Team's progress:
We had our first playable submission and demo over the last weekend and then showcased our game again on Monday in the lab. The art direction seems to be liked which include the environment but also the sprite animations. The death animations look especially awesome. Level design is something that needs to be improved. The playtesters were taking advantage of the fact that the deer enemy could be killed from a distance since the pit it was in was not low enough. Another feedback was that jumping didn't feel responsive at times when jumping off the edge of a tile. Something called "Coyote Time" was recommended where the player is allowed to jump a fraction of a second after falling off a ledge to make it feel snappier and more forgiving with the timing. We also need to implement wall jumping so that we can design the levels in a way that wall climbing can be used to access otherwise inaccessible areas. Overall good feedback from the first playtest and our team will look to make all of the changes required.
My contributions:
Since the last journal I imported all the tileset sprites we created and sliced them in Unity and created tiles. Using the tiles I created a new "Area 1" scene that we used in our playtests. I created new prefabs and updated existing prefabs with any changes and brought them into the new scene to make sure they worked there. Pouria was able to finish the deer and add a script to patrol and do a basic melee attack. I integrated that into the new scene but there were errors. I fixed what I could, like making sure objects were in the right layers to detect certain collisions and ignore others and Pouria was able to fix an issue with the deer game object.
The tiles looked weird just by themselves so I had to add a background. I found a background with over 9 layers that was meant to be used for parallax effects. I watched a video which showed the need to put them in different 'Z' depths and create the script to move them at different rates compared to the camera movement but didn't have time to implement it. I changed the background images into a "tile" type and just stretched them out to make a static background which still looked pretty good in our scene. With a parallax effect it will look even better. I created a build for Michelle to run her playtests on Saturday, since she was doing it earlier than Jason and Ray.
In between Michelle's playtests and Ray & Jason's, I added background music to the scene which fit the forest theme well, added sounds effects for the melee and ranged attacks, fixed bugs and added a respawn option and made a new build. I think the sounds really added to the immersion of the game.
Reflection:
I have a list of features which need to be added and bugs to be fixed that I will work on a little this weekend but I expect the majority of them won't be finished. I have been catching up on other classes this week and we have another Critique for IAT 410 coming up this Sunday. The critiques seem to be getting longer and longer, from 1200 to 1500 to 2000 words now.. I'll find some time to work on the project as I have to, to not fall behind but have other classes to work on this weekend so it will only be a small progress. I imagine my teammates are in a similar situation as this week has been mostly quiet compared to last week. I will need their art assets to work on Area 2 eventually when bug fixes and the new features are finished.
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