IAT 410 Blog

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.

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.

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...

This week we put together all the pieces of the code and prefabs in Unity to make the first playable prototype. The mechanics and features we managed to put in include: player movement, attacking, platforms and basic level layouts, enemy pathfinding, flying enemies, player state changing, and some animations. We then playtested this version of the game with 4 playtesters that were around the same age and gamer type. I organized the revised game design doc and wrote some parts of the presentation slides. I also finished the model and rig for the second enemy in the game, the Knight. It was once again based on one of the options for the big enemy in the concept art I made a few changes to the design. More detail was added because the sprite is going to be bigger than the Thrall's and more armor and knight looking features were added because the concept art version was fairly rough. The waist cloth was also removed because it would cause too much trouble during the animation proc...

Forgot to write it last week. We worked on separately getting different parts of the playable prototype working in Unity. Room switching, enemy path finding, player movement and jumping, player state switching for the body swap mechanic, platforming, and attacking. We also created the sword character model. I rigged the sword and worked on the knight model.