Since there are only weeks to soft openings, we were on a very tight schedule this week.
(The title on the board is incorrect, which should be week 13)
Since we narrowed down the scope to only three test and mission tracks, Feiran and Angela mainly worked on track assets. Angela did research in how to make procedural tracks in Houdini and Feiran made the tracks in 3DS Max. By the end of the week, they finished all three test tracks and two mission tracks – turning and jumping.
Eric and Aiden worked on the core gameplay mechanism. In short, since our stakeholders would like us to clearly distinguish the performance and driving feelings of vehicles, they worked really hard on the level and data designs. For each test track, we have 12 customization options, so there are totally 36 chassis models. We would like to let players notice a great difference between the categories of jumping, turning and the combination of turning and jumping, but slight distinction between the 12 options within a single category. In addition, we need to test and figure out the thresholds for mission tracks, for instance, which chassis can easily pass the mission, and which chassis cannot.
Christiana worked on pre-generation of models. Because this is the final production, she did a lot of experiment and worked out a set of configurations that generates the best looking models. By the end of the week, she generated 4 models in the turning category.
What’s more, Anthony Daniels visited the ETC on Wednesday, and spent 1 hour with our project. After understanding what we are doing, he gave us very good pieces of advise – the visualization is insufficient and the keyboard/mouse controller is not easy to use. Based on that, we fixed the UI and camera, as well as tried to use the Logitech wheel controllers.
