Beta - Log #3

Quality of Life Update

QA testing from our lecturer highlighted a lot of issues, most of which were quality of life updates for the game. Things such as environment issues, bugs, and pro-tips.

Camera interactions, animation updates, character design, character orientation on surfaces, pause menus, hammer indicators, and UI suggestions were just a few of the critiques we received from our unofficial QA test.

We’ve already begun work on adding new, more friendly and consistent (and even animated) UI prompts for players to rely on. Along a useful minimap! (A really placeholder one, don’t cringe!).

This lead to a drastic amount of changes within the first few days, which really tested our abilities using sourcetree effectively, merging changes, updating scenes etc.

We basically overhauled most of the major systems of the game this week, working to resolve a lot of the issues that these systems were facing, as highlighted by our QA, and generic user playtesting.

Animation Fixes

Safa had the tendency of being able to move when performing actions. Smashing, attaching the hammer head, detaching it...Safa could slide along the floor when doing all of these. She could even do them while jumping!

We’ve implemented all the proper fixes so that Safa stays put when performing these actions - making the game look less wonky!

The Artists

Aidan

This week was spent taking the bell puzzle to the next level. Firstly I updated my bell arm blockouts so that they appeared more wooden. I also spent a bit of time in Unity messing with physics of our rope - of which I made a tileable normalmap for efficiency reasons. After receiving external help, the bell hangs more believably, considering its weight and size in general. In addition to this, I made some coloured pieces of cloth that are to assist in solving this puzzle. Three pieces of cloth, one for each bird that sing the tune that allows the player to solve the bell puzzle.

I also spent the end of the week making three custom fonts, two that mimic the first. This was done so that every UI button prompt were to appear ‘wiggly’ and hand-written.

Connor

During this week I continued creating more assets for the game. I went back to the breakable wall for the first puzzle area, as the first one was designed to be more rock like, and the consensus from the team was to make it appear more like a cracked ruinous wall like the pale temple bricks around the level. I split a wall into 21 pieces and created high poly sculpts for each of them. I also continued creating the beach assets, finishing the animations for the crab, and the meshes/texture maps for the inanimate pieces. I also began concepts for a new puzzle area. As a way to use the climbing mechanics again, I concepted a puzzle which requires the player to create a

path up to a tower using ledges and mechanisms.

David

Week 3 consisted of refining some of tileable ground textures using Substance Designer. It takes a bit more work to get some great looking stylized materials in Designer but the reusability and control over the textures is invaluable. I also started playing around with a new water material for the island and ocean as well as creating a seperate scene within the unity project to test art assets. Progress art wise has been slow over beta because the level needs resizing and refining, as well as the terrian. This will all be done during the Gold sprint. I created this separate test scene to test all our new art assets ready for the Gold project to use mainly baked lighting because of how much better it looks!

The Programmers

Hadley

This week we were kicked into overdrive, our lecturer Sal extensively QA tested the game on the Friday of last week, giving us a comprehensive list of updates, fixes and changes to be made throughout this week. The list comprised of a multitude of things, ranging from simple fixes such as the positions/rotations of environmental assets to animation fixes, camera orientation suggestions and physics tips!

I immediately began working on implementing the fixes to the camera that Sal had suggested, as in all 3rd person platformer games that I nostalgically look back on (Jak and Daxter, Ratchet and Clank, Sly Fox), the camera operates in this particular way that will autoalign behind the player, but if they continue to move in the same direction, their directional input on the controller will not be relative to the new camera’s position, but to the position of the camera before the auto alignment begun.

Limit’s to the camera’s parameters were added as well, such that the player cannot rotate so quickly, adding a bit of smoothness to the ‘feel’ of the camera and controls, while also not allowing the player to look so far up or down in their orbital view.

Animation fixes were the next thing on the list, transitioning between states and the animations that should accompany that, sometimes would not fire correctly, or were easily breakable. Extremely busy week coming into the final week of Beta, and into NZGDC!

Jose

All the good feedback we got really lit a fire in my heart! We’re working hard to address as many things as were brought up as possible, while slowly planning out the next puzzle to be added!

The list of features I’ve implemented this week are below!

• Added tentative Minimap (which shows Safa and the Hammer head on it) and Control scheme menus when pressing start. They’re placeholder but should improve player experience.

• Worked with Aidan to implement a new UI system to show players when they can perform actions. Animated and cute, too! It will display a longer message the first time an action can be performed, and then switch to a shorter one.

• Made Safa automatically swing the hammer when pressing the attack button while having put the hammer away.

• Made the hammer fall off from the pole if Safa falls from an extremely high distance.

• Proximity based disappearance for broken pieces of objects.

• Added some colliders to items missing them.

• Added lightning and shadows to the pole. As before it didn’t project one at all.

• Added an XRay to the hammer, so that it can be seen through walls.

• However, adding in this x ray would require a lot of shader replacement in most of the world - so I will wait until a big team meeting before we decide if it is worth the effort.

Izzy

This week was the whole week of me being away after finding a full-time job in the industry. I have come in the weekend and fixed a few bugs assigned to me by my fellow programmers. Before this, during the week, Hadley has found someone who could help us create our own animations via motion capture. I was required to send them a T Pose of Safa for set up purposes. In the weekend, I was required to fix a few bugs in the animation. One was the ‘hard fall” that Hadley implemented. It was not as smooth and had a delay in animation and it also moved Safa’s root which translated her abnormally backward, so I tweaked the animation settings and fixed it. Another task assigned to me, was the button management while equipping and unequipping the hammer and putting it behind her back. A quick remedy of this was to stop Safa from moving while she is doing the actions to give the system some time to manage the input.