With Armageddon this week and Pax the following week, we needed to make a push for polish this week. Again, I made a number of improvements regarding Klepto’s arm and grappling. I fixed an issue which occasionally prevented people from grappling with the Right Trigger on the Xbox controller. The indicator now scales and fades in when the grapple point comes in-view or in-range. Additionally, the arm has become more stable, thanks to getting some assistance from the people that developed the rope physics plugin we are using. When the player drops a crate, if they are near a pressure plate, the crate will automatically snap to the pressure plate.
I also edited a couple trailers. One was for Armageddon and one was for our accelerator application and is now on our Itch.io page. The reception for Armageddon was generally positive and served as a good stress test as a number of crashes and bugs revealed themselves as the crowds came to play. Throughout the week, I spent a lot of time working on the PS4 port of the game. After many issues with getting a build working, I was finally able to get one with a simple scene. There were issues with shaders that I had to fix and unfortunately, the physics arm won’t work on PS4. After the success with the simple scene, I attempted to port Level 3 to the PS4. The performance was terrible. I am working through a guide online to improve the performance but so far, the improvements have been fairly minimal. I think I will need to add more walls to box in each section of the level so that occlusion culling can work better in this level as it is currently quite open.
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Using the Unity profiler, I noticed that the massive frame spikes we were experiencing seemed to be caused by garbage collection. I researched how I could reduce the amount of garbage our code was generating. We were already caching much of our data so most of the garbage was generated by creating new strings, concatenating strings and using yield return 1 instead of yield return null in coroutines. After spending time in many of the game’s scripts I was able to minimize the frame spikes caused by garbage generation.
Another performance boost came from using Unity’s occlusion culling. I set up my level to support occlusion culling by using mountains and other assets to break up the level. The resulted in a not insignificant performance boost. A variety of fixes were made to the grappling this week. The grapple indicator was improved with new assets to make it easier to read. The indicator handles onscreen in-range, onscreen out-of-range, off-screen in-range, and off-screen out-of-range. The way that pushing and pulling when the player is too close or too far from the grapple point works has been changed. This improves the smoothness of the motion while preventing players from getting pushed through walls. Additionally, Klepto’s mechanical arm has been improved to be more stable. The tutorial signs got more character by giving the sign the ability to face Klepto when he is in range. I also attempted to make the text feel more like it is coming from the sign by making it the same colour and making it move in the same way. Finally, I also improved Dylan’s respawn loading screen by using a UI mask and portal image. This week was all about level design for me.
In preparation for moving into the jungle scenes full-tilt, I blocked out the entire second jungle level this week. The 'gimmick' for this level is rotating platforms, which come in two different flavours - rotating constantly and 'staggered' rotation, which stops every 90 degrees. The two different platforms are intended to introduce a bit of a timing mechanic, rather than the sometimes careless jumping that we encourage. This level is unique because it represents the first time that i have designed an entirely enclosed level from scratch. All of the previous levels that I have designed previously were designed in an open space, laying pathways and creating open areas within the scene. I like this form of limitation; it keeps the level focused and within scope, and is a challenge to create puzzles and activities for. I have created the entire level mechanically, save for the portal at the end of the level. Either next week or the week after I will decorate it, and it should be fully integrated as part of the jungle world by the start of week 7. I'm pretty happy with the similarities between the first and second levels - both of them use pressure plates as the main facilitator of progress, and the second level also includes some new quirks. I have been experimenting with using 'jump-cut' camera scenes to show players things like transitions, opening/closing doors, etc. I think it makes the level a little more explanatory, and allows the player to quickly understand if they've opened a door. In the future i'll probably use this kind of system in other levels as we move forward. This was a big week when it came to rehashing the character as I started to attempt on re animating the jump and redoing some death animations that we needed to add for Dylan’s level. I am proud of the death animations that I had done but I was unable to implement both animations, as the player animator was much unorganised. This was not a good sign for what was to come, as I would and try to attempt to edit the games jump animation. I was able to edit the old animations without too much of hassle and was able to ask for help from the programmers about the animator. While changing this animation, we were also able to fix animation bugs. Whilst updating these animations, we decided to animate the landing animations as well. This took quite a while to set this up but I think everyone is happy with the result. After this I started on modelling the Viewmaster which would be the level select.
This week I worked on props and environmental assets for the new Jungle levels. The vases were designed to look hand painted. I achieved a good painterly look in substance using brushes and normals under the brush strokes to add weight like paint. The throne and statue were also done a little differently from the usual Wild west stuff ive done. These were both sculpted in Zbrush and then re topologised and textured using a proceedural stone/rock jungle material i made in substance designer. The throne base was also sculpted and then used to bake normals to achieve the tiled stone effect.
Blog Week 4
This week we have Armageddon. The final build is ready to roll, so not a lot of art has been done this week. We’re all really excited to show the game off again and get some more feedback. Kids have often been the best source, as they are so brutally honest. For the Armageddon build, we will just be focusing on the Wild West World, the Jungle World isn’t far enough along to be ready to show yet. We’ve set up a debug menu to access each level with the hit of a button, so it should be easy to give people a taste of each section of the game quickly. 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. Dillan 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. This has been a very productive week for the team with a variety of major improvements and mechanical tweaks making their way into the game. The new plasma barriers have now been incorporated into the game and act as the electric fences with the exception being that they kill the player upon contact. The players death animation has also been implemented into the game and is triggered when killed by plasma fences or turret bullets. Some of the players facial animations have also been added to the game such as the “wind face” when using the helicopter hand. The glider levels have also been improved by creating a new floppy drive pick – up which can be used on the glider sections to guide the player in the direction that they are supposed to be following. It also gives the player something extra to do whilst flying on the glider and provides a slightly harder challenge. The respawning of the player has also been improved to use a circular, cartoonish styled screen fade before respawning the player at their previous checkpoint. This works well as it helps to hide the player model from teleporting to their new destination and provides more feedback to the player when dying. Other than this, we have now also implemented asynchronous loading between scenes into the game. This simultaneously loads the next scene whilst a screen is displayed to cover the view of the scene from loading. This stops the abrupt loading of scenes, which previously existed and caused the transitions between scenes to appear jarring and sudden. This level transitioning has also been paired with a new screen fade that fades the screen to black before loading the next scene, providing a much smoother transition. This loading screen now also features a loading bar that gives the player an indication as to how long the game will take to load. The following week will be a busy one as we prepare and finalise our build to show case at Armageddon on the weekend.
This week, we divided the team up in order to both finish off the Wild West world and also get cracking on the Jungle world. I started off the week with research and some quick concepts, and set to work making plants and platforms for the levels. Juane also made some plants, such as grass and vines. As well as this, I started some tests on the skybox, testing out how to layers things, and which colours would work the best with the colours of the new world. I made a new flat, cardboard tree for the Jungle world, and Scott replicated my tree perfectly and made two more, whilst I was busy re-texturing Klepto for the final time. Juane spent a lot of the week fixing things, optimising things, and testing things out, and he was largely responsible for the tutorial sign guy.
Corne built a modular train-rail/minecart track set to be used to flesh out the levels a bit more in a final art pass. This week we really wanted to get all of the assets we had made implemented into the game. We also made a reasonably simple change to the tutorial section, by adding a new character, the tip sign guy. We had the sign rigged up so that it would follow the player as they walked by, and we added some googly eyes for him to stare at the player with. I also made some glow in the dark stars and planets for the skybox, which juane made fade in and out, and float around in the sky, which looks cool. Some cardboard clouds, and a cardboard moon are the final things I made this week. This is the final weeks work before we show at Armageddon PAX, so this week was a big one. This week I finished the last of the Wild West mine props. The track is modular with start and end pieces with a middle piece that connects them. The track switch is an additional level prop to give a bit of character to the levels. I started working on a rock material for the Jungle levels. The first 2 Jungle rocks i made were textured with this procedural material. I also re worked the In game UI elements for the grapple hook. These were not working as intended and added confusion to players in our play tests. The new UI elements allow the player to be fully aware of whether or not they are in range and where the grapple point actually is when off screen.
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