Make it look good!

The Kinect Posing tool is done! At least for now we agreed that the functionality it has is enough for this stage and the lead engineer asked me to start working on making our game look better!

These days we have been working on little details of our game, adding HUD elements to give enough information to the player, crunching numbers to make gameplay more complicated but way more fun, modifying our models to make them better for the game, etc...

There has been a lot of changes on the art side, now that we have more experience with Unity and how it uses 3D models, we are at the stage where we can modify the geometry to make it look the way we want and get some special effects in Unity. These tweaks have also brought many challenges, some very common ones but a lot of unexpected too. 

I started working with the Lightmapping tool in Unity, right now most of our textures don't have any lighting information and I thought there is a lot of volume information that has gone missing because of that; the ligthmapping tool works well in the sense of giving you the ability to modify color tones to make stuff look more interesting. I have been testing with our level and checking what is possible and what is not; here is a small test that I put together to present to my team, I believe they liked it!

Another area I wanted to work on more was writing some custom shaders and some post-processing image effects. Hopefully I will get the all the 3D models on time so I can lit them properly and move on to the next stage! 

[ before / after ]

Ready to submit

Long nights, big cups of coffee (not really, coffee is kinda forbidden in here) and lots of compiling errors!

That has been the story of Zodiac Engineers for the last couple of weeks. We have been doing a lot of progress, not only on the engineering side but our artists are finally catching up with great stuff!

After lots of iterations, we're finally getting all our puzzle pieces together. As I wrote before, most of the engineering systems were working fine already and we have been polishing them. Personally I am still working on polishing the Kinect data, I feel like there's so much to do but at the same time so little, I really need to start putting together some testing sessions because I need to start checking the data more and more, nobody in our team is a motion expert so there is a lot of testing to do. I'm implementing multiple features in our Poses tool, hopefully that will help me compare the data in a more visual and effective way. 

IGF deadline was here and we were getting ready for it, there were some crunch hours but we finally came out with a solid build and one of my teammates came with a great solution for putting together an installer that puts everything in place with just a few clicks. Our producer made a video of the game that exemplifies what it is about, I have to say I am really happy with what he did! The video shows the game very well, specially the special features and the fun parts of it, hopefully that will give us a little bit of a burst! Personally I am not 100% sure what's next (other than keep working on gameplay and polishing the Kinect data) but there are really good things coming up, I am sure!