Winter 2014 Week 7

On Saturday, we met up with the programmers for the first meeting with them.  It went so well that I think the group is starting to see some light at the end of the tunnel!  Our new programmers, AJ and Colton, were able to set up a Unity Version Control server for us, so not more Google drive to update the build!  We didn't have a huge program with updating through Google drive, but with version control on unity, it will be super efficient and less of a time actually uploading the work.  This also prevents issues with accidentally going back a build and working on something that was already edited.  AJ is working on the player controls, camera, and AI.  The physics and player controls of the game didn't feel correct to players, so we wanted AJ to go back and clean up some of the coding behind that.  Colton is focused on Lumi, and also getting an animation sprite box implemented for the memory shards so we have something as a placeholder for Tamarind's art in the future.  We covered mostly what we needed to fix for this level from the playtest.  A lot of it was feedback.  Players were confused what controls, what to do, and the goals of the game.  So one of the high priority things that we need to include is the integration of Memory shard collecting count.  We were wanting it to be something that revolves around Lumi rather than around the HUD.  Brice worked on a lot of Concept art that the 3D art team has been modeling for chapter 2:

Winter 2014 Week 6

I am very happy with hour the art is coming out to be in our game.  There are some things that can be polished, but the overall art progress is pretty consistent, so hands down to the art team for making our first level look awesome!  Play test went very well and we were able to get a lot of feedback on our game based on how to aesthetically make our game be dark without actually covering up the artwork, and also making the game play more interesting.  Here are screen shots from our Play test on thursday:

We also presented to two programmers our game and they were really interested! This means we finally have programmers who mainly just program and don't have to wear like 4 other hats!  This lifts the rock off of Alex, because he was our main programmer, but his focus wasn't on programming.  This allows the team to feel more confident about the project too, so it is actually interesting to play.

Winter Week 5

So one of our goals was to get all the assets completed by Saturday (yesterday) for Chapter 1.  Well, we are like 90% there.  We are still missing a couple of textures, but models wise, everything is being uploaded.
Because we will have a lot of background objects placed around, there will be a lot of setting up for the background lighting to make those objects pop out.  We have Jeff looking up a water shader and also working on NGUI!  This will help tremendously to pull our game together in aesthetic and feedback/function.
I was a little worried with how dark the setting was because of all the darkness hiding the objects's texture.  I think we might need to brighten things up, and then go in and tweak the darkness timer so that becomes to real darkness that affects the player.  Otherwise, you can't see any of the beautiful artwork that the art team has put together!

Winter Week 4

Good news!  We finally have our chapter 1 level design polished nicely!  Alex is now working on the timer mechanics to get it set right for the chapter 1 of our beach level.  We have two animation students who are also pitching in the development for our game now!  This is going to help tremendously on getting tasks done for our character animations.  We have one that is mainly working on 3D animations, and we have another student who is pitching in with the 2D animations for our game.  Here is a wireframe of how our chapter 1 is set up.  Overall, we have most of the models done and UVed, but they still need texturing, and that will be done for this upcoming weekend.