Winter 2014 Week 10

Hi everyone!  We presented our Beta build to our classmates this week, and that was a great success!  The tasks that were given this week was terrain building, finish texturing assets, importing assets to unity for chapter 2, UI tweaking, and also level tweaking.

For chapter 2, we finished the terrain, but didn't have time to go in and create correct collision for it, so we kept the prototype platforms that was used at the beginning.  Of course this level will be cleaned up and the grey terrain will be taken out.  Jeff went in and finished our Main Menu by using NGUI and importing the UI elements that I had tweaked from Brice's first pass.  Because we were running out of time, a lot of the puzzle meshes weren't placed into the Unity scene.  I think from the last quarter, our progress this quarter has been much better!  The results are great, and the pacing of everyone's work progress is definitely improving.  We also have two sound designers that we will be meeting up with on Skype this Saturday to go over the game's music.

I (Tian) also went in and created a game play video that includes me talking about the game's mechanics and aesthetics.

Here it is:

Dissonance Beta Gamplay 2014 from Tian Chen on Vimeo.

Winter 2014 Week 9

We conducted our final playtest session this Thursday and got our last batch of feedback from our playtesters. With the addition of our second blocked out level (which was redone from the diagram that Alex put together last week) people were able to see more of what we were going for with the nonlinear and puzzle components of our gameplay. Even with the placeholder programmer art, feedback was much more positive in for our game designers.

The programmers also made some serious nice progress this week, polishing off a lot of the physics for the character controller to make it feel a lot better. There were still a couple issues with a glitch that allows players to hug and jump from walls, similar to Mega Man X games. Although unintentional, people seemed to enjoy this "feature," but we don't have any plans to make this a legitimate mechanic. They'll be moving forward with some ideas they came up with to make the timer component more interesting that will also solve the problems we have with the "darkness" mask. More details on that soon.

UI, sound, and particles are the next focuses for our designers and artists. We still have things to concept for level two as we start to address the concept of enemies, but for the remainder of our winter quarter we are adding in some more of the "post-production" stuff that makes it a more polished, complete experienced. Brice and Jeff have been working on putting together the sprites and layouts necessary to construct our UI screens and AJ, one of our programmers, will be adding in any scripts we need to make them functional, particularly with the pause screen. Dantrell is working on some particle effects to show when the player has gotten their power-up boost from the memory shards. Tian is developing a method to make the memory shards stand out more so the player notices them.

The one thing we've been missing is a way of teaching the player how to play and what they're supposed to be doing. Alex has been working on tutorial level to show a completely linear way of introducing them to the memory shards and what they do. If all goes well, we'll be putting that into the build this week as well.

Winter 2014 Week 8

This past Saturday was SCAD Day, a sort of "open house" for prospective students and their parents at our school, so we set up a playtest session to be able to have people whom we've never met before and have never seen our program get a chance to play our game and get some feedback. We used the same build as we did last week so we could get a comparison of the kind of comments we received from last week with our fellow students and coworkers. Overall, from an outsider's perspective, our game is relatively strong from a design standpoint and quite strong artistically. It was interesting to compare the numbers of people noticing our first memory shard because the people who knew less about our game were more inclined to explore it. They didn't however, seem to take much of the narrative away from the game, but that's understandable because we're still not in a state where our narrative elements have been implemented.

The programmers have made some headway on the build. The Xbox controller has been fully mapped and integrated into the game with any the UI left to sync up to the new control scheme. The only reason why we didn't use it for the playtest is because the camera has somehow zoomed in really close to the player character, so the player would have been unable to see. More development on that soon, but Dissonance, from a technical standpoint, is progressing swimmingly.

Chapter 2 has a level diagram now and Alex, our level designer, is in the process of blocking it out. We also have Nicole, one of our artist, developing a tutorial level to take place before chapter 1 and show the player what the objective is in a more natural learning environment. Other members of our team have been working on their own level ideas, so our level design has had all hands on deck this past week.

Nicole, Jeff, and Brice have been working on UI layouts and illustrations to take the place of what we have so far. Still no pause menu yet, but we have a working main menu as a placeholder as well as a restart screen for whenever the player dies or finishes the current level. We're expecting that we'll at least have placeholders for every screen we need within the next two weeks with final designs to be integrated sometime in the spring.

Lastly, production has begun for the sound design on Dissonance and we have reached out to the people at Berklee College of Music in Boston to develop our soundtrack. Jeff has been building our sound library and will begin mixing and integration in the spring.