This week we came back from spring break and GDC with a lot of energy and plenty of things to do. Although we had only spent a little bit of time working over spring break and GDC, we did have some fresh thoughts on the challenges ahead.
We received some really helpful suggestions about how to solve some of our technical challenges. First, we had a graphics programmer review some of the problems we were facing and recommend some potential methods of tackling the challenge. Over the break these were tested out, some were clearly not options. This helped us limited the number of possible solutions ahead.
At GDC we discovered that a fellow ETC student, Yifei Zhao, had been doing research on Nvidia Flex. We began talking to him about some the problems we were facing, and he had excellent suggestions on approaches for solving the issues. This led to a significant breakthrough this week as we were able to as we were able to create an attraction force on the particles. This then allowed us to program a pinch gesture so that we pull the particles together back into one object. This was our largest remaining challenge with the technology so it was exciting to find a solution. While it still has bugs, it is great that we have made this progress.
Another big step forward for us was that the AI system was beginning to be fleshed out. We had three different types of slime interacting with each other in different ways. The fire slime now could chase our most basic slime character, while sticky slime would cling to it.
Meanwhile we actually had characters designed for the sticky and fire slimes. An upgrade to one of the tools we were using made it possible to use the soft-body physics function and Unity’s shader-graph. This was an exciting step forward for the character design process.although some fixes are still need to the render pipeline for VR.
The game design had also seen some major changes over the course of the week. Mini-games were in development.These were designed to fit in with the current theme of the land.
On Thursday afternoon we met with our client. While they were glad to see some of the progress we made, they were in general concerned about the scope we had planned. They strongly recommended we de-scope. So the remainder of the week was spent focusing on understanding how to simplify the game design we had in place. It came down to focusing on the areas where we felt our game was strongest and building that into a tighter experience with very simple progression mechanics. We hope to show our client a full game loop by next week.