Vertical Slice - Log #6 (Week 7 & 8)

Finalising the Environment

The greybox has been fully replaced by implementing all of the necessary art assets.

Vegetation

Vegetation assets were made to add some colour variety to the environment. The seaweed, dry grass and bushes are usable but the cacti are to be saved for a sandy area.

Updated Climbing/Movement

With the addition of the completed environment, movement required an update so that it does not interact so terribly with the non-flat game world. On top of which, climbing animations were updated so as to smooth out climbing movement in general. Because of the new model and rig for Safa that was added into the game at such a late stage, movement and climbing had to be quickly adjusted to feel good again. Some refinement over the controls and movement were required for general movement and jumping. With tweaks to the controls over climbing, so as to make the player feel more ‘weighted’ adding a sense of realism.

The Artists

Aidan

This week was for continuing to spice up the environment. I spent my time making vegetation assets to add colour variety to our current level. I got carried away making cactus assets only to realise we don’t have a sand area just yet, so these assets will be adjusted to art style and implemented further down the line. As for the dry grass and seaweed these were very straight forward and serve to decorate the floors. The most vibrant assets made this week aside from the cacti, were three variations of bushes, depending on which David feels best fit the current environment - consisting of green, yellow and orange.

David’s final request for Wednesday’s submission was to replace the remaining greybox assets, therefore he tasked me with replacing mechanical pieces such as the cylinder, pressure plate and the movable cubes. All of which I made custom rune alphas, consisting of new and dilapidated styles, for ZBrush. I also made some emissive textures for these assets to display a connection between pressure plate and cylindrical platform. Lastly I hand painted a ground texture to add variation to our flooring, so that it’s not just ruined tiles.

Connor

I came back and discussed what I had done with my team members. Some assets of mine weren’t necessary anymore, so I put those aside and put all the other assets on the drive with their normal maps. I then remade the normals for the hammer and shaft. As I was catching up with work from other classes too, I was less productive than desired.

This week was the final week for creating any missing assets. During this week, I went ahead and created particle systems for miscellaneous things we still needed. I created an ambient dust system, a falling rock/dust system, a door opening dust system, and a pillar rise dust system. I then finished my final high poly mesh assets, the door, a platform, and a last minute aesthetic set piece.

David

This week was when all the final models needed to start making their way into the level to replace the greybox area. I was also finishing my essay in this time so it was also quite a slow week but here we had models beginning to make their way into the game. Here I also created some procedural materials that we could use as albedo maps in engine on environment models for modularity purposes.

The final week consisted of making sure the entire level had all the final assets put in, that collisions were all working properly and a fair amount of set dressing to make the level look nice. I struggled with the color palette for the level here but because I was using only a few procedural albedos it was easy for me to quickly iterate different color schemes. I struggled a bit trying to make the stylized level work color wise because I have been so heavily focused on realism modelling and texturing since I started. This week I also added some polish with post processing effects on the camera. I also created small terrain sections that I could use for the floor allowing me to blend textures and create grass planes easily with wind effects. I also focused heavily on highlighting areas of interest and trying to lead the players eye using cracks in the roof manipulating the shadows of the directional light.

The Programmers

Hadley

The reiteration of the actual character meant that we had to invest some time into redeveloping the character controller to feel good again. Because the new character also had a new rig for animations, Izzy and myself then had to tweak the controller for the character and the camera to make the character control well again. On top of which, the new environment provided by David meant that we had a lot less flat environment to run and around and test with.

This opened up a whole new world of issues with the controller navigating over bumpy terrain, which further led to the development of an overhauled grounding system. As it turns out Unity’s in-built CharacterController component, is pretty terrible when it comes to complex movement and interactions. This means that essentially, for future development, the character controller will again need to be redeveloped to utilize RigidBody physics for movement in place of the CharacterController component, which has become a huge hindrance for achieving the system of movement and interactions that we want (Not enough time to do it for vertical slice). On top of which, the list of bugs is forever expanding and feels like it literally never ends, our comprehensive list of bugs, is too comprehensive and has required a lot of time to be invested into fixing the issues that arise. The final weeks were spent troubleshooting issues related to framerate, triggers not firing, characters falling through stuff, and camera clipping of course, just to name a few of the many bugs that have risen from development. On top of which, merging errors were prominent throughout the game and required a lot of work to rectify.

Jose

Week 7

• We had 4 assignments due so it was a big bug fixing week with Safa’s jumping and climbing.

• Merged the first pass of the new assets into the build and made sure the puzzles didn’t break.

• Designed a new concept for Safa due to lecturer feedback.

Week 8

The final week. The week of crunch. The week of death.

• Cloth physics on the pole, put in Connor’s new textures.

• Door Puzzle re-established.

• Rewrote the whole climbing system and its not perfect but now it works as we need.

• Worked with Izzy on a transition animation when climbing.

• Polished the block pushing area with connor’s dust particles. The pressure plate and the cylinders light up with emissive materials when active.

• Worked with David and Connor to put in all the new assets into our level. And I mean all of them.

Izzy

This week was solely making the basic character movement working and bug free as we are also submitting this to another subject as a plug in. This week was also made for fixing the climbing functionality as it has a lot of bugs. During the weekly mentoring session, one of the lecturers suggested that the the new imported character looked very similar to the character of the newly released game, ‘Rime”. This was quite obvious so we decided to change it entirely. The artist that was in charge for the character was busy with other commitments and so I took action and went ahead with modeling a new character.

Over the weekend, I tried my best to finish the character model but I got stuck with the clothes design so I got help from Jose and David. Finally, the last week of vertical slice has came, I managed to finish the character model, and imported it to the game. Thankfully the character controller is very modular so it was easy. The character had cloth aspects on her shoulders so I also implemented the cloth physics in unity. This took a while as it was very troublesome as unity has bug in the game engine itself. In addition, I added the animation transition so when the character jumps to another side of the wall instead of her just warping on the other wall. After this, I reimplemented putting the pole in the lever and also pulling it. I handed it over to Jose so he can do the manipulation of the door once the lever was pulled.