Team Summary:
For this week, we alternated between working independently and discussing together either online or in person. Last Thursday, our team were present together, however we were working on our own aspect of the game. Fahad was working on coding the ray-casting, Averi was working on environment assets, Eva was implementing the finished assets and I was working on the walking animation. For the rest of the week Fahad organized and wrote content for the document and play-tested two people, Averi was working on environmental assets, shell menus, presentation slides and play-tested one person. Eva was working on bugs in the code, and implementing finished assets. I was working on more animations for Solis and play-testing two other people.
My Contributions:
After doing the first animation, which involved idle stance for Solis, I was starting to get used to the animation workflow and alternating between creating the assets in Photoshop and animating the assets in Spriter. The idle animation was the slowest process because I was learning a new software and redesigning Solis at the same time. My workflow includes, drawing Solis at a key-frame pose in Photoshop, then slicing each moving part of Solis into separate prefab assets. After slicing Solis into separately-planned body part assets, I placed them in the correct order into Spriter then animate each body part to create a loop animation that plays when the user interacts with Solis using the keyboard. After finishing the loop animation, I export the animation into separate PNGs, which is then brought to the Unity file I created, to test the animation and see how fast it would play based on the number of exported PNGs and find the proper sample number to play the animation at a correct pace. Once it is tested, I use a website that resizes a batch of PNGs to the correct size for Solis so he can fit properly into the game.
For this week, I continued to work on the animation for Solis to prevent him from looking like some moving/floating PNG image in the game. So far I have managed to finish Solis’ walking, climbing, jumping and falling animation loops and tested and resized the PNG set images for each stances. Furthermore I play-tested two people who gave us really detailed feedback about our alpha code content.
My Reflection:
In my opinion, I think our game really needs to focus on gameplay rather than aesthetics and visual graphics. I understand that games need to look professional and look clean and polished (both visually and emotionally), however our game needs to prioritize the basics of game creation such as core and secondary mechanics like the puzzles, UI and UX design we planned for Dark Ages. I find it frustrating that we can work and create a visually appealing game but we cannot create a proper and challenging game through game mechanics. I think we need to step back for the next week and focus on improving our level one and create better levels planned for our game that focuses on mechanics and just use low-fidelity assets for now, such as placeholders. However, even if we want to focus more on game mechanics, it may be too late to revert our game to focus more on challenging game mechanics and gameplay. Because the highlights of our game focuses on emotional appeal, we should accentuate and exploit this aspect of our game. Having a creepy and horrifying game might be our only saving grace for Dark Ages, while also balancing these with challenging gameplay/puzzles. These should be discussed in the next team meeting.
