Overview
We’re getting close to the end of the semester so this week the team spent a lot of time polishing up the game and looking into the future. Early this week we met with our faculty instructors, they had played build 1.2.1 so they came with some final bits of feedback about the game. We also had softs this week so a few faculty members, our faculty consultants, and Serena from the CMU Futurist Club came by to talk about and play the game. This week was also a big week polishing the game with multiple meetings for look dev taking place. This included adding lighting to the characters’ faces, blocking out character placements, and making some adjustments to the environment. Finally, we had multiple meetings within the team to discuss finals, the ETC Festival, festival submission, and other outstanding items.
New Look for 2D Art
This week Amber made a lot of adjustments to the 2D art in the game. This includes making the characters match the 3D counterparts more closely, a new color for the background, and some shading work. The hero shot at the end of the game has also been finished with new shading. Take a look at a few below.
Environment Art
Environment art has also had adjustments made. First, we have added some fog to the scene in the surrounding city as well as some solar panels on other roofs around the city. There have been a few foliage updates, most notably in the vertical garden area. Also, the community garden on the first section of the rooftop now reflects the player’s choice at the beginning of the game during the fundraising interview.
Character Art and Look Dev
Renders of Characters and Textures
Yukti has finished the characters with accessories and textures all in place. Take a look at a few Maya renders below.
Look Dev
This week we also spent a lot of time staging the characters in the environment and lighting them. In earlier builds, the characters would not look at you and were often obscured in shadow. This has been one of the major points of the game we hoped to adjust and have gotten a lot of feedback from players that this needs to be fixed. So we have now found final placements for the characters in the environment, when you talk to them they are now framed in a way that makes them look like they are looking at you, and their faces have soft spotlights on them so you can see their faces and silhouettes more easily. Take a look at some images below.
Softs
This week was also softs week, a week where faculty come through to take a look at all of the projects. Faculty consultants assigned after halves also need to play through the full experience of each project.
On Wednesday morning we had three 20-minute conversations with faculty.
Our first was with Mike Christel. He has played some earlier builds and was impressed with the progress he made. He had a few points of feedback that we discussed. The biggest thing was that he wanted the characters to be looking at the player when talking to them, this is something that we fixed later in the week. He was also distracted by the fact when you looked off the side of the building there was nothing below but floating buildings. This was made worse by the fact that the rest of the environment was pretty polished, so there was a big disconnect. We hope the fog we’ve added feels intentional and helps alleviate the issue. We also spoke further and clarified some things about our resources page.
Next was Drew Davidson. He played through build 1.2.1 before coming in. He had some issues with the camera mechanics, mostly relating to being able to aim at the camera icons. He found it difficult to do at times without a reticle. To fix this we tried adding a reticle in the center of the screen but found it distracting. So instead we made the radius of the camera spots larger making it easier to aim at them, this still has yet to be tested. He also really enjoyed the puzzle and said that that section could be extrapolated into its own game.
Finally, we spoke on Zoom with Carl Rosendahl. While he hasn’t played the experience he did watch the playthrough. We mostly filled him in on what the game was and what the goals were. He then gave us some ideas on what he’d like to see in our final presentation. Most notably what the original seed was for the vision of the game.
Our faculty consultants also came through to play the game.
Ricardo Washington played through on Wednesday. He had some notes about redundant sections of dialogue. He also had some issues with the camera mechanics and walked up to the camera icons rather than pointing at them with the mouse. We hope our change of UI will fix that. He had not seen the interstitial images but felt that they worked well in the game. He also suggested that we populate the rooftops of other buildings in the game with greenery. While we aren’t adding greenery we did add some solar panels to far-off buildings.
Ralph Vituccio came by on Thursday to check out the game. Instead of playing it himself again, he brought along Serena, the president of the CMU Futurist Club to playtest the game. She was able to play through the entire experience. Her favorite part of the experience was chapter 6, where you are able to take pictures and learn about all of the technology on the rooftop. She felt that there may be a bit too much dialogue for her in the first part of the game though this never frustrated her. She also liked the art and the optimistic tone of the game and said she could really see the thought process behind all of our decisions.
While we don’t have a ton of time to act on all the feedback given we hope to make some more improvements to the game this week and we feel like we are at a good place with the game at this moment.
Festival, Finals, and the Future
We have a busy week next week and spent some time talking about everything we need to accomplish for the project.
First is the ETC Festival which will be taking place on Friday, Dec. 9th. We are going to have multiple sections of the game booted up. Mainly the puzzle chapter and the end photo-taking chapter. That way guests can play smaller sections of the game to get an idea of what they will be doing. We are doing it this way because it is such a long game and we need to keep the flow of guests steady. We will also have a trailer of the game running and the full game running on one of the computers if a guest wants a deeper dive into the game.
We also discussed our final presentation. We got our initial outline done and will run through it with our faculty instructors this Monday. We will then practice with Ricardo on Wednesday, iterate on his feedback for another rehearsal with Heather on Friday and then have rehearsal in the RPIS the next Monday. We present on Tuesday, Dec 13th.
We are also working with the Center for Transformational play as part of a pilot program to get more student games into festivals and conferences. This week we created a list of materials we’d need to submit and talked about team availability post-semester. We then sent this info along to Jessica Hammer and Elaine Fath, with whom we will be consulting about festivals and competitions. Our main targets for submission are the Games For Change Festival, Indiecade, and the IEEE Game SIG Competition.
Learn more about the launch of the Center for Transformational play here.
Looking Into Next Week
- Final Video
- Finals Slide Building and Rehearsals
- Polishing
- Creation of some game festival submission materials
- ETC Festival on Friday
- Plans to launch the game on Itch.io