LONG POST INCOMING.  Enjoy reading. 

In our second week, Jimmy spent the majority of his time trying and experimenting with the FEZ camera. One of the issues was when the camera switched to 2D, although it looked fine through the orthographic lens, the player would teleport their position in the “3D space” which we couldn’t find the solution for and if we ignored this issue (let’s say, because it looked ok in 2D), it would certainly lead to more issues as we continued developing our game. We needed to figure out what to do asap because this decision essentially meant changing our entire game design and how it was played. Although the narrative of climbing the tower would remain the same, it was purely how the camera was set up and the interactions between said tower and the player that was the issue. 

In this FEZ photo (above), the wooden sign is not placed at the forefront of the ground, but rather in the middle of the Z-axis, but it is presented as though it is on one 2D plane (photo below). 

Therefore, this meant that the issue we were having earlier would severely come back to bite us if we couldn’t get it solved because any sort of interactions that would be read by the game, it would not be able to find the proper location of the item and player in 3D space even IF it looked fine in 2D. The relationship between 3D and 2D and how it was implemented to look 2D in FEZ is beyond our knowledge and far too complex for us.

I bring this up because one of the ideas to solve this was to simply remove the “extra” squares (circled red), so that the character wasn’t teleporting their position, however what that left us with was one row of squares, meaning that putting miscellaneous items such as chests, ladders, etc, would all be on that one row (rather than how it is done in FEZ). This would actually hinder our exploration theme because you’re exploring on one linear pathway. 

SO, the conclusion we came up with was scrapping the entire 2D perspective camera and to use a 3D perspective camera. This allowed us to keep the depth (like receding and advancing in space) and implement more miscellaneous items and exploration. Therefore the camera is no longer orthographic and the 2D-look that was inspired by FEZ is no longer happening. 

In our next meeting (Feb 4th), we realized that saying a “3D camera” was still a bit too vague in terms of our vision. Jimmy and I (Michelle) both brought something different in terms of camera layout and movement to lay out our options and experiment with how exactly our game would be played. Jimmy tried out a fully third person controller view, however in order to rotate the camera, players needed to right-click on the mouse. He also implemented the character switching mechanic.

 Michelle tried a more isometric view (2.5D), having a 3D environment with a 2D sprite, reminiscent to old PS JRPG games. 

We realized that we wanted the camera to automatically rotate as the character also rotates around the tower and not have it be dependent on a mouse. We also decided to go with the 2.5D perspective. Jimmy spent the next day implementing the automatic camera onto the isometric view (which can be viewed in our proof-of-concept blog). Jason also started programming the interactions that would occur in our game, such as opening chests. 

We’ve also created a YouTube channel to upload any progress videos so that we can all see them and have access to them. 

In our next meeting (Saturday, Feb, 6th), we discussed level design. Jason started to create our first model of the level design concept. Katrina experimented (using the isometric view) with the sky-box in Unity and when players switched characters, the sky would change depending on who was being played as. She also implemented a method to make objects and platforms disappear on the other character’s side. For instance, if players were playing as Dusk, they can only see and interact with her side of things and vice versa. Ricci and Qiushi started working on music. Ricci made more of our SFX for the game while Qiushi made the ice level BGM. I (Michelle) worked on concept art, and the 3D model (We switched to having the character being 3D). 

We had a brief meeting on Sunday, Feb 7th, to discuss more about our puzzles and level layout design which we finished. This is the puzzle design for our ice sliding puzzle. Look at it as a “mini-trial” that requires both Dusk and Dawn to be placed at specific spots in order to reach the other side and continue up the path to the top of the tower ! 

Thanks for reading and see you in our next weekly post and our Design Document !