This is it. Just I a few days before Demo Day and I cannot say we are prepared at all. In the end, we decided to cut off the gameplay presentation just because it wasn't ready. We still had serious merge and bugs problems there was no way we can show something like that. Matt asked me to help with the presentation, so I started to fill out the slides that Jade has created. It was hard for me to find nice images of the models we already had in the build. I liked Jose's Game Over clip so I inserted in the end game slide which ended up looking pretty nice. But I guess the hardest part was to meditate on why and how we failed as a team for the "Problems" slide.
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Matt was considering to make a video for Demo Day presentation. So he asked me if I wanted to join that team with Jade to plan it. I loved the idea because it was a unique opportunity to implement my films knowledge. Also because I was sure it wasn't a good idea at all to show our buggy pre-alpha playable. So Jade started by listing every asset ready to be shown. Then I proceeded to make a rough storyboard of how the video could be. It was tricky to fit in a few seconds all the features we wanted to show. But I ended up with a nice idea that I believe it would have been nice to watch. I didn't finish it though because Matt finally discarded the video to try to have a playable before the deadline.
As I completed my previous tasks I ended up without anything else to do for this week. So Andy told me that art team needs more prop for the museum level, the idea was to reach a number around 100. I spent most of the class looking images from famous museums around the world to see how they look like. It was quite challenging because most of them have very specific themes and the decoration was made accordingly. Even so, I manage to found around 50 objects that fit into the vision I had of the museum level. Then I had to find concrete images that can be used as main references. After several hours looking I was satisfied with the number and the appearance of the props that I found.
As I wanted to keep working on enemies because they have been my main task since the beginning of the semester. I was asked to help with animations implementation. We already had the animations ready to be triggered the only thing we need now was to insert them into the build. But I couldn't. I had to ask for help to Hector, Matt, and even Nikki. I felt I really like I really failed this one.
So I just hopped on the stuff I could do. I started to playtest the enemy behavior scene over and over again. I found a couple of problems: once the enemies reached you they won't continue chasing you anymore and the fact that after a few seconds standing they started to slowly move sideways. I finally communicated these problems to Chris so he could fix them. After the pivot, the old Lore has to be revised. Everyone else was busy on others tasks so I thought it would be a nice opportunity to see how I manage to write a lore. So I reduced the scale of everything down to gain control of the situation. I used The Hurt Locker as the main reference to make a statement about war as a pointless slaughter. The game will be taking place in an alternate reality with our protagonist are trapped. I didn't want to actually explain where exactly they are fighting. Whether it was hell, purgatory or a hallucination the idea was to leave that decision to the players. The only asset I would need to show the settings would be a (maybe animated) comic page screen before the start screen or between loading screens.
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. 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.
After taking a good look to Killing Floor numbers, I felt I was prepared to do some math. I didn't want to get to complex with the equations because they would be really hard to understand or integrate with other math. The first thing we did, Andy was helping, was define the main variables. Things like the number of the round, base enemies number, the volume of wave or a maximum number of enemies, a random number just to add variety to the gameplay and a multiplier to adjust all these numbers depending on the number of players. Besides this, we also included 3 modifiers to change the strength, life, and speed of the enemies as the number of the wave increase. After Philip and Mike made comments pointing a few errors, we were ready to go with the basic wave controller math.
For the next Sprint, and because was directly related to enemies, I was asked to on the equation that will control the amount of enemies per wave, the interval of cooldown, enemies rate increase, stuff like that. As always the first thing I though was do a little research to find out how our references approach the problem. After a few minutes looking for Gears, Left 4 Dead and COD horde modes I ended up in Killing Floor official forum with a document that seems to good to be real. I found was look like the complete explanation of how exactly the game manage numbers, equations, behaviors and even full descriptions of the game modes and characters. The way the resolve these problems are way complex than ours but still it was a amazing reference with gave me an idea to how start.
Luckily, most people liked my first sketch of enemies design. But of course, there was feedback I need to take in consideration. Art team, for example, want me to stay with one model or another, I mean between make all the enemies animals or anthropomorphic. As I had one David Jones crew guy and one giant crab I had to change this up. So looking for any references for a human crab monster, the only thing I could find was "Him" from Superpower Girls. Also, they didn't want grabs attacks because they said it would be complicated both from an art and tech point of view, so I just send those 2 attack to the icebox. Let's see if everybody is happy now.
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AuthorI want to study Video Games in a theoretical way. Archivos
May 2018
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