Going towards Ubisoft Demo Day March 18th

After the release of our Alpha build (March 4th), we decided to take a slight rest for the weekend. Over the weekend, I made a few tweaks to the game -- adding our main menu scene as well as a pause screen.

We met again on March 8th. This meeting was the discussion about sound effects and beginning to integrate them as our alpha build did not showcase sfx sounds. Our biggest take-away from the alpha playtesting was that we needed players to visually and audibly hear that changes are being made. For example, we had a playtester not realize that the items were being used on the tree because there were no particle effects or SFXs. We categorized our SFX as : UI sounds (such as button clicks, opening inventory), general feedback sounds (walking, sliding, jumping sounds), and reward association (quest complete, picking up a gem, using items).

We also talked about the tutorial creation. We talked about creating a tutorial that would ease players into our gameplay mechanics as one of our earlier suggestions was to do a tutorial similar to how the Mario series in which the controls were taught through story/dialogue. Similar to Mario 64 , it starts the game off with Lakitu telling Mario the controls bit by bit. With this in mind, we decided to go with a tutorial that teaches players to get into the mindset of using items, opening their inventory and understanding that switching characters is integral to the game. 

Katrina's plans were to fully implement the flower quest to which the player is able to interact with the flower, give the photo to the cat, and receive a gem. Jimmy focuses on the feedback we received in our alpha build such as adding shaders to the characters, adding a shadow directly under the characters rather than relative to the light source, fixing cameras and perspectives. I also made visual changes such as the F circle, the dialogue box update, and the type-writing text (with the pixelated font), creating the models for the NPCS (frog & mouse) and other 2D assets. 

Jason continues to work towards designing the level and the next platform puzzle. Omar continues to work on the ice level puzzle, Qiushi joined the meeting today and was gonna work on the main menu music as well as the twilight theme. 

On March 10th, Jimmy stumbled upon an error in regards to our NPC script. 

This led to some errors in which some of the dialogue wouldn’t start or be read properly. However, the solution to it was in the script itself. Before it was just the raw line: 

DialogUI.Instance.dialogueRunner.Add(yarnDialog);

Which meant that since we had multiple NPC scripts attached to different objects each loading the "world_interactions.yarn" file, they were re-adding the nodes raw. Jimmy added a new line in the script for it to check if we have already loaded the file and if so, don't add the file again, which led to no more errors. He also added the blob shadow underneath the characters as well as the see through colours for Dusk and Dawn when they’re behind objects.

Wet met again on March 11th which was a quick progress-check meeting then again on March 17th. By then, we already began implementing the SFXs that Ricci made for us. Jason was continuing to polish the next platform puzzle and the upper half of the tower design, Jimmy showed us the complete tutorial level in which in the beginning of the game, players can only play as Dawn (unable to switch to Dusk) and upon completing the tutorial, players would hopefully get an understanding of the core mechanics of our game. Katrina completed implementing cat quest, as well as added a task-list UI (and it's functionality) to the game and improved the inventory by adding the ability to include descriptions to the items. These were helpful additions to our game, especially the descriptions to items, which we never realized was quite integral to world-building our game and was another way to help guide / remind players on what to do with said items.

Something else Jason was looking into was the teleporting function to our games as our game did include different levels that progress upwards, we needed a way to get players from level 1 to 2. However when creating the function, he stumbled upon a problem which was that he created the function in the update frame. The update frame happens each frame meaning that when players teleport to point B from point A, they would instantly teleport back to point A. So he changed it to onTriggerEnter which happened less frequently and allowed players to get to point B. 

We then had our Ubisoft presentations, in which we received valuable information from the guests and took note of them in our playtesting report. Our changes are further showcased in our Feedback Adjusted Build which shows the development of our game from the Alpha presentation to March 18th.