Updates! 4/14/14

Hey all, sorry we’ve been so quiet lately. There’s been a lot going on these last couple weeks and to be honest we’ve been so busy making the game we pushed the dev blog to a lower priority. We’re in the home stretch, and every minute counts!

 

The long story short, is that we’re still implementing previously created content. We have all the pieces and now we’re putting them together. Some key players have contributed all they’re going to contribute, which is exciting, and others have a lot of work ahead of them. Here’s the state of the game and the key contributors as of right now:

 

Main Menu: Code complete, creative elements unfinished

White Wing: Completely done, 4 sound effects remain unimplemented

Green Wing: Code complete barring a couple small bugs, creative elements complete, music implemented, SFX unimplemented

Yellow Wing: Completely done, 2 sound effects remain unimplemented

Pink Wing: Boss developed and in state of implementation, creative elements complete, sound effects to be implemented

Red Wing: Boss developed and in state of implementation, creative elements in state of implementation, sound effects to be implemented

The Hub: NPC to be implemented, music implemented, 4 SFX to be implemented, code complete

 

 

Our awesome audio team is finishing up their work, our external artist is completely done as of a couple days ago, and Justin is essentially done with his work except for polish on existing pieces.

 

Chris:

• Implement audio
• Finish Wrath fight
• Finish menu elements

Duncan:

• Implement NPCs
• Finish Lust fight

Zach:

• Bug fixes
• Implement boss drops

 

 

It’s gonna be close, but we’ll definitely have something awesome in the end. But enough wasting time here, I need to get back to work!

Updates! 4/1/14

The game’s been cancelled. Everybody go home, nothing to see here.

April Fools!

We’re still working hard, here’s what’s gone down since our last update:

• We met with our audio team and checked out the most recent version of our audio tracks
• We designed all the remaining content
• We playtested our existing content again and got more feedback
• We mapped out a near-daily development plan for the remaining available time

Based on our playtesting, the levels are still a little too difficult to navigate, movement is a bit too elastic, and players wanted some indication of what objects can be grappled on. These are currently being addressed and we’re always grateful for the feedback we receive.

Our plans for this week:

Chris

• Rework existing level structure
• Add grapplability indicator in level elements
• Create more level art/assets
• Rework player visuals

Duncan

• Finalize Greed/Gluttony fight
• Implement NPCs in The Hub
• Implement item drops in existing boss fights

Zach

• Fix any remaining movement or grapple bugs
• Develop enemy spawner code for Wrath encounter
• Develop turret code for Wrath encounter

Justin

• Complete Lust asset, including animations and texturing
• Begin creating Wrath asset

Updates! 3/24/14

In the last week, we’ve been busy! Here’s a rundown of what we’ve gotten done:

• Sloth redesigned and new features implemented. Features include animations, VFX, AI, and game events.
• Greed & Gluttony implemented. Some attacks, AI, and game events implemented, some attacks animated but not implemented.
• New level art added for Green and Yellow wings.
• New player animated and designed, not yet implemented.
• Various bug fixes

We’re on track for more playtesting on Monday, but before then here’s the breakdown:

Chris

• Implement new player
• Create new level assets
• Prototype perspective camera

Duncan

• Finish Greed/Gluttony encounter

Justin

• Complete Lust design, prepare for modeling and animation

Zach

• Grapple bugfixes
• Sloth bugfixes

 

Hopefully we should have the first half of our game essentially completed by Monday! Pretty exciting, stay tuned.

Updates! 3/17/14 – Dev Status

This week our goal was to beef up the first boss experience by adding new attacks and polishing what’s already there. Apart of that dealt with how the boss gives and receives damage, which caused a lot of bugs/issues with all the colliders on the boss. 

We’ve done a lot of debugging to try to get everything to play nice, but in the end this problem has set us back a couple of dev days. However, I’m confidence we can make up the time in the coming week.

– Zach Lead Engineer

Updates! 3/13/14

Believe it or not, but we have a lot of new information for you since our last update! After meeting and discussing how we’re revisiting old and designing new content, we came up with some really awesome plans:

• The tutorial sequence will be more spread out and focus on specific elements more closely
• Sloth will be given two new combat mechanics to make the fight more fun. Specifically Sloth will be getting two new close-range moves to knock back and incapacitate the player.
• Sloth will be made larger and get slight visual changes
• Greed/Gluttony’s mechanics are designed and in progress. Using a combination of projectile and melee moves, it should be an exciting encounter (no spoilers yet!)
• The Hub will be shrunk and streamlined
• Yellow Wing will be mostly removed, barring one small exception (again, no spoilers yet!)
• Lust and Wrath are designed at a high level
• There will be some visual redesign of existing level elements

 

We also met with our audio team again and they were very impressed with what we’ve gotten done since the last meeting. More importantly, they had some very cool ideas with the music in our game and will be sending us tracks in the very near future. We’re keeping in close contact over the next week or so and will have a lot of exciting things to implement very soon.

 

Lastly, our task breakdown for the week is as follows:

 

Chris:

• Create new tutorial sequence
• Redesign doors and new platforms

Duncan

• Finalize NPC behavior
• Implement NPCs in The Hub
• Develop toxic hazard prototype

Justin

• Redesign Sloth
• Animate Greed/Gluttony

Zach

• Clean code
• Develop z-axis prototype
• Work on new Sloth AI

Updates! 3/10/14

Playtest number 2 was today and we got a ton of useful information! After adding a lot of art and fixing mechanics, we showed off the current state of the game to our capstone class and professors. Here’s the rundown of our feedback:

• Grappling movement feels great, non-grappling movement not so much.
• The art is awesome but hard to distinguish background and foreground.
• Adding more direction to early levels will help ease any confusion.
• The boss fight needs more oomph. Add more elements and make it smarter.

We’re also thinking about reducing the total number of boss fights. It’s not an issue of dedication, just time. We’re still actively discussing how to move foreward so nothing’s set in stone just yet.

 

A lot of our work this week will be based off of our playtesting feedback. Here’s the breakdown:

 

Chris:

• Fix level art
• Add tutorial/instruction graphics
• Designing improved combat mechanics

Duncan:

• Improve sword swing animation
• Create toxic liquid hazard
• Update item upgrade prefabs

Justin:

• Finish the 2nd boss encounter

Zach:

• 3-dimensional player “toss”
• Check NPC code
• Sloth boss AI
• Improve the Sloth boss fight

 

As previously stated, this week will be important for us not so much as in a development sense but a management sense, as we’re only looking at another six weeks-ish of work time. Still, keeping our hopes high!

Updates! 3/4/14

Hey all, we’ve been working hard (despite being on spring break!) and have more updates for you! We’ve gotten more art done, created a lot more assets (visual and otherwise), and began working on the finalized level structure of the game (so it’s not a series of empty rectangles like the first playtest demo). We’ve also begun finalizing our NPC system and reworking existing systems (combat, etc) to work with suggestions from our playtesting session. Since the whole group won’t be here for break, the work breakdown is a little uneven this week but don’t worry! It just means we’re working as hard as we can with the availability we have.

 

Zach

• Refactor existing systems for dynamic and improved behavior

Duncan

• Finish NPC system in its entirety
• Refactor existing systems

Chris

• Create scene level structure of full game
• Implement level design for early and mid-game levels
• Create more art assets for new level elements
• Streamline file structure for game assets
• Coordinate between external art and audio members
• Refactor existing systems to address criticisms in playtesting feedback

Mini Preview

We’ve been playing around with art styles and found something we all like. Here’s a little preview!

Updates! 2/25/14

Another update, another bunch of work done! A little less exciting than previous updates (for good reason!) we’ve been focusing on tweaking existing systems and getting things ready for other people to see. There have been a couple hiccups in the last few days but otherwise everything’s been smooth sailing. For the sake of transparency, here’s the good, bad, and the ugly:

 

Good:

• We’ve refactored the player, item, inventory, and Sloth AI code to the structure we want in the final versions of the game
• We’ve implemented a lot of new art that has received many positive responses
• We’re one element from being code complete!

Less-Good:

• We’ve had to restructure creation of art assets, which as included bringing on a new team member. From this point on Justin Yang will remain Creative Direction, Chris Germano will head creation of 2D assets, and Peyton Gee will be creating background landscapes to be used in our background parallax system.
• Part of refactoring the player code resulted in less than preferable player control. Unfortunately this was immediately before our playtesting, but we are actively working to improve player control before the next playtesting session.
• Because of the way we generate levels they do not work with Unity Web Player. This is not a priority for us and we do not plan to immediately rewrite how our game works for online previews. Because of this we won’t be posting as many interactive demos here. In return we’ll be posting screenshots and videos down the line.

 

These are only our recent events, and as usual here’s our weekly plan:

 

Chris:

• Create the level system for The Hub with basic level design
• Continue creating level art for new levels and improve existing level art
• Help Zach finalize player movement feel
• Create core item assets, mainly the grapple and blowtorch

Duncan:

• Create a preliminary NPC system (basic interaction, animations, etc)
• Create an inventory visualization system
• Have pickups pop up from bosses when rewarded

Justin:

• Create animations for Greed and Gluttony
• Finalize textures for Greed and Gluttony

Zach:

• Fix the player movement feel
• Finalize the code room and scene managers
• Develop a life stealing weapon
• Conceptualize the system behind grappling on a moving object

 

We’re looking forward to the coming week, being spring break we should have a ton of time to get new work done! Stay tuned.

Updates! 2/21/14

We’ve been working hard (or hardly working, I always get those confused) and have a bunch of stuff done that we can’t really show you guys… yet. That’s because it’s all code! We’ve developed a bunch of great systems that handle our inventory, player interactions, doors, scene transferring, etc. For now, here’s what we want to get done by Monday:

 

Chris

• Rework and finalize background parallax code
• Come up with art concepts, reach out to interested artists
• Prototype different room sizes

Zach

• Create cleaned/streamlined staging demo branch
• Finalize item/inventory code (with Duncan)
• Implement fancy AI system for Sloth (or Duncan)

Justin

• Texture Greed/Gluttony

Duncan

• Implement fancy AI system for Sloth (or Zach)
• Finalize item/inventory code (with Zach)