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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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. 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.
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. The team almost disintegrated over the spring break, or at least that's how we (Kenisha, Phil and me) felt. With just one more month left we didn't have anything decent to show. The presentation we did for Introduction to CSG class was the awful proof. So we decided to come up with a brand new environment trying to restore the team morale. We also knew that Jade was working on her own scene. So maybe we will able to merge both and have a nice looking world.
We ended up meeting every day of the break in the library trying to build this new futuristic city from a Kenisha's old scene with a bunch of free assets. We also added colliders and as many props as we could. When I first opened the MVP scene I realized how long way we still had ahead. The scene was a mess and feels very prototypical. The scale was off for almost all the assets and there was no format to import them or apply textures. I tried to reorganize, re-scale and import the assets that we would have ready. Still, the modular buildings from Nick and Jose were tricky to assemble. I had to ask for their help several times to understand the building process. Even then, the scenes didn't look good enough. The science fiction sensation was missing. My simple assets made with ProBuilder would only work as far background. So I concluded that the scene just wasn't ready to attach colliers or rigid bodies. I will ask for a meeting with Jade and Nick to find solutions in this regard.
Jade asked me to do a quick search in the Unity assets Store to possible useful (and cheap) tools that we could add to the build. I based my first search on science fiction elements environments elements which I luckily was able to find a few. Goods examples were the foggy lights for a rainy futuristic city, the hologram effect to turn any solid object in a projection, or the cable generator as building decoration. Then I tried to look for functionality tools. Again, I was able to find several packages that could eventually help us in more technical aspects. There were different types: easy pickup system, waypoints system, easy population, camera transitions, cinema facecap or head look controller. I hope we can use some of them, the majority it's free and looks easy to implement.
I think Matt was concern about the lack of interaction in our game. As our main mechanic was just selection among conversation options, he wanted more interaction with the world in different forms. That's why Phil and I created a new doc with others simple mechanics that could be easy inserted in the game. I proposed a conversation log with is very useful in narrative games, a telescope to zoom in and out, a picking up interaction to examine any intractable object. Phil proposed a camera mechanic to take photos at any moment of the game, another good idea in my opinion.
Matt asked me to help the environment team by creating simple assets models to use them as placeholders in the scene. He wanted around 25 in total, so it would take some time. I already had experience working with Unity's Probuilder tool and because I wasn't having a good time with the business development I decided to give it a try. Although the process was indeed long it wasn't that hard. I made from trash cans to skyscrapers, simple but with a few details.
I will be working with Nick in following weeks in order to decide which assets we could develop more and which ones could be eventually added to the MVP scene. Along with the dialogue Tree, I made last week I supposed to include also the event tree. But I wasn't able to do it unfortunately because It would have looked saturated. So this week I completed my event tree. Again, I tried to keep it as simple as I could, It should work as the main tutorial in the game. The outcomes were different for each other and the player would only have four decision in total. The idea was to make something short, dramatic, simple and effective.
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AuthorI want to study Video Games in a theoretical way. Archivos
May 2018
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