Us. We’re the new sprinters in town.
Over the course of a week the team worked tirelessly (we were fairly tired) on created the level 1 Alpha Code. Our wonderful visual artists finished the absolutely adorable animations for our main character Solis. This was done by our lead character artists, who finished bring Solis to life with movement animations, hiding, climbing and oh so much more! Our environment artists brought to life the world of Dark Age by creating our entire level 1 with a foreground, background and even a in-between ground. Our asset team also created many different dialogue text placement options to read and look at which are a great blessing. This meant that the coding team didn’t need to display the text via the built in Unity GUI message system (which I have absolutely no idea how it works but sounds g-ui-reat). Once the assets were completed, our lead programer would take them and place them into the game world. This laid out a proper foundation for us to work off of. The lead programer and myself then worked back and forth (kind of like a ping-pong match) and implemented the features into the game world. That experience? Mind-blowing. I learned a great deal about Unity and scripting in general (stay tuned as ill speak about this below) which was amazing. Once we finished coding out the game and adding the assets in we began play testing. Play testing was anything but play, it was a serious affair that helped us to better gauge where our players noted frustrating components and areas of improvements. We conducted a total of five play tests with different gamer types (for more information, please see Play Testing Report).
My personal contributions were essentially everywhere. I aided in the process of creating scripts and coding, as well as placing in assets in various locations. I alluded to my experience above, which I will further iterate in the following sentences. When I was tasked with an issue, my brain I had to truly flex though. For example, I was tasked with implementing a script that would display the dialogue text at the bottom of the screen when the player was standing near an interactive object, I used a vast network of empty box colliders with triggers active, a new player detection script that returns booleans on key pressed and in hit box, as well as individual scripts for every dialogue image to display when said booleans are read true. Quite the accomplishment if I do say so myself. Which I do. Along with this particular example I created other scripts that will be used later on in new levels. The experience was interesting, I learned a lot of problem solving skills and learned the Unity environment better.
My second large tasks was to create and populate the documentation we would submit along with the code. This documentation included a number of diagrams such as a bubble diagram, overview map, ramp diagram and much more! I wrote the various design questions we aimed to address and the play testing questions as well. I m proud to say it was a hit with the subject (the individuals we play tested). The documentation was quite the challenge, as there was a number of items to create and write up. However, I m confident in my writing ability. I believe my concise and to-the-point writing was beneficial in conveying information to the subjects we tested and helping us better understand the various components of our game.
Oh, I also led two play test.
For the following weeks the biggest challenge will be to improve the visual feedback systems in the game. This will include highlighting what is interactive, what doors you can go through, if the player is losing health and more. These are predominately UX based issues we need to resolve. We also will - on the suggestion of Rick Brown - focus on finding music that will curate the sorrow we evoke through Dark Ages ambiance. This is key to creating the experience we hope the player will have throughout the game play session as well as have once they leave. We want players to feel lost hope and feel as if they finally got through a dire situation. We have quite the week ahead of us, but the team and I know we can make it…. We must.
