ART
- Worked on new character design. Texturing + Animation
- Made & implemented new art assets for the level
- Created feedback UI
- Made feedback VFX
- Prepared for the halves presentation
DESIGN
- This week I worked with Akshay and Kshitij to integrate art and new puzzles into our halves build. I’m cautiously optimistic about our halves performance and am looking forward to hearing the faculty’s feedback. During the ETC playtest day, we got so much great feedback from the kids that came to play. The findings from this playtest are the thing informing the design for this coming week. I’m really excited to improve the game based on this feedback and playtest again! We are hoping to have two playtests at Trinity next week which makes me tired just thinking about but also excited to get more feedback.
PROGRAMMING
- Imported new character model and got animations working for running and jumping
- Changed heating and cooling effects to use particle systems instead of sprite sheets
- Added the character ability animation
- Added cave art assets, changed the level geometry to the new assets
- Changed gas flow logic to use the new discrete system. Also, gas can now flow into empty containers and change color according to the container. This should open up some possibilities for some new puzzles
- Added some constraints to the zoom functionality. Still need to add positional zoom
- Added feedback for when a container is doing work
- Got gameplay demo ready for presentation at halves
PRODUCTION
- Majority of this week was spent preparing for our presentation. Despite being out of town, I was able to create and iterate on the slides without too much hassle, and found that my productivity actually increased being physically away. We still had Scrum over the phone and kept each other updated through the online group chat. On Thursday night and Friday morning, we rehearsed for halves with the new art and design in the most up-to-date build. I am happy with our halves presentation and aware that we still have a long way to go, so keeping everyone enthusiastic about the game will be important. I feel quite excited about the project, and energised to keep working on it. I am really grateful to my team for being such superstars, covering for me, keeping communication open, and working with me when I was away, making remote production go more smoothly than I had anticipated. They are the best! On Saturday, we had ETC Playtest Day with 12 groups of kids throughout the day, which presented us with lots of useful feedback. Straight after playtest day, we met as a team and defined some tasks for next week as we head into our iteration, playtesting, polish and assessment phase and main development comes to a close.
