Vertical Slice - Log #1 (Week 1-2)

Developing the Character

The character design was overhauled this week, starting with clothing concepts to help with defining the character’s rig.

This led to the creation of a high poly sculpt in ZBrush with a placeholder head, as a face/head isn’t a top priority for mechanical testing.

The next step was rigging the current state of the character to test movement and mechanics that don’t rely on the hammer or pole.

Character Controller

The character controller got a complete revamp from the previous prototype iteration, this begun with a complete restructuring of how the different control aspects interacted with one another. Utilizing one main class to act as a ‘brain’ of sorts over the other scripts for controlling the character, whether those be movement, actions, or animations the MainController handles all flow of logic to those other scripts. This led to a much more fluid controlling character that handles a lot better already than the previous version. This includes aspects of the camera as well, controlling and camera occlusion so that there is no loss of vision on the player.

Hammer Design

The hammer was designed based on reference of hammers and blunt weapons, as well as Middle-Eastern/Persian weapon designs.

The hammer model was created using size reference for a human, then exaggerating the proportions to bring more emphasis on the hammer. As this game’s design isn’t based entirely in realism, minor exaggeration was a welcome choice.

Greyboxing

The new version of the Greybox started within this period. We’re trying our best to introduce movement mechanics to the player in a concise manner, following the rule of threes. This is the section of the game leading up to acquiring the hammer, so it’s crucial that the player dominates movement before having to learn hammer-specific mechanics. Climbing, Jumping, Shimmying, and utilizing a pole as a crank to activate mechanisms are the mechanics introduced in the area depicted below.

Puzzle Mechanics

The first puzzle in the game involves using the learnt climbing mechanics to hop up on a few walls, dropping a cube to use as a weight for a raising platform.

The button reacts differently to our character’s and the cube’s weight. This is so, in case the player stands up on the button, they will get visual feedback as a sort of hint showing they need a static weight to accomplish their goal.

Puzzle Assets

Greybox phase puzzle assets and props were created based on the puzzles we are aiming to put in the game. Once these were created and the rigged character was made available to the rest of the group, alterations were made based on what had been created so the design was made ergonomic, ensuring no broken geometry or anatomy when implementing the assets.

Story Bible

During the first week the base narrative was created with multiple iterations concerning the finer details and discussed amongst the team. We created a story that made sense logically and tried staying away from too many cliches. After these details were decided upon, we got feedback about the overall arc from a lecturer who had experience in narrative design. He said we were on track towards a strong narrative arc, and suggestions he made had already been implemented as details. As we wanted as much feedback as possible we decided to attend the workshop: Future Realities Auckland Workshop 4: Creative Makers Round Table, a workshop part of Auckland Tech Week allowing us to interact with industry professionals working in media narrative. We received helpful feedback from this too. We were told the arc we had chosen was a good way to go, especially as a first narrative based project and for the game medium. There were a few things that were suggested that made us think about some of the larger plot holes and story logic, which we thought about and implemented into the final story bible.

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The Artists

Aidan

From the prototyping stage to vertical slice, the character’s design needed to be fairly overhauled as our current placeholder is a naked female mesh. Considering our intended tone of the game, it was pretty important to get a proper model in place, or at least clothed. Concepting the clothing will also help with the rig down the line - knowing if any extra parts need bones for animating secondary actions. After concepting some clothing designs (focused more on shape than texture) I started sculpting over the original mesh from prototype and ended up cutting the ‘tabard’ shorter so that the animations would work better (less clipping). I then spent a few hours retopologising in TopoGun making sure it had relevant edge loops around joints.

After retopologising, I took the model into maya and used the auto rig, painted bone weights and animated a placeholder run animation and jump pose for testing purposes. Although there are some issues with weighting in the rig, this serves as an early iteration to show where the character is headed design-wise.

Connor

During the first week I spent the time creating the hammer concepts and fleshing out the narrative to bounce off the rest of the team. Because heavy weaponry wasn’t common in the culture we were being influenced by, I looked at other reference when it came to shape and combined it with the design elements from our original base culture. With the narrative, I fleshed out the story and created several different iterations that could be put together in any combination.

During the second week, I spent time finishing the hammer model and started on the designs for the mechanisms the player encounters, e.g. levers, buttons, cranks. I got the character model off the drive and began testing everything ergonomically, changing dimensions and angles of certain props in order to have the character interact as realistically as possible without breaking any anatomy.

David

During week one I began constructing the art bible containing reference and mood boards for the environment and foliage. I felt it was important to establish the intended art style of the game before we dive into modelling and texturing. The art bible is divided up into sections containing everything from the general art style and color palette to the type of trees and how they will be textured so it contains a lot of visual reference that we have gathered on where we want to go with the game's art direction. It also contains a few technical guides including steps to follow to ensure the models are all exported and named properly and uniformly. This includes a naming convention we have also developed that borrows heavily from Epic Games naming convention.

Moving on to week two Jose and I began working on the greybox and designing the first few sets of movement based puzzles to familiarize the player with the movement mechanics and controls including climbing, shimmying and also a weight based physic puzzle. Next up we will be refining the greybox a bit more which will lead us into breaking down which assets need to be modelled. I will also be working on a demo scene to test created assets together to ensure we have a solid level of cohesiveness between artists.

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The Programmers

Hadley

I began by designing the new and improved character control system, designing the layout with a central ‘brain’ behind the functionality of everything allowed for the best flow of logic, with little to no conflicting aspects of movement. A lot of time was invested into the camera, it’s movement and especially occlusion, This was completed and implemented into the ‘brain’ of the controller, once a frame of the controller was completed, Izzy was given access to implement her work.

Jose

Although my work was slowed at first due to issues with other assignments, I hopped back into work by working with David to create the Greybox. We discussed heavily on the progression of mechanics, and designed the appropriate puzzles. I implemented the weight puzzle as discussed, and imported the puzzle requiring a pole that I had created previously for Prototype 3, with some alterations to account for the changes in our framework.

Isabelle

At the start of the week, I imported some animations from mixamo.com to work on the animation states for the main character. I created a state machine without using the animator component in unity. The character can now can run, jump, strafe left & right. By the end of the week, I started implementing the climbing mechanic. At the moment it can only climb up to ledges. By next week, the shimmying will be implemented.