It is now the end of the semester and the senior show is only a couple weeks away. I personally think the game is in a good spot. Besides some polish on the programmer end is finish the end screen which is already almost done. I implemented Norman’s suits for the characters so now the player can wear the casual clothes or a fancy suite! I also worked on the pause menu and had the pause banner be the color of the player who selected it and put button symbols on the option buttons to give more explanation to the player on how to select them. In the weeks to come it will be polish central and bug fixes. Well I hope you have enjoyed my stupid ramblings on what I have been doing. I really cant think of anything else to talk about mainly because I don’t really want to write this blog post anymore so there you go. 🙂
This week was fixing a bug and making a pause menu. The pause menu is a basic menu with two options for main menu and resume. To show which option is selected the button is scaled up. It was a very simple. The other main thing I did was a bug fix one of the most annoying bug that we have in the game. The bug is the players speed being set to either a larger or extremely during a scene transition and keeping the players at those speeds for the rest of the game. Looking through it I found that it was the transitions were causing the original speed to be being changed to this new number during the transition. To fix this I just set the original speed back to what it should be right after the transition. Hopefully this will fix the bug and we won’t see it come up. That is pretty much it for work. I also have been updating animations and adding in new heads for the characters.
Another big event that happened is that as a team we have been given an option to keep working together and even continue with Office Mayhem. There is a Boston based company called Pilot that wants to get into more entertainment business like VR and even their own IP. Well we have connections with them and could do freelance work with them like their VR project. This seems like a very cool idea. I would have fun working with this team again and having a job after college is nice but I don’t know if I would really want to do this kind of work. I mean this would be nice as a first job that could help me get another job in the future. It is a very interesting option that has presented itself that I will have to think more about as I continue my job search.
Hey so PAX was awesome! We had alot of people play the game and the response was amazing. People loved it and asked us where they could get it or when it will come out! It is such a cool feeling to have that many people want something that you made. We also were contacted by Rooster Teeth showing interest in publishing our game. It is crazy that we got this offer. Now we are in the middle of contacting them so no promises but still just to have someone like that talk to us is too cool. Ok on to what I did this week. So this week was character customization. We wanted character customization to be done in the start screen with the bumpers be switching out heads and bodies. This at first was easy just to get the basics done. I just hold the different meshes in the an array and just rotate through them setting them to active and not active. Now having this to be saved through the levels was at first a little troublesome. We at first had this whole thing to save where in the array we were and then have to find it and set everything to them each level. It would have taken a long time but then Ty realized that we can just call a Unity function dontdestroyonload and just give it the character object. It worked and with just a little tweaking we got it fully working and it solved some of our other problem so yay!! Yep so thats about it.
I put in the new character models so we now have four characters in the game with every major animation. It is all set for PAX East which by the way we are going to PAX. I am very excited to have our game shown at such a huge event. This is all I did. I am very happy with where the game is right now. I don’t have any concerns about the build. I am very excited to get real people feedback and see what they like and what they don’t like.
The animations are in! We now have all the base animations into the player animator and they are implemented the character prefab. The animator has two layer to it. The base layer is the animations for the player when the player is not holding anything. The second layer is for whenever the player is holding an object. The second layer will override the base layer. After this all I had to do was go into code and set the layers in code whenever a pickup occurs. To keep the animations somewhat more organized I created a class to hold all the calls. This was the first time I have used the animator and unity state machines so it took awhile. The longest time was finding all the places in the interactions script as well as getting the blending down. Now that this is finished adding new animations or updating them will be very easy and fast.
This week starts the full process of getting animations into the build. I worked on the first animations of the idle, walk, run and interact. I have very little experience with animation blending and full implementation of Unity’s animator class but with a little bit of playing around I have a better idea of how to use it. I will continue next week to work on the other animations so that we will have all the basic animations for the characters. This was the only thing that I did this week. It took a little longer than I had expected to get the animations how I wanted. That is all for this week. Next week I will have more to talk about with animations.
This week was a pretty easy week. I added the the title of each round UI to the game. I am using the alert message framework that I made for crunch time. The only difference is that I am also affecting the camera for this part. In the beginning of the round we want the players to see the whole level so that can get a preview of where everything is. During the game the camera will pan and zoom to keep all the players visible so I just disabled that functionality until after the round starts. The other thing that I am doing is getting the animations into the game. One of our artists is finishing the animations so now I get to implement them into the game. I feel pretty decent about this. I sat down with the artist and did an example animation and it worked well but putting in this first one that he has sent me and I am having some problems. I am doing exactly what I did for the example but it is still not working so I will have to ask him if maybe the problem is on his end. I am confident that we can solve this if we just sit down together and look at it which we will tomorrow. Other than that it was been pretty easy going which is nice. I will also need to look through the code and do come basic refactoring soon just to keep everything nice and organized. Our last meeting was a little hectic cause there were alot of bugs being caused by some simple code that we just had to go through and refactor so hopefully if we occasionally go through our code we can solve these problems before they cause major problems and we don’t have a hectic meeting again. Well that’s all for now, another update will be next week.
This week was a decent week. I didn’t do too much. We started the week with finalizing crunch time with new UI. I added a banner that drops down right before over time starts. I also changed the score cards so that the keep their original score but they have a x2 in the upper right corner. I also updated the players score so that each players score changes location to show who is in first place. Oh and I added some location indicator for the start screen so that players know the bounds they have to stand in front to the door to start the game. We were going to use a shader but I think that would look a little awkward and I think a more in game asset like a door mat would look better. My crowning achievement for this week was I got a quit button into the game. That’s right you can now press the escape button to immediately quit the game. This is probably the best thing I will do for this game. Nothing I will ever do will surpass creating a quit button. Well that’s all for now see you next week.
This week was pretty good. I hate how Unity does controllers but with the help of friends I have overcome it. This weeks tasks were touching up crunch time, getting the immersive menu transition triggers working, getting player drop-in drop-out working. Starting off with touching up crunch time I added more elements to crunch time to give it more of a pop for players so that they know when crunch time has started. We wanted the timer and the task cards to pulse when crunch time started and change color to red. To do this I thought it would be best to just change the scale up and down based on how big it is. After doing this my lead Ty showed me the greatness that is iTween. ITween is a nice basic animation tool that allows you to in code create animations. It has a lot of pre-made animations that you can give it the object and the time you want it to be complete. It is amazing and will make it easier to do other tasks in the future. With the immersive menu I added a door trigger to the start level. This will now have the players move to the door to start the game. In the future we will make multiple doors for different menus. Now time for the worst part of the week, the drop-in drop-out. I learned that Unity sucks at controller input. It is a nightmare to try and set up a drop out system. You cant search for specific controllers so we had to just search through the controllers each time to find the corresponding player. We had to add a specific state of being unplugged so that the controller and the player knows that it is not connected to remove the character from the game. It was a lot of work and a major headache but its done so yeah. On to next week!!
Andrew Millsap 