Week 8 - Deep Dive Prep

Senior Team Week 8 (10/19-10/25)

This last week felt right, the team was focused on both getting our documentation together for challenging the next stage at the start of the next week.  We each had prototype work to do as well, Kody with getting art assets into the game, Michael was busy fixing and refixing the aiming of the guns and Aiden was designing the level.  My responsibilities were to implement the sounds and get the in game menu to work.  I start getting nervous when a week goes by and I don’t feel like work got done on the game which did not happen this week, unlike the last time we were preparing to challenge.  I was able to strike a healthy balance between implementing sounds, creating the Audio Pipeline, adding the in game menu and writing/practicing my slide for the presentation.

The main letdown of the week was that we did not manage to set up a Discipline Review with Professor Eric Sample who teaches Audio Production classes and who we had hoped would help us iron out the our Audio plans.  The only other Discipline Review we had planned to do this week was with Professor Wehmeyer and it went very well, we went in looking to get a better handle on our aesthetic and to see if we could get any help with our research on the Ottoman Empire. Professor Wehmeyer was a great help in these regards and was very interested in where we had taken the game since we had last talked with him.

We were confident that when we challenged we would be able to pass easily. This was because we had been constantly communicating our research to each other and we had spent each meeting for the last 3 weeks exploring our mechanics, world and story trying to figure out the best way to do everything.  However we were unable to get everyone to create their slides before our Friday meeting and so were unable to practice our presentation then, undaunted we planned to finish our slides by Sunday and practice then. Calamity struck when I got news that one my cousins had died and her funeral was on Sunday, Aidan also found himself stranded outside the state when he missed the bus back to Vermont. The Sunday meeting and presentation practice was therefore very understaffed and what practice the group got did not include everyone.

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.

Week 5 - Actually Challenging

Senior Team Week 5 (9/28-10/5)

This week was very important because this was the last chance to challenge the first stage before the break. Missing this deadline would have left us with 5 weeks to complete the rest of the game we chose. Knowing this we focused ourselves on hitting every item we had failed to finish for last week, we also improved our prototypes.

The feeling of this week was mostly paperwork and dialogue. I spent some time revising TRAs and other documentation based on feedback from the practice presentation we did in class last week. The main issue was the suggestion that Isometric cameras were easier to do in Unity than I had previously believed. After researching the matter I discovered Unity's built in system for creating a Isometric camera, however my research did not turn up a solution to the issues caused by the Isometric camera.

I also made the GIFs of the Plant game for the presentation, this was an interesting and sometimes frustrating experience.  Learning how to make GIFs and how to use fraps was simple but figuring out the little eccentricities was an annoying task. In the end though I came away with enough good gameplay footage to make two satsifying GIFs.

The decision for which game we would go forward with was the hardest decision we had to make so far. We each made our case for our currently favored game, we were just barely in favor of the Mech game. The next step we took was to formally cast our votes in light of the previous cases we had made. It came down to a 2-2 split between the Mech game and the Finnish game, Aidan was the deciding vote. In the end we went forward with the Mech game.

Also Kody made an amazing piece of concept art for the Mech game.