WORKING TOWARDS OUR TUTORIAL LEVEL

Hello, hello! Apologies for these delayed weekly updates -- a lot of us were focusing on the game as well as our other courses.  I’ve just never had the time to sit down and fully flesh them out (until now).

With that being said, let’s update you all within the past few weeks starting with Week 4 -- reading week. We met on Feb 16th to discuss our goals for the reading week and what needed to be complete as we worked towards our tutorial level that was due Feb 26th. We wanted to make sure to give our team members sufficient time to implement everything and not leave it to the last minute. We've also set up our Trello page in which we put in our own individual tasks, but honestly, all of us have a very strong work ethic and we get it done regardless of having a Trello page or not. The page is more just to remind us what we’re working on/towards but we all communicate outside of it and regularly meet-up (every 2-3 days) to continuously update one another. 

Our vision for the tutorial level was to take Katrina’s initial test of the tree-quest and refine it. This meant having the proper characters modelled and animated, the proper environment (the tower + snow), and the proper UI system and essentially have one of the quests ready in our game. 

To talk about what was done for the tutorial level during Week 4-5 : 

Jimmy continued to work on camera movement, player controls and the overall aesthetic of our game with the pixelated look. He also did research on the toon shader which made our models have a cell-shading effect rather than the more gradient/softer shading. We also discussed making the pupils bigger which we all agreed that it looked better/more noticeable. We also discussed not only switching skyboxes but also switching the lighting for both characters. Dawn would have a warmer light while Dusk would have a more cool-toned light and we all enjoyed that idea a lot and think it fit our game very nicely. 

Jason worked on creating the level (the lower and it's branches) in Unity using reference to the design that was shown in our design document. He was looking into using pro-builder to create our grey-boxing and then using a poly-brush to go over the level to add texture of the ground, grass and then the snow ontop of all that which he researched himself. He also used the poly brush to soften the edges of the cubes and make it look a lot more like terrain and not have the blocky look. It gave our ground a nice texture.

Katrina worked on the quest implementation and the entire inventory UI system. This also included putting the correct sprites where they need to be; having separate inventories for both Dusk and Dawn and not having Dawn’s sun energy items be shown or used when you’re playing as Dusk; and clicking on the item to actually use it. Katrina also coded in the NPC script which we will now use as reference for any sort of NPC interactions and got it working nicely on the tree quest. 

Ricci made the sound effects for our game. This included different versions of snow walking sounds as well as the blip noises for when the characters spoke.

I continued to work on the characters and animating them as well as pumping out as many assets as I could for our environment since our game heavily relies on the atmosphere of our world. I also wrote the quest scripts using yarnspinner. Whenever the level was ready and complete, I put in my assets and make any final changes to polish up our tutorial level. 

On Feb 26th, we had our parsec meeting with Karthik to set it up and make sure everything was working fine. He gave us a bit of feedback in terms of our character controls. The feedback we got was that when you moved Dawn, her head was looking in a different direction than the way she was supposed to move. For example, when you moved left a bit, her head was still oriented to look upwards which was an easy fix on our end -- all we had to do was change the rotation parameter on both characters to make it faster. He also suggested for our alpha presentation to have an image of our UI controls because I had to explain to him the controls of the game which we don’t want to happen during our alpha. 

With the tutorial level complete and the meeting with Karthik over, we all moved into Week 6 and our goals for the alpha presentation. 

See you in Week 6’s document !