October 30th, 2023 – November 5th, 2023
Production
This week we had a very busy week preparing for our Saturday Playtest Day. Even though we still have a lot we want to complete, we worked hard to try and put together a complete experience to help give the players a sense of what we are trying to accomplish with our game. So far we have put most of our focus on phase 2 since it has the most important elements of the game play, such as the red tide, which the player will have to rely on the echolocation to navigate. These two elements have been giving us problems, but the programmers have been working hard to find solutions. For the actual playtest we made a pre and post game survey to help us to get feedback on how the game may have impacted the players. This will also be a great way to compare the feedback later on once we have made additional updates to see how different elements have affected the players knowledge and motivation to make change.
Design
According to the feedback from the previous playtest, we found out that the phase 1 map is too big for players to play through, so we made the phase 1 map smaller, and made the exit more obvious.
In order to solve the motion sick problem, we invited Jesse Schell to experience our game, and he gave us a lot of valuable feedback. He said our mangrove tunnel is very likely to cause motion sickness, so we decided to replace the tunnel with a cave and replace swimming through the tunnel with playing a static video.
This is the placeholder for our time warp scene.
We also put in a quick tutorial for our playtest that will be updated later with a more detail.
Art
This week we started animating the dolphin, excavator arm and created a restoration sign for phase 3.
We rigged the dolphin and animated a swim cycle for it within Maya.
Here is the rig:
We also modeled, rigged, and animated an excavator arm to show the destruction of mangroves at the end of our first phase in the game.
Finally, to indicate to players that the final scene is a mangrove restoration site, we modeled and textured a restoration sign.
Programming
We have implemented the dead fish function so that the fish will flip over and stop moving after hit by the red tide. The UI will also respond after the player eats the dead fish so that they know that it is bad.
Level blueprint updated.
Previously players might get lost after missing one fish so now we have the fish generate throughout the game from the beginning.
We also implemented the function for light up the sky after player get to phase 3 to give it a more positive and hopeful feeling similar to phase 1.
Since we are using Quest 3 to develop our game, post-processing can be used to display fish outlines, even if there are obstacles in front of them.
The outline disappears a few seconds later depending on the distance between the player and the fish.