In Portfolio Night I was pretty busy with another project. Although the designer's team lost our changes because Phil's version in Unity Collab was never able to merge for some reason, Jade had to manually implement our changes into her copy of the build. As I knew the guys won't have problems to do it I left everything to them.
Later when I was playtesting our game I realized several problems: there was no visible timer to let us know when the game will restart, I wasn't listed in the credits, the movement glitch was still there, my suicidal guy wasn't dying, etc. But overall I must say that the game looks appealing in our stand, it was a success.
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In Portfolio Night I was polishing Down to Earth until literally a few minutes before the presentation. There were still many minor issues to be fixed: find a background music, decrease the growing size of the plants, make the animation and interaction for the fly. Luckily Hector was able to help me out with that, while Joey polished other small details, Marissa, on the other hand, took care of the animation and finding the background music. I was always there making sure the integration was coming along and preparing everything for the presentation. Which was I must say fairly good, most of the people were attracted by the Leap Motion controller and the theme was well received. An animation freshman eve recorded a video of Down to Earth gameplay. Overall, the night was a success.
Jade liked one of the tools a found in the store. Easy Population allows you to control and animate crowd NPC. The only thing you need is a walkable terrain and set up the waypoints and spawner markers. After a couple hours and test, I Got Easy Population Working with 3D Morph characters (which was the tool that will be used by the artist to make street NPC).
The only issues I had was that sometimes the characters could go through a corner of a solid object but it's nothing serious. In the end, I learned how to control the number of characters and way-points. These characters would have to load with the scene itself because they just suddenly appear in the scene. Before playtesting session I want everything in place to have the final design of the window. Marissa asked me to change the 2D window for Leo's 3D model and by doing that the view seems deeper than before. Because I didn't want to create a new scene for the instruction I had the idea to insert those images as poster inside the room. Marissa changed their color they looked nice actually. I also had to change the position and display of the seed bags (and the actual models) which were somehow hard to grab. They now always fall in the pot even if it is by accident. In the end, our team was able to come up with a pretty nice looking a functional scene. We should all be proud.
After failing several times trying to implement the camera changes before and at the end of each event (I made it with cinemachine but combining this tool with Adventure Creators seems horrible). Jade asked me to implement some fog in the MVP scene. I was able to do it in a sample scene with the terrain settings (I first looked for free assets that could emulate this effect but I didn't find any). When we tried to insert this fog in the MVP scene it refuses to work for a reason beyond us. So I failed we this tasks as well. In the end, I just found a bunch free clothes for female NPC characters.
I wanted to find a better background and appropriate music for it. The ones in the tutorial felt too generic and boring to me. It was relatively easy to find a free spacial material in the asset story, but the music was completely different. I had to really dig into the store to find a vivid background song. How the song contrast by the serious assets was also part of the joke. With this last piece, the game I had in mind should be complete. Oh and some classmates helped me by writing more game over messages.
I wish I would have known ahead that we will be showcasing this prototype to the public. We received so much feedback and realized so many mistakes that it was a really valuable day. The game appealed to children mostly and I think they had a good time playing it or just interacting with the virtual hands. Lots of people came to see what was the game about, they didn't stop until close time. We even had one student interested in joining to MATC Computer Simulation and Gaming Program, it was inspiring.
By the end of the day, we had a long list of improvements. Overall it was both fun and challenging at the same time.
While I was still working exclusively with Kenisha and Phil, I was asked to create a new event to insert into our brand new city. So I looked at my old events idea and found one I wanted to keep writing about: The Suicidal Guy. The general idea was to see an old guy standing on the rooftop of a skyscraper. The player should try to persuade him to give up on the suicide without calling the security forces (ignoring him was another option that would lead him to suicide). Either way, the guy was destined to die. Update: Playtesting during Portfolio Night I realized an emerging gameplay decision: the players themselves could also push the NPC to his death. I would like to make this another formal decision if we have time. For the final revision I was trying to balance the number of asteroids/speed of the ship/colliders/background music and the game over message. Although several people told me that there may be too many asteroids, I feel that the important part of this experience. The idea here is try to frustrate the players to make fun of them in that moment. The way I want to engage players is by the game over messages which are
Just a week before Portfolio Night the build was still far from done. Although I already had all the scene we need, they weren't properly connected yet. I still had to synchronize the credits with the loop timer, apply the new mesh and materials to the seeds, insert the fly, speed up the credit scene which feels a little long, insert the instruction as posters and fix the timer. While Joey needed to fix the Fly Trap which refuses to work, adjust the water colliders and fix the growing size of the Christmas cactus. We need to finish all by next week.
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AuthorI want to study Video Games in a theoretical way. Archivos
May 2018
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