Summary:
This week we meet on Thursday after lab and discussed about assets, level one design and how everything should be implemented in the code while each one of us did our own work at the same time. Averi were drawing environments for level one, Jameson worked on making smooth animations, Fahad tried to figure out how ray casting laser works, and I was adding in all the assets that was completed. After this meeting, we did not meet again in person, we only discussed in line when we have some confusion, and we were just finishing our own portion of work for level. Cause time were running a bit late, the last portion of the assets were put in rush, that caused some bugs that we need to fix in the future. For the playtesting, we had the test players playing a kind of broken game where there is many glitches.
Contributions:
My personal contribution is just working and the code, testing and make sure the assets are in the right place, assets show up at the right time, making sure the scenes are loaded in the right order to match, and debugging. Most of my time were spent on debugging. For example the animation glitch of Solis where he jumps and collide with a ladder, and the enemies’ laser does not detect player fully. I spent a lot of time on these bugs where I managed to fix the most general ones, but there is still a lot of bugs I failed to fix within limited time.
Self-Reflections:
Right now, I don’t like the game. If I have to rank our game with the rest of groups’ game, our game is at the bottom of the rank. The current level one we have right now, I feel like we focused too much on the quality of the assets, rather than game-play and mechanics. We should focus more on the game-play. I think this level one is very empty, and boring. Our game should have included more puzzle solving and use the simple mechanics to make more interesting puzzles. Right now, I don’t see any puzzle going on. The level one we have right now, I don’t even think it’s a complete level. I think we should cut down the empty space before encountering the first watcher, and bring in the underground level as part of level one. The player have already spent time walking inside the house. We should increase the intensity of the each level. Right now, the game is not challenging at all. For the future, I hope we can focus more on the game-play, make the game fun and interesting, and fun level design into something that we all proud of. We should also focus on how the emotional atmosphere of the game is expressed to the player, how to let the player to understand the narrative, and how they are taught to learn the mechanics. I am also concerned about the time required to finish the assets for our future levels. With the drawing quality right now, I don’t see our group to finish on time. For the alpha code, we had deadline for finishing the assets so I can have enough time to implement everything and actually have time to do my other assignment. But the fact that all the assets are completed on Sunday night, all my schedule shifts. Please, for the future, can we leave more time to finish the code after the assets are done? And if there isn’t enough time to implement the assets into the code, don’t be picky when time is running out. I keep on mention about focusing on game-play and mechanics to the group every week, and it still does't work well... If the team can’t feel the way I am feeling right now about the boring game we have right now, I think it’s pointless to carry on. If I can’t get my idea of focusing on game-play mechanics rather than pretty assets to the group, then I will just do whatever the majority want. I will just help the group to finish what they want.
