For this week, we are mainly focusing on achieving our half’s goals by adding pick-up function and scheduling playtests to gather feedback. And we have started drafting our presentation slides.

This week’s tasks:
Tech:

1. Implement pick-up
2. Implement environment to Unity scene.
3. Height calibration
4. Add ambient sound to Unity

Game design:

1. New game idea: pick up mushrooms and stack them on head as mushroom hats.
2. Summarizing design progress & adding it to half of the presentation
3. Playtest with students, faculties, and alum.

Art:

1. Adjust the environment scene.
2. Add textures to the main mushroom, bamboo, and bamboo shoots.
3. Character finish topology & texture.

Tech:

On Thursday, we implemented the pick-up function and adjusted the scale of the environment. After the users’ collider touches the mushroom’s collider for 2 seconds, the mushroom will be automatically collected.

And we playtested with 5 students on Friday. Here are some of the suggestions and feedback we got:
1. Playtesters wants to walk into the positive space (inside of the screen).
2. It would be better if we can add feedback telling people that the mushrooms were picked up.
3. Some playtesters thought they stepped on the mushrooms instead of picked them up.
4. Playtesters like the sound effect when they picked up the mushroom.

Game design:

We met Christine Barnes this Wednesday and playtested our prototype, and here are some feedback we got from her:

1. Laggy environment:
   Solution: because the bamboo and grass took up too much GPU, we reduced the polygons of our models and decided to add a 2D picture to replace the background.
2. May consider a time limit for levels.
3. Design a voice guidance to tell players to pick-up mushrooms.

The tasks we want to complete before half presentation:

• Have a complete and playable scene for phase 1, includes
  • The complete environment with decorations and proper background
  • Interactable mushrooms along the road
  • The player will now be slowly moving forward from the beginning
  • SFX attached
  • Some signs of the environment change for phase 2 of the game
• A 2D demo/draft of the start and ending animation
  • E.g moles to start migrating, moles put up mushroom hats, moles wave to winning
• Phase 2 of the game will be demoed by pictures(for now)

Art

We tried solving the laggy problem by reducing the amount of polygons (especially grass and bamboos). Also we finished most of the textures for the assets.