An unexpected popped out in my mind. What if in one of the walls of the room a giant mirror will be reflecting every object inside but the player? I was sure that this situation would evoke in the player the surrealist sensation that I was looking for. The contradiction between being there through the interaction without being able to see your own reflection was somehow appealing to me. But in the end, I wasn't able to do it. The free mirror I found was in a beta phase which means it was still experimental. I couldn't make it work and I also refused to ask for help because Chris was already too busy with the arcade game integration. On the other hand, I asked Tyler to expand the room adding a bathroom and a closet. He showed me a few planes and even when I liked them I decided to send the idea to icebox tasks for now. I needed him scripting the radio and exit door functionality.
0 Comments
The first idea I had was to use the assets to make some kind of "arena" similar to a sports stadium. So each player will start on their own side of the field. I rearranged the assets to make a division in the center of the scenario. It didn't look pretty but technically fulfill the objective. I also leave a few palms trees around to make it looks real.
It wasn't long before we realized this design had several problems: when I tried to bake the navigation plane every single palm tree turned into an "obstacle" on the battlefield. Same goes for the bunch of assets I had in the center of the scenario. They would block the way when one or more units tried to go through. So we had to rethink the whole scenario since the beginning. Now was the time to test my brand new unit in combat. I was expecting to participate in playtesting sessions several weeks ago. But for various reasons, I never had the chance. Although Tyler was assisting me with specific rules I also had to take notes so it was quite difficult game. In the end, I won (we were controlling Tyranids) but we realized that the toughness and strength of my Elites could be a little too high. The cost was also off. In the reflection, I had the sensation that our units were indeed hard to kill but relatively inoffensive and with serious limitations against shooties enemies. We should be revising these details for next playtest sessions.
We played in Prisoners Exchange scenario. Although the idea of taking enemy models as a prisoner was interesting the scenario as a whole wasn't working very well. We quickly forgot of those units and went straight to combat. This week I was collaborating with Kenisha to rethink entirely the health and death system for the game. Her idea of using the silhouette of a realistic heart as health status was excellent. I thought we could also add faster heartbeats and make it darker to indicate low levels of health. As she liked it she made a visual reference to have a concrete idea of how may looks like it. The death system was a little more complicated than that.
What should happen when a player dies? Matt told us that they should come back to the lobby. Art guys also came with the funny idea of forcing the dead player to gamble while they are waiting in the lobby. So we decided that after 15 seconds (a chance to come back to the match) the player would come back to the lobby to play different gamble games for a chance to revive. I joined the environment team with Tyler and Eric just to do something different as I usually prefer work on characters. We went through all the free environment we could find in Unity Store. Among them, I especially liked a desert settlement one which seems like moderns days battlefield. Also because of the level of details and numbers prefabs so we have more assets to play with. It included a sandstorm which seems amazing but I ended up cutting out because it blocked a clear view of the units. We definitely need to continue messing around with this to have something presentable.
Although we already had enough models to build a prototypical room. I felt we really need a couple more which were relatively important to accomplishing my vision. The most important one was without doubts the window which supposes to open and close letting the player watch a variety of landscapes (which I will later decide that they need to be pixel art). Navigating in a website called cgtrader following Nuhi advice I found an old but functional window that Daneka should be able to edit. We just needed to get rid of the internal division and add opening/closing animations before its actual implementation. It wasn't exactly what I had in mind but I can definitely live with this.
I didn't feel too confident being on Lore team. That's because my grammar skills are still kinda poor and creating fiction universes is not my favorite part regarding creative writing. I would prefer focus on small stories with a few character but high symbolic levels. So I asked Leo if I can change to mechanics team. Since we started to play this game I was looking forward to creating a unit and play with its numbers. This week I finally started to work on my first unit: an Elite. As we need an Ore unit I looked in Tyranids code which suppose to be the strongest close combat race. The numbers were corrected by Tyler and Jacob several times until this final result.
Last class before peers review Chris ask me if I can make a prototypical whitebox just to test the enemies behavior. In order to do this, I looked tutorial to see if there was a tool I can use to easily build a simple level. I quickly found ProBuilder, a pretty nice and friendly package for unity which gives you a basic toolbox set to create squared base geometric objects oriented to building levels. After the necessary learning process, I was able to put together a simple whitebox scene to test Christ's navigation script. Although I prefer characters than experiments I have to say I enjoy it but It's required a sharp spacial ability which I am not sure to have.
Eric did a good job looking for the sounds effect we need for all the components of the game. Today I spent most of the class time going through each one to make sure they would make sense in my vision of the game. As always there were a few that sound pretty similar to what I had in mind, but there were others that.. we will have a find a creative way to use them. There was also a short group that I am not sure if we will be able to actually find. For this ones, I guess I will have to delete them or just exchange them with something similar. But overall I have to say I am happy with Eric work.
Noah wanted a unified format so each feature team can design the different units following the same requirements. So I helped him to define those ones. We had to consider every aspect of it on the battlefield. Why exactly is made for? How is different from other units? Which is its specific role in the battle? How much should it cost? We tried to force the people to balance the numbers ahead. Finally, the list finishes with complementary information such as a reference image or how many animations the unit will need.
|
AuthorI want to study Video Games in a theoretical way. Archivos
May 2018
Categories
All
|