Overview
This week we got some more feedback from faculty to help guide some design tweaks moving forward and began our focus on integrating the final assets into the game. We have also begun to polish the experience, this includes a lot of tweaking and bug fixing but also includes the replacement of the temporary UI with a more finalized UI. On the environment art side, Danny and Hagan have integrated new, finalized foliage into the scene. They have also started on some of the low-priority assets that will be put into the environment to help give it some character. Yukti has also been hard at work on the animations of the characters. The hope is to have our animation state machine up and running on Monday. Last but not least, Amber finished some of the 2D images that will be shown during the interstitials in between playable chapters of the game.
Design Considerations
After some feedback from playtesting about the design of our game, we decided to meet with Dave Culyba to see where we could improve our experience. One of his main feedback areas was that the roof did not feel alive and was a little bit sterile. He wanted to feel more motivated to explore the rooftop garden. There were also concerns over the amount of dialogue, especially in chapters 1 and 2. He was playing an older build of the game without some improvements so we hope the additions we’ve made since then will help the experience. What we will be trying to pursue to help with the design will be a couple of things.
- We will be adding some smaller assets into the environment that makes the space feel more lived in. The player will then be able to interact with the objects and get some text that will give more context to the space.
- Now that we have a more freeform camera experience, we hope to showcase the photos the player takes at the end of the game in some form.
- We will still be implementing some changes in the dialogue in chapter 2 to help shorten the experience.
We are also finding that, with the addition of 2D images during the interstitials of the game, the dialogue in the opening feels less daunting. After some feedback from Jessica Hammer regarding these images, they also seem to help show the relationship between characters better, making it easier to understand the context of the game and the story.
Environment Art
This week the artists have added the final foliage into the game. This includes more specific crops and species of plants as well as some more decorative elements.
There will be additions to the environment to help bring life and character to it. As mentioned earlier in the blog post, these will include smaller assets that the players can interact with to learn about characters and the spaces. More on that in the coming weeks.
Character Art
Yukti is most of the way through her animation journey. The animations include an idle animation and a number of different emotes per character. These emotes will be triggered during dialogue to have the characters react to different dialogue choices or moments in the story. There will be 11 animations in total. Below is a short video of Olive’s idle animation to give a demonstration of the rigs working in Maya.
Next week Yuki will finish up the animations and begin texturing and the creation of accessories for the characters.
Interstitial Images
A number of 2D images have been completed to be added to the interstitial chapters of the game. These will help give better context for the story and characters. Take a look!
UI
Updated UI is beginning to come together in the game as well. This will replace the old placeholders we’ve had in place for a long time. Further adjustments may be made to the color of the UI.
Looking Into Next Week
- Completion of the animation state machine as well as the animations themselves.
- Character textures as well as work on accessories for the characters.
- Full first pass of UI finished.
- Low-priority modeling for the environment.
- Preparing for the last few weeks and the end of the semester.