CAGD 470 - LockedIn Sprint #3

  During the Sprint kickoff for Locked In, we had a very straightforward object: to get a build of the game done and have a playtest released. To achieve this there were various key aspects of the game that we had to work on. My job was getting more enemies done and released. We would need to implement other things, like health and other enemy features. 


So, starting with the features, the first thing that I tackled was making the health component, which needed to be the most modular it could be; I wanted the same Health component to be used by the enemies and the player, which meant a lot of adjusting. Something else that I was aware of is that the player can grab an extra armor piece that acts as a shield, so I made it so the health component could also have a shield. Finally, I added some events that trigger when the health is changed and when the health is depleted; that way, there could be a modular way for the other programmer to implement it and apply it to their player script. This is how that turned out:



After completing that, I worked on the grunt, which was reasonably easy to make; tearing the mimic script apart, I made an enemy that follows you no matter where you are, and it advances slowly towards you. This is what that looked like in the game:



The next thing I started working on was researching the B-Head enemy, which is a dog-like monster that does not have eyes and is driven by the player's sounds. Our first approach to the B-head was making the player’s microphone input to drive the B-head, and I did research on Unity capturing audio and how to check when it is being used. 



After testing it a bit, I knew this would take a lot of work to implement and that making a background removal system was very likely out of scope. So, after informing and discussing this with my team's designer and producer, we concluded that this was not going to be within the project’s development time. So, instead of making the game rely on the player’s microphone input, we made it rely on the player’s sound effects, meaning we would need player sounds implemented. I worked on a sound effects manager that will take care of the sound effects the player sends and make it so that the enemy captures them. I wanted to make it as easy as possible for the designer to change the values for each VFX sound. The audio manager will hold the player sounds library and act as a sound spawner for any script that calls it.



The last thing I worked on during this sprint was the radioactive bug enemy, which didn’t have pathfinding that needed to be implemented but instead followed a set path at a set speed. Previously, I worked with Unity splines, so this was fairly easy to find and implement into Locked in; this is how that ended up looking:


Finally, this sprint went very smoothly, and we had a lot done; we had our playtest, and it was fairly simple to put everything together; we had minor bugs that we were able to solve on the spot, but the build was released, and we got some playtesting. My team did a great job, and I’ll be happy to keep working in Locked in in the future. Something I believe we could have improved was the time management for the build because it was left for the last things in the sprint, and we had some time crunching at the end.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

CAGD 373 - Pirate Game Assets Final

Image
  Game Walkthrough:      The goal of this project was to recreate a location from Sea Of Thieves. My team decided to work on an outpost with a stationary sloop and a tavern. We needed to make the mountains similar and add many assets that would be interesting for the player to look at, like the barrels and the lamposts. Also, we needed some interactivity, like cannon shooting and quests. My role on this project was the programmer in charge of implementing all the systems regarding the gameplay. So I managed to make the player movement, interaction with barrels, shootable cannons, a quest system, the final battle, money systems, a high score leaderboard table, and many other small systems within the scene. I also tackled Unity-related tasks like generating a new water shader and sculpting the terrain. One of the problems I faced was dealing with the inventory system since that took a whole sprint on its own, and I did not have any prior experience designing one. I tac...
Read more

CAGD 470 - Locked in Sprint #1

Image
  In CAGD 470 (Video Game Production), I was recruited into a group that wanted to make a first-person horror game in which a player is in a laboratory and trying to escape. At the same time, some monsters roam around, making the player’s journey difficult. The game will have various rooms and puzzles that will challenge the player. In the game's vision, enemies would roam the laboratory. The player would have to gather various items that will help them on their journey to escape the lab. After getting an idea of the game, many key points and features came to my attention, including the player controller, enemy AI, Inventory System, and Crafting System. All those were going to be heavy tasks for this project. After discussing with the other members in the group, we concluded that the hardest feature to develop would be enemy AI since it needed to include multiple behaviors and enemy types, and we all had previous experience programming enemy AI. I took on the task of learning how t...
Read more

CAGD 495 - Stumble Sprint #3

Image
  Starting Sprint #3 for Stumble, there were various things that I wanted to get done; personally, I wanted to implement the core game loop and get started on the arena for the game. During the sprint kickoff, there were various priorities that the designer and producer wanted me to get done at the beginning of the sprint, which were modifying the player controller further and changing some keys; these changes were based on the playtests conducted at the end of the previous sprint. It was mentioned to me that during this sprint, we were going to have an animator & rigger for the team, so I wanted to get animations in the game. So, the first thing I started working on was the priorities and adjusting the player controller. I started working on a delay for the diving mechanic. The biggest problem during the playtest was that players were unable to cancel the dive and dive midair again; if you were quick enough, you would get boosted forward just by tapping space quickly. I adde...
Read more