Time: 02/06-02/12
Summary:
Anthony Daniels (actor of C-3PO in Star Wars) was at ETC this week! We had the chance to discuss the project and he was intrigued by the idea of putting 2D into 3D. He described it as “cheating but clever”.
Production:
Continuing the effort to scope down, we decided to downgrade the 2-floor apartment to just the ground floor and moved all the rooms to the same floor. Compared to Week 2’s total number of art assets, we downsized from 350 to 250. Based on last week’s progress (assets per week), this was considered a much more feasible plan. In addition, the story – the big reveal at the end is canceled and replaced with an implicit closing event.
For art asset management, we started using ShotGrid by Autodesk and deprecated Google Sheets. Sound assets are still managed with Google Sheets and the overall timeline is by Monday.com.
Design:
We met with Matt Costa (‘12 and Principal Creative Director at Riot Games) and Chris Klug (Professor at ETC) this week to discuss our design, especially the story aspect. We realized that we were spending efforts on the story and gameplay aspects when we should have focused on our no.1 goal – art. Therefore, a major scope cut took place.
Please refer to the Production section.
Art/UI:
Around 60 meshes and materials have been completed in the past two weeks. They will be implemented into the game scene next week.
Filming:
Finally! We got access to the green screen room and set up basic lighting and filming equipment to do our first rounds of testing. We invited classmates to be actors and tried acting ourselves as well. Although none of us were professional, it was fun!
Programming:
Player locomotion has been implemented where players can snap-turn and teleport with controllers. The map has been divided into accessible areas and non-accessible areas.
The test videos were imported and placed inside the graybox scenes. However, UE5 kept crashing when I tried VR Preview with one video playing. This issue didn’t happen before and it would take a while to fix. Nevertheless, a demo was recorded inside the UE editor to show the basic composition.
Audio:
Due to the continuous cut in scope, the number of audio assets was also reduced from 90 to 60. Now that we are certain of our scope, audio drafts will be in production from next week.
Future Plans:
- Audio drafts
- Scene composition
