Week 06
A major leap we need to take as a team is on the production and productivity front. Hongzhu and Varun are new to these gameplay programming roles, so it’s hard for them to determine smaller hourly tasks within a larger system. For now, while Keran and the programmers figure out a way to determine hourly assignment, she is asking Varun and Hongzhu what they plan on implementing by the end of the sprint week. The entire week is then broken down into days, and each day has Varun and Hongzhu jumping back and forth between Gameplay and Tech. Art tasks. This way of deciding a weekly task will help Hongzhu and Varun stay inspired (through tech. art tasks) and productive (through gameplay tasks).
About that element of randomness we needed last week… Varun immediately asked if the team would be okay with him starting work on a Tornado he mentioned in the first week. Varun’s initial thoughts and tech. art design: The tornado will always be swarming around the environment in predetermined locations. If a survivor gets caught in the storm while working, they will immediately go to a “Dead” state. Eventually, the player will be deciding between which person to send out when the reward greatly outweighs the risk. Everyone’s eyes got big when we imagined a rag doll survivor swirling around a massive storm… Go Varun, go! We intend for this level of emotion the tornado adds will ask the player to make an interesting decision. Varun also began work on integrating Healthy and Keran’s fortress and inner-fortress models as they were completed, and updated each model piece by piece.
Hongzhu made a new camera system for the interior fortress gameplay that acts as a “slingshot” to bring the player back to the center of the fortress. The more we playtested this internally, the more we realized that this new tweak to the camera system might actually be useful throughout the game. We will continue experimenting with this. He also finished the UI system research, implemented it, and made a progress bar for the timer that starts when a survivor begins collecting a resource outside the fortress.
Throughout the week, Julian refined the gameplay systems documentation, the controls documentation, and the player story documentation. Julian also looked at other genres that use a “Fog of War” other than RTS. In Silent Hill 2, The fog was used to prevent the player from seeing too far out, as the technology only allowed for a finite amount of models and textures to be loaded… This information is useful because when Julian made a big level with lots of resources on it, the build slowed down significantly. The models we received from the previous team are not optimized and have too many polys for Unity to handle at once. Julian and Varun decided that while Keran works on making our new, stylized resource models and Varun and Hongzhu finalize loading on demand, we should replace the old models with cubes to allow Unity to load more at once. Adding a few different colors will let the player distinguish between different types of resources, but this solution is only temporary, and the “fog of war” will be very helpful in loading resources only when we need them.
Healthy worked on the Fortress, intending to finish the model and all of the UVs to leave texturing and refining for next week. Here are some progress screenshots from her end:
Keran spent the week redoing some of the UVs for the first room and kept working on cleaning up the 3rd room’s interior model meshes and UVs. She also started making a physical burndown sheet and a calendar for the team to keep track of major deadlines like halves and our publishing date.
