Gold - Log #3

Cinematic Camera

Adding more Cinematic camera tracks, to highlight the island rebuild. New system for handling movement, beginning and ending, etc.

The Artists

Aidan

This was another unsuccessful week wrestling with the mocap animations in Motionbuilder, so instead I overhauled the tower designs. The new tower are stationary columns with an activation animation for the lotus on the top. This serves as a better activation and to make up for the column remaining still, I have added emissive designs with a pulse for activation. The only hiccup with these assets was running the lotus through unity and constantly iterating to make it just right. I also completed the hammer cradle, which is essentially another pressure plate that exclusively activates to the hammer head being placed on it. For this reason, I have carried over a design from the hammer to represent a similarity between the two. Emissive maps were also added for activation.

Connor

I continued this week with the work needed on any extra effects and environment elements. One of the team members asked for an effect/aura to surround the hammer when it is placed upon one of the deactivated buttons. I followed a tutorial on how to create an effect like this, ending up with a transparent bubble that inconsistently breaks. The following GIF is both the broken and working states. It was too much of a risk to keep in the game, as you can see from the broken state.

I began planning the progression and content of the new tutorial area the team wanted, one that would show players the controls and elements needed to move and solve puzzles within the rest of the game. I also fixed the character’s attack animation. The problem being that it would end the animation in a different location to what it started, making the character jump abruptly to another location. It was a simple fix, changing the values of the attack animation so it would end in the correct location.

David

Week 3 consisted of the final build of the exterior of the island that I was responsible for. I created the layout similar to the old level and began populating the scene with rocks and foliage. I also added a cove to the side of the map to expand the playspace and give the player more freedom in exploring the island.

The Programmers

Hadley

Coming into the 3rd week of Gold, playtesters continually voiced their concerns with 2 aspects of the character controller; the camera, and the jump. So I invested two days of the week into optimizing the camera’s occlusion method, and the control “feel” of said camera. The jump was the trickiest aspect of the entire character/camera controller, absolutely “nailing down” the jump arc, in relation to the game world, and the animation was a massive balancing act, that actually took a bulk my time this week. We also received finalized music assets from our amazing sound guys, which I added into the barebones music system I had previously implemented. Unfortunately my theory crafted music system wasn’t ideal, some refactoring of that was required. I also added back into the game-world cinematic cameras, updating them to look nicer, but also updating them for the new areas/puzzles.

Jose

Now that most of our systems were added back to the warehouse scene, I spent most of this week adding back all of our puzzles from Beta back into our proper final scene.

These puzzles are the mural pressure plate and its push matching puzzle, the bell puzzle, and the tutorial pressure plates.

I also had to re add some other systems like Cloth Physics.

Footstep sounds are now in! They’re linked to Safa’s animation for that EXTRA JUICE!

Also after putting it off for as long as humanly possible, Safa can now climb vertically. We got a nice animation from Mixomo to compliment it too!

Izzy

This week’s tasks for me is to finish up the character and the hammer models to be ready to import into the game. After this, I’ve also been assigned to create more environmental assets such as mushrooms, and a broken boat to be placed at the shore. There were also quite a few that I made that did not get to the game such as clay pots/ chiseled rocks as we were focused on putting the character in the game correctly. When passed it on the team, I checked the build at home and it didn't look right so I did some troubleshooting as to why the character didn’t look right when they’ve imported it. It turns out it had double scaling from the parent and child. I informed Hadley about it so he could fix it.