This week I had to work on finishing on the research essay for the other class as it was due on that Friday. This meant that I had to prioritise this over the prototype until Friday afternoon. As soon as I had submitted, I went to work straight onto the animations for the security guard. The main two animations that we needed was the animation where the player would lose the security guard. There wasn’t too much reference when it came to this type of animation so I got real stuck.
After being unable to finish that animation, I went home and started again with a different reference. Zac suggested I take a look at the types of animations in The Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker and the Sly Cooper series. What I noticed is that these two types of animations were quite short and you didn’t really realise what the animation looked like. I went to having it way more simplified whilst still using the stopping animation from the failed animation before. I was also in the mood for doing another animation so I decided to start on the animation where the security guard would spot the character. I remember that Dylan wanted an animation that looked like a a karate move. I started this animation without any reference but I started to find it hard to get the timing right again. So I decided to record myself doing the animation to get the motion on the legs and the arms to look realistic and have better flow. I also tried writing down the key positions of the animation. Stated the start of the jumping, when it started to arc, when it started to fall, when the character makes contact with the ground and when the character recovers from the ground shock.
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This week was all about bringing in the art elements we have all been working on, and getting them into the grey box level to replace temporary assets. I spent most of the week tweaking assets and making textures for them. Working with the programmers we managed to integrate most of the assets we needed. In keeping within our art style I aimed for interesting textures without too much visual noise. We have an art style that is quite flat. Use of normal hard brushes in Substance painter helped give a bit of character to the assets. I also worked on the UI with Josh. We came up with the idea to have a main menu where the character is being chased by a guard down an endless corridor. I did a bunch of logo mock ups. The fonts i chose to use are all in the public domain. This helps avoid any issues down the line with copyright. For the logo the Klepto name is Adumu.tff and the "space thief" is Gravity.tff
This week, was just getting a good review from Armageddon. Me, Jaune and Conrad were the representatives for our game while the other team members were steadily working on the game. It was an interesting experience being in an Exhibitor at an expo as big as Armageddon. Even though it was the Wellington, there was a very large amount of people there.
As the targeted age for our game was toward the younger populous, it seemed that we did attract just that type of player. It was really encouraging sitting next to them and they saying that it was quite enjoyable. Some of the major issues that was brought up was the fact that the double jump usually didn’t work when jumping from platform to platform. Another was that the grapple points were too hard to see when playing for the first time with conflicting signs that were displayed next to them. When you came up to the lights, there would be a Y symbol and then before the lights, there was a button press. Other requests were that the character would maybe need more customisations, but I didn’t take them too seriously. It could be a good addition to the game, to design your own protagonist for a play former. Overall I thought the game was received well at Armageddon and the general statement was that “it’s been a while since I player a platformer” and that “it was pretty fun”. The last comment was not a joke, but I still thought it was pretty funny. A lot of work went into the project this week and something resembling a game happened to emerge. The team went from being incredibly stressed to quite content with the game’s current state. At the beginning of the week, we were pretty satisfied with the game’s mechanics we had developed up to that point. However, we did not have a vertical slice level and the Armageddon level was designed as a mechanics playground so we did not wish to use that. Zac and I spent an evening designing a new level and I proposed that we use ProBuilder to create it as this would be the fastest option. We quickly familiarised ourselves with the tool and the next day began working on the level. We split the level into 3 scenes for a couple reasons. The first is that the programmers would be able to each work on a part of the level simultaneously. Secondly, with the vertical slice deadline approaching, we did not have enough time to significantly optimise and therefore decided that we would have smaller scenes with greater detail than one larger scene with less detail. I created the middle scene of the level. The goal of my scene was to challenge the player with moving platforms, introduce multiple guards in a room including a lookout guard and introduce the grappling mechanic. The moving platforms are positioned around a large stack of crates. On top of the crates is a trophy collectable (I will explain this later). This trophy is visible to the player when they enter the room but it can only be accessed by jumping across the moving platforms and climbing onto the stack of crates from the back. This trophy presents only a small amount of challenge. After the moving platforms, the player is led through a corridor to the next room. The next room is much darker and resembles a mysterious office after hours. Two guards patrol this room. One is doing the rounds on the office floor and another is perched on a balcony. The guard on the balcony cannot chase the player if he is alerted to the player’s presence. Instead, his role is to alert his buddy on the ground with the AI’s shout system. The player must time their movement with the balcony guard’s facing to cross the room to the hallway on the far side unnoticed. This room features desks which allow the player to take advantage of the character’s small size as the character can fit underneath these desks and evade detection. Under one of these desks is a trophy. The player is drawn to the hallway on the far side by a bright light. Once the light is reached, the player must climb up some crates and enter an air duct where they will emerge in the next room. The final room for my scene is the introduction of the grappling hook. Similar to the Armageddon level, the grappling hook is first used in an area where the player cannot die as there is a floor underneath to prevent the player from falling. After this, the player must grapple across two grapple points with an endless floor below. There is also another opportunity for a trophy in this room for more advanced players. Players can swing to a balcony on the side and clamber across some pipes to retrieve the trophy. The player then lands on a platform after the two grapple jumps and enters a door which commences the third part of the level. I put a lot of hours into my scene and I’m very happy with how it turned out. We decided to make the character run when a button is held rather than require the player to gently push the stick for long stretches when stealth is required. It also more clearly defines the states between sneaking and running. When you are running it is now very obvious that you are making noise. As I mentioned before, I added trophies into the game as loot which supplements the money earned from pickpocketing guards. I reused the trophy model from the prototype, tweaked the colour values, made it spin and added a particle effect and voila: a trophy collectable. It also does a little dance when you pick it up. This week for the guards I made a couple changes. Firstly, I changed how the load checkpoint function works so that it will always put the guard back to its position at the start of the scene and reset its state too. This is because if a guard was right next to a player when the game was saved and then loaded the guard would keep killing the player. Secondly, I made the guard’s flashlights change colour to reflect the state that they are in. If they are unaware, they have a yellow flashlight and if they are chasing the player or searching for the player, their flashlight becomes red. Conrad made an emissive map for the guard which lets the flashlight bulb also emit light and I made sure to pass the correct colour to this as well. This week I also built the main menu for the game which currently only has two options: start and exit. It features the main character endlessly running along a hallway while being chased by a guard. The characters aren’t actually moving: they are just stuck in the run animation. An overhead light, crates and the walkway beneath them all move to give the illusion of the characters running. The overhead light and walkways work by being moved along past the player then having their positions pushed back when they reach a threshold to give the illusion of the objects moving endlessly. I wanted the crates to have a little more variance so I create them at runtime, move them along and destroy them when they’ve reached a certain threshold outside of the camera's view. I randomised the spawn interval, crate layout and which side they spawned on. I am super happy with how this menu turning out as it looks great and captures the theme of the game nicely. Finally, I spent a few hours producing a more visually interesting death text. When the player is caught now, the gameplay freezes, the bloom slightly intensifies and a soft red and blue flashing light appears. A cell door rolls in from the right of the screen and the word ‘BUSTED’ appears in front of the cell door. At this point, the player must press ‘A’ or ‘SPACE’ to reload to the previous checkpoint. I made the cell door in illustrator and gave the illusion of depth using gradients. I’m overall quite happy with how this turned out, however, I think the text could look more interesting.
This week was continuing along a trend that we set the previous week. After Josh and I designed the level, we split up as a group and worked on different parts of the level. Fairly early on into development, we decided that the level would be slightly more interesting if it was set on a space station.
As i was assigned the first scene of the level, I had a few goals and tasks to achieve to teach the player the mechanics. 1. Teach movement - both walking/running around and jumping (both single and double) 2. Teach players about AI characters and how best to avoid them. 3. Teach players that good items/collectibles are located off the beaten path. I came up with the idea for a station-based level primarily based off the concern that a lot of our areas would seem too 'plain'. Adding large, transparent areas in various styles as windows made the level feel a lot more interesting. For the first part of the level, I tried to emulate a standard lobby-type area, which evolved to one under construction when it came to achieving the goals of the level. The big crate is intended to force the player to double jump. The area is designed to encourage the player to first move left before moving right. Next, the player walks down a larger hallway, and has to jump over a few small obstructions (reinforcing jumping further) Next, the player is presented with an area that allows them to analyze the situation before they attempt it. They are granted vision of a guard on a simple patrol, and are able to see both opaque and transparent objects. The scene is designed to be clumsy for the AI to navigate smoothly, which aids the player further. Off to the side is the level's first 'treasure', on top of a desk. Such treasures will be used as rewards for players to encourage moving off the normal linear path within a level. Finally, this week I also was able to work on sound. I spent several hours recording and finding appropriate sounds for the game, and will implement them all with a custom sound manager on Monday. I have also found a 'main theme' for our title that fits the tone of the game. All that is left is the mad dash for the finish! This week was the week I got my hands dirty and cleaned up some lighting issues, Implemented post effects, small editing of animations/systems and creation of particle systems. I created a laser that has a small animation. I also worked close with Dylan to fix some issues with the grappling. I decided to make an announcement of sort and give a sneak peak to our followers on facebook. This post blew us away by reaching over 1800 people within 2 days. Compared to our other posts which average 150-200. We plan to create more amazing scenes to produce a greater fan base. In addition to the facebook post I also took the liberty to update the forum post on Blender artists you can view some of the comments here: blenderartists.org. Below this you will notice some Gifs of particle systems I edited. While I also edited the particle system that Scott had created for the Samurai prototype to fit into the game (the hit/sparks). The smoke/fire particles were made by simulating the effect in Blender and rendering them out into individual images and then later combined into an 8k texture map (this can be reduced in the quality settings of Unity).
This week I managed to get my sticky paws on a build that has the animation prerequisites that I had been asking to have for a while now. These included velocity parameters, turning angles and values for the grapple attachments and so fourth. I did have to tinker with some scripts to get the correct values that I was looking for which took a little longer than I would have liked. I also cleaned up the folder structure and realized that the player model that was being used was not the correct one. What was happening was that someone had been using an old model and importing the animations from another model meaning that animations would not align and get distorted. After cleaning the model up I threw the character back together with the correct player mesh and rig. Once there I could work on the animation pipeline. I removed some animations that weren't being used and added a bunch more. I further demonstrated by play testing and refining animation transitions and timing. I implemented the use of blend trees with blend trees inside of it. I changed the animations that Scott had created and refined them to loop better and structure better with the jump and landing animations. There is still more to be done on the player animations such as the grapple hook and timed animation states that activate at a certain time in the animation to make it feel better. None the less we are slowly getting a better and better character as the development time continues.
This week we prepare for Armageddon, and with it I tried to create something that the players there would be able to figure out. So I created a controller that would represent the buttons that are needed to use in that certain situation. The controller would appear in and out when the player is near and would disappear when the player completes the given task. We departed for wellington on the Wednesday so due to traveling and not being able to access my computer, things were limited to what I could do on my laptop. However the game was presented and played by many. The main feedback that was given about the game was mainly mechanics based. I would relay the feedback with the programmers so that we could make changes appropriately. Some of the feedback is what follows; * "The game feels slidey" * "It would be nice if the jumping would work better" * "It's hard to tell what button to press" I noticed that players sometimes got confused when entering the vents and would not know where to go and so i would help them generally. The overall trip was great to try and get it out there and have people test it, we had a few hiccups as every game does in critical time, but progress none the less.
Blog post for (6/06/2017)
This week I was sick and sitting at home trying to help as much as I can. I was mainly focusing on how the player would work within the game world and researching how other games do their mechanics and animations. Looking into Rachet and Clank and Jak and Daxter heavily for influences on these subjects. Nothing visual to provide from me, but more study by watching videos, I also looked at how squash and stretch how I might be able to implement that into the player rig. However; that was out of my capabilities this far into the vertical slice. Week 6 was mostly about our programming team working on alternative projects, while the rest of the team filtered back in after the Armageddon weekend. The feedback received was mostly iterated upon, and fell into a few different categories:
The biggest change on the title that I worked on during the week was to change the action buttons for the grappling hook. When using an Xbox ONE controller, I found issues with using the right bumper to attach the grappling hook to a grapple point. I switched the button to the trigger as an alternative, and found it surprisingly comfortable. I personally prefer the press-to-connect grappling style (like Wind Waker) but I understand why others would prefer it - it adds an extra level of complexity and meaning to the gameplay. I am unsure if it is an issue with the Xbox one controller or not, but the trigger felt far better than the right bumper. I have also started work on the first level, expanding and designing the initial level based on the feedback that we received. The introduction has been redesigned to introduce mechanics slightly slower, and will transition smoothly into an expanded version of the rest of the level. Next week I will focus on this area as well, fleshing out the rest of the level until I am satisfied that it is sufficient enough. |
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