Updates, Updates, and more Updates

After enjoying a short reprieve from graduating college, our team decided to take another crack towards building the game. With a fresh set of eyes, we ended up overhauling the visual style, rebuilt large portions of the code, and revisited the level design from the later playtests of the game. As of right now, the visual update is heading towards it's final stages in terms of environment art. Here are some examples of the old look compared to the new look.

Out with the old

In with the new

The Art Director and I also created a new pipeline for model and texture importing which dropped our draw calls by about 1/3rd of the previous builds.

With such a significant change to the environment style, the particle effects also get an update. The particle effects I built also have a drastic reduction in emitters (sometimes by a factor of 10) so we can really push the detail to other dynamic objects in the levels. These particles also only pull from a small set of textures and materials to help reduce VRAM usage.

Most of these particles use the same texture and material.

 And finally the characters are currently going under another pass to match the new visual aesthetic. One of the character modelers just finished a hi-poly sculpt which I will retopologize later this week.

Old squire

New Squire Concept

New Squire with armor

New Squire without armor

 As more stuff gets pushed through I will keep updating about the grind to make The Grind.

Down Goes Texture!

This week I completed the Snatcher, a horrific looking demon treasure chest that sucks away the players XP, and the bomb asset, which happens to be a fantastic upgrade from the previous model (a Unity sphere primitive). In addition to those assets, I hopped back over to the design team to make sure that all of the enemy spawn triggers function and trigger properly. I also slowed down the tutorial level and worked on adding sound to the tutorial level with James and Graham so players can understand what was happening in that level. The last thing I added was the correct lava textures and materials for each level. Next, I need to make a quick build for Out To Launch and start adding in the new hero assets that the art team has been working on. And so continues the grind to completing The Grind.

I got one hand in my pocket, the other one texturing characters!

For the past three weeks, I have flipped over to the art team to help push out our last batch of assets. My task was to complete the remaining character textures, an enemy texture, and some extra small assets, so here is an update on some of those guys.

The family is all here!

While I am working on these textures, I also made some small assets like the arrow and boomerang so we don't have characters shooting cubes anymore. Next on the list is making the last character texture (for Guywen, the black knight) and making the bomb asset and the glorious snatcher.

This is why we can have nice things

2 weeks have passed in the last quarter for the production of the Grind and I have accomplished a lot based on our playtests and design meetings. First off, all of the levels, excluding one have their lighting completed. I used a combination of static light for lightmapping and 2 dynamic directional lights that only affect the players and enemies so they pop out a bit more from the scene. The dynamic lights also allow the players to receive a bit more visual feedback of their positioning in the level; this makes jumping on platforms much easier.

I also adjusted the experience gain based off of a new formula. The new formula helps players level in a manner that the designers wanted originally without disrupting our gameplay in a drastic manner. Because the formula is applied on a per level basis, we can properly adjust for differing variables in the formula. 

(average player deaths in one level x 100) + (how many levels we want the players to level up x 100) = total experience allotted per level

The experience change is not the only major change to level design. Enemy health and experience got a pretty big buff. This allows for less enemies to be on screen with a stronger emphasis on last hits, a core game mechanic. Because of these changes, the designers have much more control over total game length and level length.

The last thing I worked on was a layout rough for the website. It still has a long ways to go but the wesite hierarchy is ready to go.

And so continues the grind to completing The Grind.

It's Beginning To Look A Lot Like A Game

Be prepared for a wall of text and images, this post deals with a large period of time.

After the conclusion of the Fall Quarter, the design team and art team knew that we needed to make some drastic changes to the game to make it enjoyable. Based on the playtests, and a whole lot of research, the design team decided to figure out methods of lengthening play sessions (specifically in levels). The method I thought of was combining the levels we had already made and make the six levels into two levels with three rooms. That may sound a bit confusing, so these diagrams may help out a bit.

Most of the alpha stuff got thrown out, partially because of communication errors, and partially because of our new design and art philosophies. On the art side (this is also talking about level design aesthetics), we wanted to change the visual aesthetics of the assets and how the assets get placed in the levels. First, we decided on having a hand-painted aesthetic, removed the foliage, and based a large portion of our style off of Hieronymus Bosch.

On the level design side, the playests showed that many testers were hung up on geometry that interfered with the desired play experience we wanted. So this time around we are making sure the assets never (or as close to never as we can get) intrude in play.

In the first five weeks of winter quarter, Graham and I started developing the diagrams shown above and base prototypes for levels. The programmers really stepped their game up this quarter for the level designers; Eugene and James created a suite of modular tools (like player and enemy spawns that link up to a level system control, or triggers that can cause objects to move in game with a plethora of ways to trigger that event inside the script) that sped up the workflow between the programmers and designers for quick prototype and playtesting. Here are some pictures of the levels in engine.

I also modeled some environment assets for the levels and generated the new (and improved) asset list for the new levels. I made sure to account for folder organisation within Unity with the new asset list.

I ended up getting very sick during this quarter and had to be hospitalized for about 2 weeks that complete with a bonus prize of minor surgery. Luckily my recovery time outside of the hospital was short, so I was able to resume my work in a timely manner.

Weeks seven through nine were pretty heavy for all sides of the the production team. All of the levels are set dressed and lit (with a very basic lighting setup, for now). And we had two  moderately successful playtests that helped the design team improve our spawn ratios, find bugs, adjust item drops, and physics issues.

All in all, this quarter allowed the game to grow in ways that I did not think was possible and I am happy to be on this team. And so continues the grind...

The future will be better tomorrow

Week 9 comes to a close and we have just completed a presentation and playtest. The interface has been updated to accommodate smaller screen sizes based on a simple calculation I made, and the level functionality is coming along well. I wasn't able to complete as much work this week because of another game I am working on, but the team pulled through getting the new (or old) weapons in as well as some new items.

I will be working on texturing my column pieces this week for the target render and adjusting the level designs based on the feedback received this week. And so the grind continues...

Almost There... Almost There...

So week 8 of production comes to an end and the group is closing in on our Alpha goal. I added all of our current environment assets to the levels I made last week. I also added some preliminary lighting to a couple of the levels. Here is what our white boxed levels look like.

As far as visuals go, we are at a fairly comfortable position right now as 80% of the models are optimized and UV'd for our target render. On the design side, the functionality for the levels is still being worked on, but it should be completed by next week. And the grind to completing The Grind continues.