This week, we focused mainly on prioritizing tasks which would help us reach a minimum viable product for Soft Opening next week. To do this, the team create a large list of tweaks, additions, and/or fixes which would take aid us in creating a better game demo.
Additionally, we also began to pay attention to the overall design of the game itself. We began to implement structural changes, such as having patrolling Mechs, to add more tension to the game. At this stage of the semester, we were working towards adding in the last few features, tweaking and fixing bugs, in a bid to create a game demo which could be more engaging than our previous iteration, which we had tested on Playtest Day.
For Soft Openings at the ETC, a variety of guests will be attending. Hence, it was important to create an experience for the person walking through our door. As such, we edited a trailer, which additionally helps explain the game world and the core mechanics. Most of our efforts this week were linked to getting the game demo in as playable a state as possible, while creating plans for Soft Opening.
By tweaking Time of Day Editor as well as adding lights into the scene, we are able to create great atmosphere to set up our environment. Eventually, we settled our environment to be around dawn so that we could both show a night cityscape as well as having a clear view on the details. Environment implementation is still ongoing, but by now we begin to have some level of details. In terms of lighting, a great thing about Lumberyard is that it contains built-in light animations, where we can change how the lights in our game flash or glow. This helps us adding another layer of detail into our game, since we can mimic broken or flickering lights, emergency lights and etc.. Adding neon lights and emissions on buildings and structures also help creating a futuristic, sci-fi tone for our game, so we did not hesitate to apply as many as we can around the level.
Our Kenhai character is now playable in-game with all the animations. While we pivot our design a little, the mechs are patrolling around in game now, with their searchlights on pointing in a cone shape towards the front, and as mentioned above, the neon light emission on their body makes them more noticeable in our current environment.
This week, our team was in full force preparing for soft openings next week. We added a lot of sounds and it has made our game feel a lot better. We also played around with lighting in the game as well as the environment, and added fog. Some of our other visual effects include having an overlay on the screen to alert the streamer when it takes damage, and we are also beginning to add particle effects for mech firing.
Another big update for this week was that we finally have our main Kenhai character in game with all the animations. Other than that, we have been focussed on bug fixing. We changed around our AI system to meet with the new design changes we made last week.
Overall, we have tried to make our game as close to being ready as possible for softs.