Our primary focus for week 6 was working towards pitching a full concept for a vertical slice to our client, to better understand the direction we will be heading in for the rest of the semester.
Our concept focused on several key components – playtest results, their analyses, and our recommendation; more level concept art, our level design concept; defining our scope for the semester; and lastly, a few user interface references. By providing a wide range of options and conceptualizing the different facets of production, we were able to hone in on a focused direction which is in scope, and attainable.
Our concept pitch was successful, and the client provided helpful advice for the planning of the remainder of our semester. Now the challenge for our team will revolve around rapid prototyping and iteration, creating quick technical solutions while aggressively pursuing our art pipeline as well. Balancing all this with a deeper design and balance focus will be key for our understanding of how the semester will eventually shape up to be.
This week in art, we created concepts for two levels. The concepts focus on emphasizing the conflict and tension between the streamer character and the defending forces of the city of Krossis. We are also trying to show a transition from the wilderness to an urban environment, as the player progresses through the levels. Our client liked our concepts very much and provided us with valuable feedback. He especially likes how mundane architecture can be switched into military facilities as an extra defence.
We also discussed about naming conventions as well as how we want to set up the art pipeline. By creating a naming convention document, we are able to standardize the process of transferring assets between the artists and the programmers.Our playtesting results and feedback from our client also helped us decide which Kenhai concept we want to move forward with. Next week, we’ll be making iterations on the Kenhai design we chose, creating sketches for Mech concepts, and beginning to work on some small 3D assets.In tech, we continued looking into Lumberyard’s Physics system. We worked with projectiles, collisions and triggers, raycasts, explosions, and joints to get a good understanding of the capabilities and working of the system. We also explored Lumberyard’s AI system to test navigation/path finding.
Twitch integration is also a big part of our project. One our project goals are to explore audience-streamer interaction that deviates from the one of the most commonly used voting system. We hope to provide each audience member an individual agency to make them feel more involved, being able to directly impact the streamer’s game. Going off of this goal, we have been exploring ways that the streamer can interact with the audience, and audience with the game. This week, we dived deeper into Twitch bots. Bots can help provide an immediate feedback loop to the audience members, a suggestion we received from our quarters presentations. We set up a simple bot outside of Lumberyard (using socket programming in Python connected to the Twitch IRC) that can perform all the functions of a moderator in a chat. We can build upon this structure now to add functionality specific to out game.
Now with our basic game concept approved, we will start prototyping game-specific elements in the coming weeks. Our goal next is to get a basic foundation and structure of the game as soon as possible and then iterate on it depending on time and scope.