Our project has two distinct project deliverables, so our presentation was divided as such. Firstly, we are creating a 5-10 minute demo using Lumberyard with Twitch for audience participation, and secondly we are creating extensive technical documentation for future ETC students and developers who would be interested in using Lumberyard.
At this stage, our demo has the foundation and the components established, with a working pipeline in place for the different gameplay mechanics and core systems which would be driving our game. We also have full Twitch integration; we have created a chatbot that engages with the Twitch audience in the chat, helping us further bridge the gap between the demo and Twitch itself.
For Technical Documentation, we have been able to map and complete large sections, which will serve as a platform to further receive feedback from faculty and the client as we look to improve upon it for Finals.
After the conclusion of Halves, the team was able to take stock of the different elements of our demo which are complete, and the elements that need more work. We were able to start building a plan for the remainder of the semester with the help of faculty and peer feedback, advisor and client feedback, and internal team motivations as well.
At this stage, basic animations for Gattler Mech and Ice Mech are ready and waiting to be implemented. The rigging process of Kenhai is ongoing and hopefully we can have the skeleton as well as animation cycles in game in the coming week.
Texturing and environment modeling is also an important part of our tasks. This week we have imported the textures for Gattler Mech, and Ice Mech’s will be done soon as well. Some environmental assets are also in game, for example, emergency gates and bridge pillars.
UI elements are implemented in game, and we are in the process of replacing the placeholders with actual UI that are both functional and visually appealing.
This week we have finally reached a point where everything is integrated and our game is coming together. We have a basic game flow set up for one environment including the Twitch integration. The tech team has also decided to switch over to the new Lumberyard version 1.13. Porting our game over was not too hard and since the new engine had many small improvements, we thought it best to switch. The new version also includes some new AI features that we think will help us solve our long standing issue with AI. For now we have a buggy mech movement set up so we can get somewhat of the feel of the game we are going for. We are also now looking at taking a pass at our technical documentation. Our upcoming plan of hosting a LumberJam would require the documentation to be in as much of a user-friendly and easy to understand way as possible.
After halves, we are deciding on reevaluating our goals and scope to keep a focused development process as we move towards softs. We are still waiting to hear all the feedback that will then help us in the above mentioned task.
Here is a small demo of how the game is looking like right now:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KZKU5UX6DoU