Astral Shift

Today we had our second sprint review were our teachers gave us some feedback, which mainly regarded our asset breakdown. It was the only thing that they specifically told us to change, which we need to do before the alpha presentation on Friday. This time, we were able to show them more of what we have been working on in the form of our prototype in Unity as well as the debug menu in Tengine, which we also got some minor feedback on. I mostly spent the day on writing playtest and a variables documents for our programmers and also worked on various managerial tasks. That is all I had to share for today! Until next time! // Samuel Kärvemo, Lead Designer

Today was the last day of the second week and was generally a very productive day for us all. Our programmers fixed the debug menu and has now fully implemented the saving function, which will allow us to save variables after every time we playtest the game. As per usual, we discussed a bit about what to show the teachers on our next sprint review and also some problems with visual effects that we must figure out how to solve. In order to let the whole team get a good look at what we had decided on thus far, I put writing on the GDD on-hold for today, and intend to do this every Friday. Instead I spent a lot of time structuring up and updating the asset breakdown. That was all I had to share for today! Stay tuned! // Samuel Kärvemo, Lead Designer

Early in the morning, we finally got help in figuring out what was wrong with the physics engine, which turned out to be a simple fix for one of our programmers to handle. After a few hours of menial tasks, he eventually got it to work on the PS4. This meant a LOT of saved time for our programmers, which is extremely happy news all of us! The backside of this being that we found out that we will not be able to use a certain program we usually use for testing and presenting our game in, but that is a small price to pay. We also got our hands on a testkit for us designers, which also was after long wait. Although, when we tried using it, it was not activated and also had no idea in how we were going to easily play our game on it. We were told that we would get helped with all of that on Monday at the earliest. Which was a bit of a shame, but nothing we have any control over. I did not get much work done at all today since I was slowed down a bit by my computer dying on its first star...

Our programmers did their very best trying to make the physics engine called Box2D work on the PS4 version of the game. Although, right before lunch, they encountered a problem which they were unable to determine the source of. This caused us to start considering using Tengine's own collision solution and expanding upon it. Since one of our programmers has worked on doing this before, it comes with a few advantages, but will still mean a lot of work to get it right. We are still trying to get in touch with a teacher to help us with this in hope that they know something that we don't, but we have not heard from them since we first enquired about it. Hopefully, we'll get help with this tomorrow. I was lone designer today and finally finished the documentation on scaling of models and also wrote a bit more in the GDD. It was a pretty uneventful day besides that, so I don't have much else to say. Stay tuned for next time! // Samuel Kärvemo, Lead Designer

Half of us were sick today, which was a bit unfortunate. However, that did not mean that we did not made some breakthroughs in our project! We once more had a discussion about the scaling differences between Unity, Maya and Tengine and what it meant for our project pipelines. We settled on a solution that hopefully will benefit us all in the end.  I spent most of the day testing out and documenting the scaling settings of the levels when exporting them from Unity into Tengine. There had been a case of miscommunication between the disciplines, but which could be resolved easily. It turned out that the problem of scaling models and modules down would not become a problem on the artists side, which made the matter much less complicated. Our programmers successfully added UV-scrolling without any problems. They are also almost done with the debug menu now and will soon need a list of all variables that we will need while working on the game. Tomorrow, they will find out if i...

Starting off the second week of the project, here is some of the highlights of the day. We got some critique from the teachers during the sprint review, mainly regarding our layout of our asset breakdown. they said that even though it was well organized, it could become a problem in the future for us if we divide our tasks discipline-wise, instead of feature-wise. We will have to talk about this on our next group meeting. My co-designer allowed some of our other teammates to try his level design out and give feedback. We also talked a bit about the core mechanic and the effect of partly changing it and the risks and benefits of doing so. We will need to try it out throughly before making a decision of this matter. I spent the full course of the day writing in the GDD, mainly defining the export process from Maya into Tengine. While I wrote this, it got me thinking about how Tengine is supposed to know what objects are obstacles and not. When I asked our lead programmer about...

End of week 1! We had an important, yet brief discussion about a dilemma we had been faced with the movement of the character. The short story is that we had to choose between doing our own animations or leaving it to a physics engine. In the end though, we chose to do our own animations, in favor of having more control. I started working on my first level for the game, and also spent a lot of time with fixing scaling issues when moving files from Maya into Tengine and Unity into Maya into Tengine. It took a while, but in it worked out in the end. I will need to define the steps one need to make in order to get everything right, which I will write into the Game Design Document starting on Monday. My co-designer started on writing an extensive plan for us on our asset breakdown for this week and the next, which I think turned out great in the end. We now have a detailed plan to show to the teachers on the Sprint Review on Monday. I think that is about it! We will now all take a ...

After long wait, we finally got our version control set up for us, so we now can share our work and collaborate with one another, as was intended from the start. Better late than never, I suppose! We all had to spend some time to set it all up and working, though. In the morning I worked on updating and structuring up the asset breakdown as good as I could, while the whole afternoon was spent on meetings and discussions. We also made some tests on the scaling between Maya and Unity, which will now allow us to use both Maya and Unity to create our greybox- and mockup levels. We got to discuss a lot of topics during the afternoon meeting, mainly the pipelines of art and programming, but also something more fun, group name. It was a close call, but at the end of the meeting we had the unanimous decision to go with 'Les Variables' as our team name. Because of the long meeting, we all got a better understanding of our current situation, even across disciplines, which I think i...

Today my co-designer finished creating the prototype for our game using Unity! We will use this to playtest gameplay and try out level ideas, even before the core mechanics is implemented in the real version. We had to set up an open source version control for ourselves in order to share the game between us, so everyone in the team will be able to try out the prototype at any time during the project. It was a huge morale boost for all of us to see our game  starting to take form this early in the project. Core Mechanic Example I mostly worked on updating the GDD and making an illustation for explaining one of the core mechanics, since it needed clarification. Tomorrow, we will try out how scaling works between Maya, Tengine and Unity. After we have checked into that, we will be able to start working with greyboxing levels. As of now, there is not much else to share! Stay Tuned! // Samuel Kärvemo, Lead Designer

A lot of stuff happened today, but since it is a bit late, I'll keep it brief. We were visited by our sound team today who was breifed on what we had so far. They both seemed excited to begin the project. Welcome to the team! Our sound team: Sound/Music Sean Harry Ortega Scheli Viktor Blesin The artists discussed ideas concerning theme and setting of the game and is now looking into concepts of a dark and purgatory-like theme set in a forest with ruins. They will do some research on the matter to see if it is something they will want to pursue further. The programmers have made progress, but not without some minor setbacks. The camera controller got completely finished today while the creation of the debug menu will take longer than first expected. For now though, there is no need for concern as we are still in the early stages of the project. We designers discussed a lot about one of the core mehcanics we had in the game and decided to change it slightly in order to ke...

Today we started our first day of game project 3 on PlaygroundSquad! This will be our last game project before we all go our separate ways beginning our LIA/Intenrships practices on deifferent companies. Our team: Grafik Julia Wawrzyniak Louise Lundén Andreas Huopana Axel Kloo Design Mikael Danielsson Samuel Kärvemo Programmering Adrian Rondahl Alex Mattila We already have an established concept that we will start from, which is a concept we refer to as "Bob the Blob". However, the chosen title is only the working title and will not be the same as the final name of the project. The game is a 2.5D platformer where the core mechanics will be a double-jump that ignores collision for a brief duration and a standard wall-jump. The levels will be short and support a modular level design and the player will lose as soon as the avatar touches an obstacle. Today we discussed and worked a lot with the planning of the project and what our focus will be this week. ...