Vertical Slice - Log #3
- Squidwink
- Jun 4, 2017
- 4 min read
Developing the Face
The character’s face concepts were taken to the next level. A sculpt was made in ZBrush and later retopologized in TopoGun and imported into Maya to be attached to the body mesh.

This was followed by a quick art pass, the only textured piece was the face mesh, the rest was vertex coloured due to time constraints. Some adjustments were applied to the mesh to improve the silhouette
Character Controller
Reiteration has begun on the character controller, the goal of creating a fluid control system that not only feels good to control, but programming wise flows well. The layout of the control system has been laid out now with thorough planning, so as to maintain the flow of logic in a simple manner that allows the entire team to make changes to tinker with the controls of the character. The only way to improve the ‘feel’ of the character in-game is to reiterate on the system we have until it is a well refined system that simply, feels good to control.



Swimming
Our character has basic swimming now, with swimming animations coupled with it. It is very basic at the moment, however. In the future we want the character to know when it is in the show so it begins walking even in the water.

Expanding on the Environment
The artists continued making environmental assets, mostly that which was necessary.

The Artists
Aidan
I spent this week sculpting the character’s head in ZBrush, and later exporting it to TopoGun. I spent a few hours retopologizing each subtool from ZBrush. Once each part was retopologized I imported it all into Maya and adjusted each component to give an all round more interesting silhouette. As requested by Jose, I added the little hair strand sticking out next to the swept fringe, as it adds character to our… character.
Connor
During this week, I continued working towards making environmental assets. I created some high poly sculpts to bake onto low poly models, creating normal maps that fit our art style.
I spent some time creating the art bible section for the art style of the ruins, collaborating and discussing with Aidan as I added to it.
Continuing to experiment with decal systems. Hit a snag in testing my own normals. Imported the necessary scripts into our scene, but the decal system would not project the normals onto any mesh I applied it to. I finished creating a high poly pendulum hazard to bake on. It was decided that the rock would be used as it sets itself apart from other existing assets (not a standard block and uses rope which is new to the project). I created a new dune mesh based on my prototype design and baked the high poly on within a couple of hours.
David
I was absent for the entirety of week 4 due to being sick. No progress on the level was done here.
The Programmers
Hadley
Rebuilding the character controller after a bulk of the mechanics had been implemented. The character controller required a certain structure, in order to maintain readability, which would translate directly into usability for the rest of the team. So as to let even the artists make the changes they felt might be necessary while playtesting.
On top of which, an audio system was implemented to be a static reference for every other script in the game, allowing any other script to make various changes, when things like collisions occur, or triggers are entered. So as to change the music dynamically, but also include other sound functionality for the various interactions around the world.
Jose
Week 4 was a week very tailored in bug fixing for me. However, I got to add swimming into the game. Although we weren’t sure if it was a necessary feature for vertical slice, we did know it was possible that it would be required in the future. Although right now it is very barebones (touch trigger, go into swimming mode), it is good to see it in the game.
Additionally, I added more easing equations and parameters to the water shader, which is now applied on a plane with cloth physics. The result is that the water now has waves which can be easily edited by members of the team to get the flow they want.
The rest was simply working on the climbing glitches. Sometimes, it feels like every glitch fixed just opens the door for two more. The player may now climb up if a wall is tagged so, and the player can freely transition from a wall to the previous wall if the connection is made. I went to great lengths to make sure the climbing system could be edited heavily in the editor, so the artists and the rest of my team should be able to easily create wall climbing segments. In the future, I want to polish the animations for mostly everything, since the climbing still looks a bit wonky.
Izzy
This week’s task is to re-implement the character player animations using the Animator Component in Unity. I created a blend tree in which controls the walking to running transition of the character according to the joysticks’ input. I also made the jumping animation match with the jump of the character controller. I detected a bug whenever the character enters a slope, it’s state stays in the falling state. This was fixed through detecting the ground with a raycast and if the raycast is hitting a slope, it will remain grounded. I also had to reimplement the climbing mechanic but Jose wanted to help so I handed him over the task. By the end of the week, I took a break and studied some more IK functionality in unity to apply it to our animations.
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