Team Summary:
Last Thursday, our group began creating the first level for our game. Our first level is planned to include the prologue (home setting), the forest map, shell menus (main menu, game over and notebook), some collectibles and interactive environments, animated sprites, introducing core and secondary mechanics and the first two puzzle components. We took into consideration of the ramps and the puzzles are relatively easy because it is level one; each puzzle is complemented with a resting period for the player. On Sunday, we discussed our reward system for our level one, however we still haven’t decided on our reward yet. On Wednesday, Eva, Averi and Fahad planned to meet at SFU to discuss debugging some glitches, coding help, and connecting the environmental assets with the code. Eva helped Fahad with the pick-up and tossing component. Fahad still needs to work on the moving object mechanic (push/pull objects). Averi was cutting up environmental assets to make them shorter and finished a set of environment assets (forest scene); additionally, Averi was working hard on making all the environmental assets throughout the entire week in high fidelity. While the three of them were at school, I was at home making animations for Solis.
My Contributions:
For the first level, I helped with level designing the first and last puzzle. My initial idea for the puzzle was a branch would swing conveniently that periodically blocks the sight of the Watcher, which enables Solis to use timing to go pass the Watcher. However, this was replaced with interactive hiding. I also created the three-watcher puzzle in level one. Furthermore, I made some illustrations to clarify these puzzles and shack area. Some ideas like the fallen tree puzzle was impossible to solve and the Solis-in-the-treetop puzzle was narratively unsound. Additionally, I started making the level two scenery (the cave) for Averi later.
It was hard to find the proper animation style for Solis because of my lack of skills in creating animated gaming assets, and time constraint. I kept switching between creating animation: frame-by-frame, which involved drawing Solis repeatedly in slightly different poses in between keyframes to create an animation, or to use Spriter by BrashMonkey which was a software dedicated to creating animations for 2D game assets. Frame-by-frame took too long and was tedious and complicated because I am still learning Photoshop and my tablet-drawing skills were rusty. Spriter was a new software that I had to learn which takes time, and some features were not unlocked because there’s an additional fee for the PRO version. Eva also tried to help me decide and try to find a more efficient way to animate within the time constraint. Prior to deciding my animation style, I also considered using Adobe Flash, but there was no more time to learn and research about Adobe Flash. I redesigned Solis as well to have a simpler design that will suit to Averi’s new environment and was easier to animate in Spriter. I ended up using Spriter because I only had to create the asset in pieces and only once, then I can manipulate it in Spriter. As a practice ground I made the idle animation because it had the least movement so it was the easiest to animate. I took some notes on the speed of the animation after implementing my exported animation PNGs into my unity file (I created my own Unity mini game to test out the animations before planning to send them to the programmers).
My Reflection:
Overall, the team was very productive this week. Because of that reading break, we had to make sure that we were productive for the past two weeks. I find it that it’s great that our team can be quite flexible with team meetings. Although I was missing in the second team meeting we were all still productive and could finish multiple aspect of our game. One problem, I potentially see is the foreboding future where we must finish multiple levels very soon because the due date for our full game is coming soon. If one level took this long, how would we be able to finish multiple levels along with other final projects, and final exams in other courses. One potential solution is to start creating level two as soon as level one (alpha code) is finished. In the worse case scenario, we may have to remove a game mechanic to simplify our game.
