WEEK 11 - 95% there!!!

We are so close, yet so far away from completing the entire project! Animation wise, I am nearly there! UNITY LO’s were completed by this week and I am still hoping for the best from the games programming side…

SUNDAY:

I was still populating the map. After all, since the map is gigantic, it will take a while to populate it, aesthetically. I really wished that the games designer made the final levels in three different scenes, so that we wouldn’t have to waste time waiting for the other person to populate and/or make any refinements. Since it was all done it one scene, I personally feel it was a very inefficient strategy.

In doing so, we realized that we needed to work on ceiling textures and specific ceiling blocks to keep in line with the theme of the game. I assigned that to Ahmed to work on.

Anyways, I did my part as soon as I could to finish populating areas of the map. My main level is LEVEL 3, where I will be demonstrating the UNITY LO’s for lighting and the interactable environment. But so far, these are the areas I populated.

Swipe to see a slideshow of images.

I also needed to start lighting my scene ASAP since the lighting can affect the textures in any way. So here’s what I began with.

A ground torch (modeled and textured by Ahmed), Pedestal (modeled by Ahmed, Textured by Amos) and Vase (modeled and textured by Amos). Fire particle effects done by Amos. I worked on the lighting in this scene and decided to light up areas of the map using this as a light source. So we made a prefab of it.

MONDAY:

The eye puzzle was FINALLY done – no going back to that! It had some problems with the textures when importing into UNITY, which were finally taken care of. The code for the puzzle was also implemented very nicely, and that’s a HUGE relief for now. Here is the puzzle in the game.

I am still working on the map scenes. Constant refinements are required to get the map to look professional enough. I also experimented with some lighting in certain areas, but for now it hasn’t been used in the game.

Moreover, learning how to make particle effects was an extreme pain. I am to work on the blood effects as well as the smell particle effects to clear my LO’s. To do this, I carried out some research through watching various tutorials on YouTube and familiarizing myself with the particle system. I needed to make my own opacity maps and use them in the game. After hours of researching, I found a good tutorial that gives a breakdown of the steps, but it was hard to follow since the tutor was too fast and didn’t speak through it all.

DucVu FX (2016, September 26). Game Effect tutorial - Blood - Part 2 [video file]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b9p9KzkjaAk

I made a demo version and checked in UNITY. I wasn’t quite liking it so I reworked on another blood map from scratch. Still not quite satisfied with that, I made an alternate version using more realistic features such as smoke and blood splatter combined. After nearly 5 hours, I settled with two variations.

Since the second one was a bit more realistic when using the additive shader, I tried working around another alternative. But that just made it look like a red explosion, so that’s a definite NO!

However, here are screenshots of my attempts! The blood smoke, nonetheless, was used in the game whenever the player hits the enemies.

Also, as an impromptu task, I made a laser beam opacity map for the third puzzle. Here is the map and here it is in the game.

Swipe to see two images of the laser in the game.

TUESDAY:

I worked with JP on the smell particle trail. We experimented with a lot of different ways of doing it (after watching a couple of YouTube tutorials on it) and settled with this (scroll down to see figure 1). Side by side, I completed all last-minute texturing of assets as well as a first draft of the level design by the end of the day.

WEDNESDAY:

I am done with my part of the work for the game. I just have the lighting to do, and assisting the others with some stuff.

However, I stayed until late that day to help the games programmers with the problems they were facing. We play tested the game and found a lot of bugs, very unexpected as well. The game was very laggy, and with the number of lights that JP placed around the map, the game kept crashing. We needed to find a fix for it, and urgently.

Figure 1: Smell trail, worked with JP.

THURSDAY:

I am still reviewing the placement of assets. Restructuring a few areas since the level looked too flat gave some depth and elevation to some portions of the map. Consequently, I rearranged some floor tiles by changing up the monotonic textures and replaced them with the variations Paulo gave us earlier in the trimester.

To work on something unique and address my LO's, I reused some of our assets for different purposes.

Reusing modular assets for different purposes because of its design

The pedestal which was only meant to be used for the final level, was reused as lamps around the map by changing the color of the emitting diamond. The frame around the eye puzzle was used as more assets in various places around the map as well. The top block of the pedestal (which was detached) was used as symbolic paintings on the walls too. No one would say where they came from until we pointed it out!

A few other assets such as the papyrus that the player will have with him was done. And since we were running short on time, we needed an alternative way of making the tutorials. So I was asked to make some drawings to depict the actions the player must do to navigate the controls in the game. Here are the drawings I did:

Therefore, the game is nearly in its phase of being polished. We are so close yet so far from the final product and I can’t wait for the final to be revealed to us soon! On a side note, I have to continue working on some pending LO’s and begin compiling them shortly!

References:

DucVu FX (2016, September 26). Game Effect tutorial - Blood - Part 2 [video file]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b9p9KzkjaAk