ALPHA BUILD AVAILABLE 

Hello everyone ! Week 6 is dedicated to the alpha build. We met again on Feb 27th, the day after our meeting with Karthik to discuss our overall plans and goals. We all pushed each other into trying to get as much content as possible for our game because the more we had to show, the more useful the feedback we receive will be. First off, we began to deliberate tasks. 

Katrina worked on changing the UI system once again, this time, allowing the ability to have the items stack ontop of each other. In our previous design for the tutorial level, the sun energy would take up one slot each, which would be quite inconvenient for the player. Katrina’s main goals were to fix up the tree level, and the inventory system as well as try and add the MoonFlower quest that is associated with our Cat NPC. We also worked closely in implementing the dialog.

Jason continues to work on the level design -- this time focusing on Dusk’s side now as well as designing the disappearing platform aspect of our next quest. 

I continued to work on more environmental assets / models as well as any sort of 2D UI sprites that Katrina needed for the inventory system. I also made the different skybox gradients for each character. 

Jimmy continued to experiment with movement and adding in more cameras because one of the issues earlier was that when Dawn was on a lower platform, the upper platform would clip through the camera not allowing players to see anything. He also added the fade-out transition whenever plays switched between Dusk/Dawn. 

We met again on March 1st to see progress. Katrina continued to work on fixing the tree quest, and implemented having a certain trigger -- so, instead of having players use the sun item anywhere, they have to be within a certain distance of the tree. Katrina also added and coded in the sky-box switching and implemented the images that I made. We also continued to try and implement the MoonFlower quest. 

Omar showed us his progress on the ice-sliding level which was nice to see. He’s got the basic movement of it down, however there are a few clipping issues that he’ll continue to experiment with. 

Katrina and I worked together to fix up the yarnspinner files because there was a glitch in which the files weren’t readable (or the nodes wouldn’t load) because I put functions within the file itself, however this causes an error in unity because the functions weren’t implemented yet. 

Jason continued to work on the disappearing platform and has the level ready for Wednesday, so that we can then implement everything and have it good to go for our alpha presentation. 

Our last meeting was on March 3rd, right before our alpha. Jason and Jimmy had the disappearing platform quest ready.  He also included music and integrated Jason’s level design with his platform quest. Jimmy wrote the scripts to have the platforms only show on Dawn’s side and Dusk cannot see any of them -- requiring players to switch between the two and work together. The UI of the gems were included, so when the player finishes the quests and picks up the gems, it will show in their inventory. Jason also started working on the upper levels of the tower and we discussed the idea of having the players pressing F to teleport to the upper levels at certain trigger points instead of having long ladders connecting the levels. 

The ice-level that Omar is making is still being developed, which we all agreed is fine because we realized that the amount of content that we have for our alpha presentation is gonna take 20-30 mins already and there was no way they were gonna get to the ice-level unless we speed-run through the game. So, we pushed it to our beta release which gives us an extra two weeks to get it nice and polished. One of the issues was that the character stopped before reaching certain ice-rocks and it would hit the other colliders of the other rocks. 

On the side, while Jason and Jimmy worked together, I was working with Katrina to debug issues we were having with the quest-lines and the scripts. What was happening was that when Katrina activates both quests (the flower and the tree quest), one of them would get nulled out and the dialog script wouldn’t show. 

We debugged the issue and what occurred was that for every quest, we can't put "quest.activates" as a node, even if they're in separate dialog scripts. it can only be in one script at a time. For example, in the tree script it said " if visited ("quest.activates") is true" and then in the cat script it said " if visited ( "quest.activates) is true" . Therefore, when we put both the yarnspinner scripts in, unity was getting confused because it was happening twice and it would only do one or the other. Now on the tree dialog it says, " if visited ("TreeQuest.Activates") is true" and both quest dialog are active and working properly. 

Once Jimmy finalized things on the programming side and wrote temporary scripts for the interactions between Dusk and Dawn, he pushed it to me, and I finalized the overall environment and world-building aspect of our game. The significant change was adding in world interactions. What we realized when people were testing out the game was that they would go up to a certain door and ask, “can I interact with this?” and this would happen several times with the assets in the world. Therefore,  we added in yarnspinner scripts so that when players walked up to the door or a sign post and interacted with it, it would say something (“no one’s home right now”, “the tombstone reads ‘....’”) just to help ground our world a lot more and have small easter eggs built throughout the level. 

On March 4th, after our alpha presentation, we received a lot of good feedback and compliments on our game. Overall, they enjoyed the aesthetic of the game and the vibe. The main critiques we received were about the character/camera movement but also perspective. So, one thing they mentioned was that when the player walks, the animation is appearing as though it’s walking two miles even though it’s one button press. In terms of perspective, it was a bit disorienting, especially with the disappearing platforms. It’s hard to gauge how far the platforms are from each other or where they’re actually located in relation to the player. This meant landing the jump was weird, since the perspective is also odd. A panelist suggested projecting a shadow straight down instead of relative to a global light. 

Another piece of feedback we received was reminding players of the controls not through a UI screen, but by slowly introducing the mechanics through the game itself. So, hinting to the player they can open inventory and use particles FX to show the item is being used -- essentially having feedback when the player does something to indicate something has changed (can be visual or SFX). Also, reminding them of the switching mechanic after Dusk and Dawn’s interaction with one another. 

For the visual artist, there was feedback on creating a 2D sprite with an F and a circle around it and having short bursts of words like “Talk”, “Interact”, “Chat”, “Observe” underneath the sprite to remove lengthy texts.

With the feedback we received, we will continue to experiment with the camera physics and adding in our next set of quests. We will also have our friends and others playtest our game which we have already started handing out our alphas to people.

Overall, I hope our alpha shows you a bit of the game we want to create and the vision we have for it. At the end of the day, all of us (team members) have the same goal in mind -- to create something worthwhile and fun. 

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Personal note as team lead, I really can’t express how grateful I am for my team members and the amount of dedication they have towards this. Watching the game start off with free assets, a lot of trial and error that we had to scrap, and from grey-boxing to something that has our own voices integrated is... a feeling that is quite hard to describe but, I really cannot thank them enough for their hard work. 

We’ll continue working hard for the beta release and we are excited to show you our progress.  See you in next week’s (7) progress report. Thank you all :)