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.
With Armageddon coming up on the weekend this week was all about finalising and polishing the build to demo at the showcase. Firstly, the glider level was revamped with some new fire models which have now been used underneath the glider fans in the level. This gives the rising smoke context and provides another visual cue for the player to recognise and aim for. The glider levels lighting was also baked which increased the overall visual appearance of the level.
Other than this most of the time was spent on building and playtesting the final build for the Armageddon showcase. One of the major bugs encountered was the construction of the level select bridges after exiting different levels. Because of the new asynchronous loading system, the saving and loading manager was not functioning correctly between scenes and this was causing the issues when loading into the level select. It took a large chunk of time to find and resolve this issue however, it has now been fixed and is working as intended. We also used Unity’s profiler to try and determine the cause of the major FPS drop in the glider level. Upon doing so we discovered that the trail renderers on the wind particles in the level were causing the game to drop between 120 and 140 frames. To increase the frames during the glider level, the wind particles were changed and as a result we now have frames of up to 200 during the gliding sequence. Apart from preparation for Armageddon, I also started building the new Aztec glider terrain which will act as the canyon for the player to glide through. This glider level will differ from the first one encountered in the wild west as it follows a much more “curvy/bendy” path as opposed to the straight linear path found in the previous level. A new system has also been implemented to allow the player to disconnect from the glider and continue platforming. This allows for more diversity when building levels as it gives us the opportunity to design levels which have multiple platforming and gliding sequences. Finally, the week ended with us displaying the game at Armageddon and receiving lots of feedback on the game. Overall the feedback was very positive with most people finding the game fun and a couple of people playing through the entirety of the game for periods of up to 50 minutes. With the feedback received form Armageddon we are now ready to fix some of the issues and continue developing the game over the next week as we prepare for PAX in Australia. Much of the work I completed this week was spent developing the level I created and populating one of Zac’s jungle levels. I spent time lighting my scene to improve the feeling of being inside a dark temple. Some blueish light cascades down from openings on the roofs of the temple. I made sure to only place ferns and trees in areas touched by light. Darker rooms could use vases and statues more. One problem I had was that the large stone walls didn’t look good due to the repeating grid texture. I decided to add bricks to the walls to break up the grid and make the walls look more interesting. I also wanted to create the illusion that when the player looks down, it looks like the temple walls extend into an endless pit. To achieve this, I extended all temple walls downwards and used a black fog to fade it out. I began work on Zac’s scene by closing in some walls where necessary and adjusting the structure of the rooms to more closely resemble the rooms in the previous level. This meant adding the opening in the ceiling for the light to shine through. I also began adding some props to this scene but there is much more that needs to be done.
On Wednesday night, I headed out to PAX with other team members to show the game. We received some very positive and constructive feedback. This week is cut short since Zac and i are at Pax from the end of the week until early next week. I managed to sculpt, retopologise and texture a Jungle boulder asset for the Jungle glider section. I textured it using the proceedural material i made for the other rocks/stone assets. I also worked on a poster design using a render of Klepto that Juane made. In doing this I made a mock up of our Klepto logo which I ended up modeling in 3d and then again Juane rendered out for the final poster.
This week has been jungle work and preparation for PAX. Considering we leave tonight, I've written this prematurely to make sure that I actually do a post this week.
Jungle scenes 1 and 2 have been my primary focus this week, debugging and replacing puzzles that I didn't feel were appropriate or worst case boring. Having an entirely symmetrical level with puzzles on each side is a goal this time around, but it was starting to feel too formulaic and boring without some variance. I changed up the puzzles, as well as adding in a 'laser gate' that blocks progress for the crate. This was already planned, I just set it up and added a side passage that players must move down in order to activate it. The puzzles at the end of the level have been finished as well, with a rotated 'electric fence' on one side and a moving platform puzzle on the other. These puzzles are different enough to be interesting while also requiring a differing level of skill. I'm not hugely happy with them but they should suffice as an ending to the first jungle level. Next week we'll incorporate some of the feedback from PAX into the work that we're gonna be doing, and make sure that the jungle levels are being 'prop-ulated' in preparation for submission around end of week 7/ start of week 8. This week, most of the team flew off to Melbourne. For this reason, Klepto was effectively put on hold. We had Put as much time and effort into Klepto as we could up until Australia, and this way we would have a strong build to showcase, and after Australia, we could all focus on our final assignments without having to worry too much about Klepto. The work that went into the game in Melbourne was more networking than actual physical work.
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