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Week 12

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This week we started designing the finalized levels of the game, most of which would branch out from our central hub area. The boss fight code was implemented and was playable but did not yet have the animations. Since we probably won't have time to make a normal knight enemy, we created a tomb prefab that can be destroyed to spawn a knight body in the final level after the boss. I finished the knight animations and even ended up making a few that will be unused, such as an axe swing attack for the knight, because the knight boss will not have a melee attack and the normal knight enemy won't be in the game. The effect was made with a modified version of the shader procedural effect I made for the Thrall swing. I also made what is probably the most satisfying animation in the entire game, the breakable door shatter effect. I took the painted jpg sprite of the door and used it as the texture for a similarly shaped rectangular prism in Maya. I then used the plugin Pulldownit to...
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Week 11

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This week we did playtesting with a more complete version of the game, though most levels were still in prototype stage and didn't have final art assets in yet. All the gargoyle animations got added to the player and enemy versions. I helped write the revised design doc and started on the knight animations. Since our game is supposed to be somewhat comedic, we decided to have the possessed form of the knight to be more creative in that, instead of the knight holding the sword, the sword instead replaces the knight's head and the possesssed knight just uses punches to attack.  
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Week 10

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This week we worked more on level designs and interconnecting different levels. We also implemented the checkpoint system and various breakable objects that can be destroyed using attacks. This week I worked on animations for the gargoyle enemy and player. Animating the gargoyle was probably the most challenging out of the animations I'd done so far because of the wings and tail and it was a flying enemy. I had to account for secondary animation this time because when it's an enemy the tail and arms and legs have to move based on the flapping of the wings. When it's possessed the gargoyles wings and tail have to move according to the hopping of the sword. I ended up using a plugin called overlappy that, when used on the tail joints after all the other animation was completed, would automatically animate the tail as if it were a rope-like appendage with physics.
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Week 9

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This week we worked on the code for the gargoyle enemy and player, decided on the moveset for the knight boss, and visual feedback when the player and enemies take damage. Some of the feedback we got was that we should include more enemy variety before the first miniboss so this week I made the gargoyle enemy based on concept art. I added a tail because it looked like it should have a tail. We also discussed what the possessed form of the gargoyle would be like. Quinn wanted the gargoyle to be even smaller than the Thrall but then the question was how would the gargoyle even carry the sword. I came up with the idea that will be implemented for the gargoyle animations which is that when possessed, the dead gargoyle will hop onto the sword and ride it like a pogo stick. The behavior of the player will be the same as the sword form, but it will have a double jump and also the gargoyle's fireball ability.
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Week 8

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This week we merged the different versions of Soulmonger that we were individually making changes on in Unity, implementing the first playable levels for the presentation, and painting 2D art assets and adding them to the level backgrounds, tiles, and foregrounds. I helped write some of the revised GDD this week. I also finished up all of the revised Thrall animations and added the effect I made last week to the attacks. There's not much new stuff to explain about the new animations. It's holding the sword with two hands upright now to reduce clipping and the rest of the animations have been updated to either start from or return to that pose.
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Week 7

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This week we worked on optimizing the state changing of characters in the game. We also started designing levels. We also tried to include many animation transitions to make the movement feel smoother. For example, we tried to implement separate jump start, jump middle, and jump end animations that would play during the sword's jump. Personally, I worked on a groundbreaking new visual effect that looks hand drawn but is actually sort of procedurally generated and controllable with attributes in Maya. As shown in the hypergraph node hierarchy, I used a noise texture on a shader and dissolved it over time with a ramp shader. I then duplicated it twice, slightly offset them, and made them different colors. Then I connected all 3 to a layered shader and put the layered shader on a plane, then I bent the plane and leyframed several attributed over time to get the final sweep effect that is used in game.
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Week 6

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This week I worked on redoing the Thrall animations because its pose was too wide and long and that was causing problems with placing its hitbox. A lot of the playtest feedback was thing like the player getting hit in Thrall form when it looked like they shouldn't have been hit. Since its pose was the Thrall dragging the sword along behind it, both us devs and the play testers were divided on whether its hitbox should include the sword or not. In the end we decided to make the Thrall's pose more compact, which meant I had to do that and change all of its animations to match the new pose. This was the new base pose I settled on for the Thrall when possessed. It's much more rectangular and easy to intuitively see where the hitbox would be. On the coding side, we worked on adding some platforming features that we learned are actually included in many good platforms to make them smoother to control. One of them was coding in the ability to queue a jump while falling if the c...
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