Weeks 6 & 7

Senior Team Weeks 6-7 (10/5-10/18)

At the start of the sixth week, we decided that we would proceed as if we had passed succeeded at our challenge. We looked at where we were with our game and where we needed to be by the 18th so that we could challenge the next stage as soon as we got back from break. After a review of where the code base was and where we were in regards to the design of the game we bustled off to ready the game for testing.

I ended up working primarily on the networking for the game during these two weeks. Getting networking testable took a lot of fiddling and long nights. It turns out that people don't write all that many tutorials for Networking in Unity and that there are just enough differences in networking code between 4.5 and 5.2 that it is an adventure to code. I got networking up and running on Wednesday 10/14, four days after I had wanted to move on to other important issues. However with networking in place several other aspects of the game quickly fell into place, specifically the game loop got it's first draft and AI/player interaction.

We knew that we would have to nail down the backstory for our game quickly because it influenced so many of our other choices. Our first goal was to figure out exactly where and who we were fighting. We knew that we were making a Diesel Punk WW1 mech game but we didn't want to retread the western front. After several proposed locations we settled upon The Battle of Gallipoli in the Ottoman Empire or modern day Turkey. With our location decided we were able to limit our possible participants list down enough to choose whose side the character would be on. The decision was hotly contested and even brought up during QA and class, but eventually we settled upon the Ottoman Empire. In part we settled there because of our artist's love of the possible art styles but we also got feedback during discipline reviews that the Ottomans would make more sense to play as.

During the course of the first week we discovered that we had not actually passed the first stage and that to fully pass the first stage we would need to present three separate and distinct relationships between the pilot and the engineer roles. This focused us on resolving this thorny issue, if either of our roles wasn't as fun as the other our Co-op mech game would fall apart at the seems. The first two relationships were relatively easy to come up with as we had been wrestling with the relationship issue from the start of the project, but the third required a more imaginative approach. What Aiden eventually came up with was quite an interesting and distinct third option and it threw our previous notions of the best relationship out the window. Eventually we came to see that the novelty of third relationship was mostly just novelty but it did teach us some important lessons about player interaction.