For this week, our major task is to prepare for the Playtest Day on Nov.9th, and that means we have 3 whole weeks to keep designing and improving our game experience.
During week 7, we finished our midterm presentation and we made good progress on the tech aspect. Therefore, we decided to shift our focus to hone our design.
Tasks for this week:
Candice:
- Finalize the rigging.
- Animation sheet for the opening scene: break down the whole animation into different parts based on the storyboard.
- Start the first few parts of the animation
- Week: demo animation and more details; make the Car model build
Alex:
- Change the environment based on the 1st and 2nd levels;
- Paint the ground material;
- Draw the background image.
Lydia:
- Level 2 player dodge attacks & flowers shoot seed to attack programming.
- The highlight color for each player need to be differnt.
- Game design doc update for level 2.
- need more assets (obstacles): rocks, roots, railroad model.
Cici:
- Design level 2 details;
- Host playtest with peers;
- The faculty playtest session with Esther.
Mike:
- merge view/merge to a single camera while in the car;
- The stereo sound indicates the object’s direction;
Tech
We implemented the “merge view” and move forward when 2 players stand close to each other and look at the same direction. But when they look at different directions (the angle between them is 50 degree), their views will not merge.
On top of that, while testing the dodging obstacles (the stones in the previous video), we noticed that since we want the players to successfully dodge the stones, we had to made the players’ colliders small enough.
That caused another problem, as the players needed to pick up the mushrooms, they need to come very close to the screen as their colliders are smaller. But when people are too close to the screen, the distortion and the players’ shadow will be super obvious. Therefore, we added a contraint to stop detecting their further movement when they are getting too close to the CAVERN screen.
Game Design
We did the brainstorming again since we thought picking up mushroom is not fun enough. It would be ok if we let the players to do it for a few times, but if this is the main gameplay, it might be too boring for them.
Therefore, we came up with an idea of changing the main interaction to dodging the obstacles on a ride.
Art
Based on the new game design plan, we made the new art assets.
As for the previous plan of making 3D animation for demonstrating background story, we discussed it and thought since it is not the most important part of the game experience, we need to come up with a better idea of how to deliver it. We will talk about this during week 9 and start the narrative part.
