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.
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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.
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. 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.
Seth asked us to show the game on Earth Day in the Discovery World! I have to say I am excited about the idea of presenting the game to the general public, but there is a lot to be done yet. Hector also had to leave because of schedule problems, so I am on my own for now. I wanted to create a game loop by adding a credit scene and making it go back to the main menu one. The easiest way I can think right now is to animating the camera itself to make it scroll down along the credits image. Then, by using a timer we can jump back to the main menu.
With some assistance from other classmates, a was able to do all that. Before jumping to the new project, Hector and I wanted to polish a few details in Down To Earth. Ariana said that she wanted to emulate a real game. So we needed to insert the main menu and a Credits scene. Hector took care of the first one by simply asking the players to make a fist to load the game scene. He also made a curve loading bar, which seems nice. I asked him to try to find mesh to put the hands. Finally, we had a presentable game to show Seth.
After the final presentation, Seth asked to move now to Oculus Rift. The idea was to make an "advertising game" base on a 3D model that he will provide us. Marissa has already started to work on that last week. She wanted to make a talk show where the player answers a few questions to trigger different events. More or less as a walking simulation the player would interact with the world in limited ways. I didn't love the idea but I still had to set up the Oculus for them. It was more annoying than I thought but in the end, I was able (with Seth's assistance) to run the sample scene in Unity.
With only one more week before the presentation, we have almost everything ready to go. After importing Marissa's background, window, and sun, Jenna's bricks textures and Leo's buildings the scene started to look good. Larry and I were working on the interiors walls and floor, we were just looking for a material or texture in Unity Store that looks coherent with our external assets. He also made the shelves with a free package we found.
As the time should be passing while the user plays I had to make a simple animation for the sun. At the beginning I struggled a little but with Hector's help and a couple of tutorials I understood how to easily make the sun moves through the sky. In the final day, Hector should be polishing a few bugs while I add the last details so we can merge both scenes into the final build. After setting up our GitHub repository with Hector (Ariana was concerned about our impossibility to access to the build besides Hector), I finally started to work on the build. While Hector was busy scripting the gestures and testing the Leap Motion functionality (Larry and I were usually there giving him feedback), I open up a new scene to assemble the art assets in order to have a visual representation of the game. It was important in our team full with artists. So I imported the assets we have ready and asked for feedback to make sure the artists were satisfied with the look of the build. I also realize we were lacking a bunch of 3D assets and some other minors problems I have to discuss with Ariana.
My idea was to have the 2 scene ready (Hector's functionality and mine's aesthetic) to eventually integrate them and have the final build. Ariana was insistent with the time limit mechanic (where you only play in the day for 5 minutes and then a night cutscene is triggered) which I honestly didn't love but I was able to integrate it in the document. It is clear now that we will need some live bar to control the plant's death and spawning. We still have to integrate it in the user interface but I described the basic functionality. I also discussed this with Hector who seems to understand the idea.
Ariana was taking care of the art style section in the Game Document. I helped her with the organization and layout but she filled out everything else. The aesthetic now explain the color palette and how we are trying to achieve a relaxing experience through senses and gestures. This means that the Game Design Document should be ready for Seth to see, I don't think we are missing anything else. |
AuthorI want to study Video Games in a theoretical way. Archivos
May 2018
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