world with more props in the earlier levels. The 6th week of the gold build was just refining and optimising the game to be able to work on the PS4. Again, there was little to do in terms of the art side of things as soon as we got back from PAX, most of the artist needed to work on other assignments.
The first half of this week was a write off due to Melbourne games week. I learnt so much while we were in Melbourne. Some hard lessons learnt and great contacts made. I managed to design and create the assets for the loading screen. Using a side render view of Kleptos run cycle we made an animated loading element. The radial loading bar was inspired by my design for the Grapple hook targeting reticule UI element. I managed to also model and texture from a high poly sculpt. The textures were also done with an new pipeline which uses PRTpn maps from Xnormal. When baked into the diffuse map they really helped make my metallic values stand out and look nice and warm.
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