Hence, it was imperative to focus on future goals during these two weeks, and implement a plan which would allow us to continuously iterate on our build and also begin our preparation for Halves. Halves is a time during our semester in which we get to share our progress with faculty, students, and the general public. It is a way of ensuring we get pinpoint feedback which can guide us through the remainder of the semester.
To create a presentation which gives an accurate snapshot of our project thus far, we worked with our advisors to create a flow and structure for the presentation. On a macro-level, our team of seven brainstormed the narrative structure, and created sections which we individually wanted to address in the presentation.
At the same time, as will be mentioned in greater detail in the Tech section for the week, we continued to make progress towards our vertical slice. In the second half of the semester, we will be assessing scope, features, assets, and working towards implementation, prototypes for playtesting, and the our final vertical slice for May.
Since the schedule of team members is different during Spring Break and GDC time, for the art side, it’s all about passing work on to the other person on time. We modeled the Ice Mech and the Kenhai. While Ice Mech is roughly textured and rigged, there is a small part of UV unwrapping of the Kenhai model that needs to be carried on to next week.
An environment remapping is also going on in the meantime, where we started to replace cubes and planes from the environment blockout we had before with models in detail. This will be a long but beneficial process.
We also created a UI Toolkit, which contains most of the UI design we will be using in our game. Further adjustments will be made based on the color/shape, but this helps us greatly in setting up a game flow.
The tech team worked over a part of the Spring Break to make up for the week we were going to lose to GDC. This week, we continued our integration process while also starting to prepare for halves presentations. We got a lot of the things into our main game project, however, we still need to do a lot of working setting the game flow and just polishing everything as a whole. Both the Kenhai and the Gattler mech can move around and attack each other. The Kenhai can also shield. Placeholder UI reflects their health/damage. One of the main issues we are facing right now is that the mech AI movement is still buggy. We haven’t been able to yet figure out how to get AI to navigate in 3D.
A big news for our project though has been that Amazon launched a version 1.13 this week that has now made available their PhysX system. They also have a bunch of new features in the AI side, and overall many bug fixes. While from an early impression it looks like our team might benefit from shifting to the newer versions, this is a decision we will have to carefully take as a team. Setting up can take a lot of time, and we will need to verify whether our game can be ported over without any major concerns. Our current plan of action is to have initially have just one developer install and set up 1.13 to resolve our concerns.