Final moments in the Entropy project room before the nerf guns are packed up and the art wall is taken down.
PRODUCTION
This week was the last week of our project. Our final presentation was on Tuesday, and final playthroughs were on Thursday. The rest of the week was spent archiving and cleaning our project room. It has been an excellent semester and I think the team is really happy with what we’ve made and learned.
Jesse Schell plays our game during final playthroughs.
Introducing our girl character, by popular demand.
ART
New Start Screen
Touch up & polish
New particles
Some of the final art to go in the game included this Gay-Lussac launcher for a fun puzzle to complete the level.
DESIGN
As we’re wrapping up development on the game proper, I’ve stepped in to take on any end of semester tasks that others are too busy to do. This had made my primary responsibility the creation of our promo video. I also have some light design responsibilities that involve answering any key design questions that Kshitij or Akshay have and making sure that our final build is playable.
PROGRAMMING
Fixed crash on game reset. Was due to a soundmanager loading issue
Imported girl character and got animation controller working
Fixed issue with girl character’s rotation during abilities
Created character select screen
Got character select feature working correctly
iOS and necessary XCode updates for the new iPad
Imported new menu, credits, character select UI and BG screens
Implemented Gay-Lussac launcher
Imported sky/space BG for the last puzzle
Imported new UI assets
Got height badge system working
Changed particles to use the new meshes
Audio now starts from the main menu
SoundManager persists between scenes so audio doesn’t cut when loading
SoundManager preloads audio tracks now to prevent lagging when loading new BGM
SoundManager crossfades with customizable duration. This prevents the sound from stopping abruptly when switching tracks
Audio mute button functionality
Loading screen
What the game looks like now.
PRODUCTION
As we are approaching the end of the semester, my work this week included ensuring we had the finishing touches in place for our finals build. Some of our final game development tasks were simplifying platforming, adding sound, improving the look of the particles and including a female character. Additionally, Julian and I worked on the lesson plan in collaboration with Mr. Botzer from Trinity High School. I also put together the presentation for finals and made sure the team worked together on slides and practised in the RPIS. During festival on Wednesday, we welcomed a number of guests into our project room including one of our earliest champions for this project, Eric Keylor. I also started archiving, uploading our photos, videos and other material into Randon, so that Julian could work on the video. I have started looking into festivals and conferences where we can submit our project. Looking back on the semester, I’m happy with how far we’ve come and how much we’ve learned and am grateful to the team, our partners and the faculty for their support in making this such a great semester.
Collecting our insights on transformational game development throughout the semester to go in a final deliverable document.
ETC Faculty John Dessler and Director Drew Davidson play our game and give feedback at Softs.
ART
New Character
Art assets for Final Puzzle
New UI
DESIGN
I spent the majority of this week making changes to the game based on feedback we received at softs. The bulk of these changes involved changing the level geometry to make the platforming portion of the game much easier. Another major wrap up task is getting the final scene into the game. To this end I’ve met with Kshitij and Akshay to plan out the final scene and create a task list to complete it.
PROGRAMMING
Integrated Sound Manager
Imported audio assets
Created logic for final puzzle
Fixed collision bug with the first explodable container
Sound Manager plays random BG tracks one automatically but keeps track of played tracks. So songs do not repeat
Got UI particle container transfer working in the final puzzle for PC and iOS
Cleaned repository because we were having issues with version control in the main scene
PRODUCTION
We had Softs this week on Monday, which was tough, as although we received a lot of useful feedback, I feel that our product could have been further along. The team being separated during Thanksgiving and without a strict production structure it seemed that we were falling behind with much of our work. We had one playtest at Elizabeth Forward High School, where we observed reactions to the new collection system and additional puzzles. We also had a visit from Mr. Botzer and his students from Trinity High School, where we observed Mr. Botzer talking about the game with his students and took them on a tour of the building. Production, while slow, looks to ramp up with my renewed efforts at organisation to give the team motivation towards the finish line. We also need to think about end-of-term tasks like the finals presentation, archiving, postmortem, video and self-assessments.
We invited students from Trinity High School to the ETC for our final playtest, and Mr. Botzer conducted some great class discussions based on our game.Clearly, Mr. Botzer’s favourite part of the tour was trying out the cockpit that the first years are using with their virtual reality game for festival.
