Week 13
This week at Soft Opening, we got feedback that we should really be pushing to complete our tutorial as soon as possible, as a major milestone in completing a shippable game is that the game onboards the player without the developer present. More to come soon!
But first, check out this week’s gameplay build:
For this week’s build, Keran and Varun were able to add in the inner fortress character animations. Namely, the animations that take place while characters work inside the compartments. We are also experimenting with rotating lights that help make the compartments come “alive” while the Survivor works inside.
We’ve rewritten most of the warnings that the player may receive during gameplay. These are intended to be for both information and world-building, hopefully making them more player-friendly messages that read less like debug logs and more conversational. For example, when a player overworks Julian, rather than saying “Julian died of low energy!” the error reads as “Julian has died of exhaustion…”
We found some free Substance Share textures as placeholders in case we can’t get to original textures by the end of the semester. With the free Substance Painter plugin for Unity, we can easily import new materials for the HD Render Pipeline. The actual .sbsar files were crashing our Builds though, so Varun just extracts the meta date from the file itself to create a new Unity material of the same high definition visual quality!
Healthy and Hongzhu have completed the 20 unique characters with their new portraits on the Character Build panel. There’s a ton of diversity in the characters, so Healthy chose 20 combinations that show off all of her pieces and colors.
A handful of playtesters had told us that the minimap alone was not going to help them orient in the map, so we implemented a yellow arrow that points in the direction of the camera at all times. It is only visible while viewing the mini-map, and we are already seeing promising results!
Healthy has started working on the opening cinematic videos. Check them out below:
To automate our itch.io upload process, Hongzhu implemented an additional tool onto Jenkins that allows us to post to itch.io straight from the Jenkins browser itself. This will help speed up minor Production tasks in the future.