Gold - Log #7

Final Tower

This week, the tower was imported and the puzzle mechanics were implemented. It was covered in vines, replacing the original assets, and showing locations where the player can scale the tower. Some set dressing was also done, decorating the tower with more vines, shrubs, and plants to look a little more taken by nature.

Bell Puzzle Readability

One of the biggest issues that we faced in our game was the readability of our 2nd tower, the bell puzzle. People not associating the birds with the bells because of how spread out they were, but also with their sounds/animations not playing in the correct order was a big aspect of the difficulty people were having. We put the birds closer together and added a chirping animations, and make the sounds play tighter together and in a clearer order. This should help players figure out the puzzle better.

The Artists

Aidan

This week was mostly spent competing with other assignments, so my only major task was amending the current UI to include PlayStation prompts - as we were potentially adding support for the platform.

Connor

This week I looked at any other jobs that we need done for the final submission. I took the job of making the vines for climbing throughout all parts of the island. I created these then set them up around the island and on the final tower/climbing puzzle. I also set up the set dressing around the tower, shrubs and bushes growing around the base and from between tower segments. Other than that, most of it was spent on doing other assignments.

The Programmers

Hadley

The motion captured animations were finally processed and brought into the game, this required some refactoring of the character’s movement in general in order to begin to cater for the new animations. Unfortunately due to the lateness of the implementation, we were not able to get a stable enough system with some of the updated animations in time to meet our personal deadlines. The existing jump animation was tweaked slightly to better fit the new feel instead. The final bits of polish have been added in, altering some asset placements, puzzle readability, cinematic camera smoothing/positioning/framing, and of course the final tower (climbing puzzle) that Connor finished designing.

Jose

I implemented the final puzzle, a tower full of climbing sections that can be rearranged hitting the idols. The screenshot provided is actually the solution to the puzzle, in case you get stuck! It definitely took me a bit longer than I wanted it to though.

I helped out with tweaking and looking for new animations to improve the ones we already had in the game.

I rearranged the Bell Puzzle area to be way more readable by adding Izzy’s chirp animation and altering the timings!

Izzy

This weeks tasks is just adding some more into the environment of the game and I re-created some starfish models from my lost files to add into the broken boat scenes for beauty shots for submissions.