During the Open House we got some really good feedback, looks like our main target (kids) really like our game, a lot of people played our game but definitely kids loved it!
On the other hand a couple of fellow engineers asked me a few questions about what was happening on the back end, what were we doing with some systems in the game and why did we decide to do it that way. After thinking about what I told them that night I also came out with a few easy solutions that will make the game run much smoother and improve the gameplay a lot.
On the other hand, there is still some work to be done on the look of the game, I would like to finally get some time with the level and start modifying the lighting, as I've said before, I don't really know what I am looking for but based on the experiments I have been doing with it I feel like I am going in the right direction!
During one of our early meetings this semesters the team decided to go for an 'expericne' type of gameplay rather than a procedurally generated level generation. This can be good but bad at the same time because I end up having to work with very geometry heavy levels that have most of the fill props being hand placed (but all static) which gives me no common patterns and no repetition, this makes my life horrible when I have to work with the lighting, everything seems to be just random.
Next semester we will keep working on making our game shine like a little kid singing opera! Now that we have all systems in place and most of us have a better understanding of the pipeline and times required for different tasks, we will have a much smoother development process.
Sunday, December 16, 2012
Friday, December 7, 2012
Showtime!
For the past few weeks the team worked on getting our main level to an Alpha stage. As I explained on my previous post I had been working on getting the game to look better and trying to give it a different look, I didn't want my game to look like it was some 3D prototype made in the 80s where all the lights had no smoothing and all the light changes were super obvious.
Because Zodiac is supposed to be a paper based game, most of the geometry has hard edges and sharp angle but that was making our game look very low quality in terms of modeling (which I strongly believe is not true). I studied a little bit about shading properties of paper and reflectivity values for it and I kept working with the illumination of the scene, my goal was to create that paper feel, rather than just jaggy bad rendered geometry. Unfortunately the level was not ready on time, our game designer took too long to lay down the simple traps and I didn't have time to get all the lighting in place; rendering lights and baking shadows can be a very time consuming process, especially when you are not an expert and you are not 100% sure what you are looking for. One big limitation that we also found was the poor capability that Unity provides for team work, I was planning on spending at least a couple of days playing with the light, testing and fixing errors that may appear but if I wanted to do that the entire team would have had to wait for me for because I had to work on the final scene and any other type of change that needed to be done would have had to wait.
The level was handed to me the same day we needed to present, I started working with it very early and I was able to bake some of the lights and modify the aspect a little bit. Unfortunately there were still other bugs that were on a higher fixing hierarchy so I ended up having to solve some of that. The game looks a little bit better now but there's definitely still a lot of stuff that can be improved.
Because Zodiac is supposed to be a paper based game, most of the geometry has hard edges and sharp angle but that was making our game look very low quality in terms of modeling (which I strongly believe is not true). I studied a little bit about shading properties of paper and reflectivity values for it and I kept working with the illumination of the scene, my goal was to create that paper feel, rather than just jaggy bad rendered geometry. Unfortunately the level was not ready on time, our game designer took too long to lay down the simple traps and I didn't have time to get all the lighting in place; rendering lights and baking shadows can be a very time consuming process, especially when you are not an expert and you are not 100% sure what you are looking for. One big limitation that we also found was the poor capability that Unity provides for team work, I was planning on spending at least a couple of days playing with the light, testing and fixing errors that may appear but if I wanted to do that the entire team would have had to wait for me for because I had to work on the final scene and any other type of change that needed to be done would have had to wait.
The level was handed to me the same day we needed to present, I started working with it very early and I was able to bake some of the lights and modify the aspect a little bit. Unfortunately there were still other bugs that were on a higher fixing hierarchy so I ended up having to solve some of that. The game looks a little bit better now but there's definitely still a lot of stuff that can be improved.
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