Overview
Week 6 was another good work week for the Future Forgers. On Monday we finished up storyboard images for our story clickthrough which you can try for yourself right here, if you try it out feel free to send any thoughts to me at mcameron@andrew.cmu.edu. We also have a completed build of chapter 4, the year 2030, in Unity. This includes all the dialog and puzzle elements. While this build is early it is fully playable. We then tested both the story and the build at playtest night on Tuesday night at Hunt Library. On the art front, the environment artists are continuing to fill out and make adjustments to the rooftop layouts. They have also been working on UV unwrapping and filling out the environment with temporary foliage to get a sense of where all of the plant life will be placed. Yukti has also been working on the rigs and hair for the characters. We hope to have a proof of pipeline for the character art for our halves presentation next week. Speaking of halves, we have begun our prep, having created version 0.1 of our slide deck. A significant portion of our work this next week will be on our presentation. Check out the ETC’s Youtube this coming Friday the 14th for our presentation, we will be going at the end of the 9am – 12pm block of presentations. You can also tune in from 9 – 12 on Monday and Wednesday to see all of the other ETC projects too! Lastly, on Friday we had our first weekly meeting with Jessica Hammer and spoke primarily about our game’s design regarding the puzzle.
Playtesting
On Tuesday we went and playtested our story clickthrough and the chapter 4 Unity build featuring our puzzle mechanics.
Story
For story, we tested our full story clickthrough. This was to test how natural the dialogue was and to see if we have a good balance between making dialogue choices and exposition. Ultimately, we found that some of the small adjustments we made after last week’s playtest did help make the player feel more engaged (we added more dialog choices in chapter 2 to break up the information given by the character Asha). However there still was a lot of information and the playtester wished there was more interaction, citing that they think once they are experiencing the story in an actual build they feel a better balance between information and gameplay. A positive feedback point was that they understood the framing of the story as well as the overall arc of it, there were also moments where they reacted in the way we had hoped to character dialog and story reveals.
Unity Build
The test with our Unity build went well too. We got lots of good data about the game and a few bugs were exposed. While the story was present we were focused primarily on the puzzle mechanics and UI. People, when not wrestling with our WIP UI, seemed to enjoy the puzzles themselves. The UI and some of the interactions were tough for players to manipulate at this stage but they understood the goals of the puzzle and what they needed to do to get there. While we were here to test the gameplay we got some positive feedback on the visuals of the game as well, people so far like the art style at this early stage.
This gameplay takes place on a tablet that the player pulls out during 3D gameplay. Once the planter beds and solar panels are placed in this 2D version they appear in that location in the 3D space. The goal is to give the plants the correct amount of shade. On the first pass of the puzzle, you are just placing planters. On the second pass, you manipulate solar panels to optimize and move the actual shade.
Environment Art
This week Danny and Hagan have begun to blockout all of our Unity scenes with foliage using a shader. This may not be the final look at the foliage but it really helps us get a better sense of what the final environment will look like. We’re hoping with textures that the environment will really come alive. Take a look at some of the images below.
Jessica Hammer Meeting
Our meeting with Jessica was mostly focused on our puzzle mechanics. She liked the direction we were headed and the puzzles themselves and said most of our problems were interface related. She also recommended ways to make the first pass of the puzzles where you rearrange planters rather than the solar panels a little more readable upon completion. As of right now you cannot meet the shade requirements of the plants 100%. There is a threshold of plant unhappiness you must be lower than. One interface solution Jessica proposed was to switch from measuring by plant unhappiness, essentially keeping a number lower than a certain threshold, that we should measure by plant happiness or to be more true to the science, the amount of water saved by creating shade. Essentially counting up or filling a bar to reach a success point.
At the end of our meeting, we also sent along our story documents and clickthrough with some specific areas we would like feedback on. Our next meeting is scheduled for week 8, after fall break. We hope to discuss the story with her more then.
Looking into Next Week
- Halves prep and rehearsals galore!
- Finishing up the first full build of the game
- Continue rigging and show proof of them working in Unity
- Continued UV unwrapping and foliage blockout, some basic materials in Unity may also be placed on assets in order to give the environment some color
- Halves presentations on Friday