Zak Olyarnik | Week 3: Who You Gonna Call?

WEEKLY NARRATIVE

I decided to give the playtest survey another go, especially since we needed to actually get a first round of testers this week.  I took a lot of the feedback from Professor Rowe and committed myself to getting Qualtrics to work for us.  The default report is still doing some goofy formatting stuff, but reading and analyzing the results online works just fine for me.

We were told on rather short notice that we could compete for a chance to take Remembrance to GDC, and I was brought onboard to go through last quarter's sell presentation to tighten it and further work my presentation magic.  So I sat with Mike for a bit and we had a discussion about what the unique selling points of the game are, and how we could structure the presentation to keep coming back to them.  In the end, we weren't chosen to go, but I think the very act of going through the sell presentation has helped both from a design standpoint and for future deliverables.

And lastly, the first GDD revision was due, and because I'm very...particular...about documents, I wanted to go through and take the last editing and proofreading pass of it.  We ended up with a lot of good content, but boy, the organization, inconsistencies, and just general poor grammar really made me cringe.  Most of that was just a symptom of many people going in over the course of many months to make edits, but hopefully now it's all a little easier to read and reference. 

CONTENT WITH HOURS

• Full team meeting (2 hours)
• Retooling playtest survey again (1 hour)
• GDC presentation (1 hour)
• GDD updates and proofreading (7 hours)
• Scrum presentation (2 hours)

WORKFLOW EXAMPLES

Nothing special this week; I was doing mostly project management.

POSITIVE OUTCOMES

• Everything was a little easier this week.  Programmers were just fixing bugs so there were no real fires to put out, and the team deliverables were pretty non-threatening this time around too.

NEGATIVE OUTCOMES

• I don't think that moving to Perforce was a smart...move.  'Industry standard' and all that, but it feels like we wasted another whole week just getting it up and everyone onto it.
• No one tackled the "Experimental Features" Trello card, so there wasn't much else for programming to do this week, as we wait for the design specs of the new levels, enemies, and player abilities.

NEXT TASKS

Now that the GDD is updated, we can look at all of the planned new features at once and start assigning things to coders long-term.

TOTAL HOURS LOGGED THIS WEEK: 13 hours

John Harvey | Week 3 | Split verts?

WEEKLY NARRATIVE

This week I spent most of my time on another project, to be honest. However the work I did get done for this project was my version of splitting vertices then UVing the hospital models I did last week. I say my version because I looked online for some knowledge on the subject and got little to none. However, one of our member just informed me that he might have found the solution being Mesh display > harden egde, so we will see.

The art department didn't meet this week and I unfortunately could not attend the game meeting as I was working on the other project stated above.

Below the UV's are following our 4 square flat shading technique, but have not been textured yet.

CONTENT WITH HOURS

• Splitting verts on hospital objects (3/4 Hours)
• Uving hospital objects (1 1/4 hours)

WORKFLOW EXAMPLES

 

POSITIVE OUTCOMES

• Figured out how to split verts for future models

NEGATIVE OUTCOMES

• Over-whelmed with other classes this week

NEXT TASKS

Sending my models for texture and starting new models

TOTAL HOURS LOGGED THIS WEEK: 2~ hours

Matt Napolillo | Week 3: I Approached the Innermost Cave

Matt Napolillo | Week 3: I Approached the Innermost Cave

WEEKLY NARRATIVE

This week's focus for me was reevaluating how I was thinking about the scope of this quarter, and integrating a lot of the feedback given from Tony during class. I was also prompted to change the way I think about level design (and my creative endeavors in general), which is to try and come up with multiple iterations of something before deciding on the final result. That's how I decided to approach the new designs of the lobby for this week. Also, purchased 101 Things I Learned in Architecture School.

I came up with a few new designs after a discussion with Chris about her intentions for the feeling of the lobby. We decided to create a smaller design that felt safe for the player, while also functioning as the location for which the Memories (yes we changed it from Memento to Memory) are brought back. 

Matt Wagar and I collaborated on the design for the Dash Tutorial (which is where the player starts in the game). We also felt that the free level structure was going to make the game harder to design for, and decided to go with something a bit more linear. 

The other big change to the game was the removal of the pulse timer, and the integration of the stamina system and memory overcharge mechanic. We also finalized the abilities which the player will obtain throughout the game.

Lastly, we solidified the story of the game. This decision determined what the Memory items would be, and how we would tell the bits of story tied to each object.

CONTENT WITH HOURS

• Design and Story Meetings (4 hours)
• Level Design Session (3 hours)
• Level Design Self Work (5 hours)
• Team Meeting (1 hour)
• GDD Edit (1.5 hours)

WORKFLOW EXAMPLES

Early Lobby Designs:

Final Lobby Concept:

Dash Tutorial Design:

POSITIVE OUTCOMES

• Lowered Scope and re-evaluated use of space for the Intro Area
• Finalized the story and how the Memories tell that story
• Made some crucial changes to the game to influence a play loop that fits how we want the game to play

NEGATIVE OUTCOMES

• Got sick near the end of the week and was unable to accomplish a few tasks that I wanted to

NEXT TASKS

Compiling the room chunk asset list, and starting on new designs for the wings. Also, creating the hero room designs for each wing.

TOTAL HOURS LOGGED THIS WEEK: 14.5  hours

Jimmy Swanick | We're building a game I swear

This week we made a focused effort to finally transition from design discussions and planning to actual, concrete development. This came at about the same time as our transition from git to perforce. 

These two events are at odds with each other, so far.

Moving into this week I was making speedy progress with a variety of visual effects, lighting tweaks & adjustments, and particle effects for this project. When the latter half of the week arrived, it was time to merge my progress with the latest state of the team's repository. We'd just switched to perforce, though, despite that not everyone (myself included) had successfully got Perforce working. For the following several days, I ended up spending all of my available time to work trying and *mostly* failing to convince Perforce that I am the owner of my own workspace, and that I should be allowed to resume my work from the previous day when I sit down to work. 

Perforce did not agree. I spent almost as much time this week trying to get perforce working as I did getting work done. Progress for myself and everyone else seems slow.

 I was only able to submit one new visual effect to the Perforce cloud workspace before getting locked out of the project entirely:

Portal Cards!

One of the biggest problems with our game visually in the past has been that the lighting of our levels was so dark, that dimly lit spaces that weren't very close to the player were typically very hard to distinguish. Dark corners, hallways, and doorways were generally just blobs of dark color, making navigation very much more difficult, and the aesthetic more incomprehensible than moody. 

I learned of a great solution from a GDC talk about Abzu, where they used a tool they called "Portal Cards" to highlight and polarize the colors of distant dark spaces.   

Here's the point in the talk where they show their Portal Card in action.

Using some complicated math, a few similar examples from forums about shaders, and some glue, I put together a portal card shader that could imitate a similar thing. I even added the ability to have a texture scroll across the surface of the card to warp it or color it, so achieve a sort of smokey or ethereal effect just beyond a doorway. 

I managed to get the supporting prefabs and materials into the project, but didn't keep perforce working look enough to work it into any of our demo levels. 

BONUS: I discovered, somewhat embarrassingly, that our performance issues may have been caused by the fact that each of our textures and normal maps were imported at 2048 x 2048 resolution. This, combined with the fact that each one was applied to small 1 x 1 meter tiles that occurred hundreds of times in our level, meant that we were potentially rendering several hundred 2k textures constantly. My game started running smoothly after I reduced each texture to max 256 x 256, which is much more appropriate anyway given their size in-game. 

CONTENT WITH HOURS

• Thursday story meeting (1hr)
• Thursday Level Design meeting (3 hr)
• Friday general meting (3 hr)
• Portal Card Shaders (7 hr)
• Research: Vertex Displacement with Texture Noise (4 hr)
• Fisticuffs vs. Perforce:  (8hr)

POSITIVE OUTCOMES

• An exciting and vital visual improvement for the incoherent distant dark areas of our environments.
• A solution to our performance issues, finally.

NEGATIVE OUTCOMES

• A lot of time spent trying to debug Perforce instead of getting development done.

NEXT TASKS

Fix perforce, and get back to implementing visual effects. The next things I'm working on are the Xray Portal shader/particle effects, and a not-so-visual-but-very-important improvement for the way that our doors work. 

TOTAL HOURS LOGGED THIS WEEK: 26  hours

Sierra Dreisbach | Week 3 There Are Only 3 E's In the Word "Remembrance"

WEEKLY NARRATIVE

   Hey, it's me! I still spend most of my time looking at the Discord chat from the shadows, as I'm still too busy to make meetings. However, I know what my job is right now, and that is concept art. This week I was able to finally start on that. I was pretty happy with how it turned out, especially since I'm fairly new to digital painting. I used to do all my work traditional style, so I'm excited to finally start practicing my digital skills more. Although there are a lot of new areas it seems we want to add to the game, I feel like if we pull it off, it's going to look super cool. Drawing this "library book vortex" was really fun, so I'm excited to concept more of that and the other areas as well. 

    O yea, and I also took a minute to fix the logo. I can't believe all this time our gaME'S LOGO WAS SPELLED WRONG AND I DIDN'T REALIZE. 

CONTENT WITH HOURS

• Concept art (6 hours)
• Redid Logo (15 min)

WORKFLOW EXAMPLES

 

POSITIVE OUTCOMES

• Finally started on the concept art. 
• Feeling inspired to draw some more. 
• We have a correctly spelled logo now. 

NEGATIVE OUTCOMES

• Still trash that can't make meetings but hey what can ya do. 
• Deadlines are hard 

NEXT TASKS

    Continue making concept art and figuring out color schemes. 

TOTAL HOURS LOGGED THIS WEEK: 6.25 hours

Noah Nam | Week 3: Rock with You

WEEKLY NARRATIVE

This week I was the point man for staring into Perforce's maw. So I looked deep inside and found that Perforce takes a lot of steps to setup. I'm not sure I see the benefit yet. You can't make Git style branches and you have to manually activate your ignore files. 

I wrote a big ol document on how to set Perforce up for the team.

I also reworked the dashing mechanic. You can now dash without moving first, and dashing is now distance based instead of time based.

CONTENT WITH HOURS

• Perforce Learning and Teaching/Documentation (7.5 Hours)
• Dash Rework (2 Hours)
• Meetings (1.5 Hours)

WORKFLOW EXAMPLES

P4V, the devil's window to hell.

POSITIVE OUTCOMES

• Documentation for Perforce is done.

NEGATIVE OUTCOMES

• I'm skeptical of Perforce.
• CS383 makes life hard.

NEXT TASKS

let's go by birthday train

TOTAL HOURS LOGGED THIS WEEK: 11 hours

Week 3: Road to GDC (almost)

WEEKLY NARRATIVE

This week a few of use from the team presented our game for a chance to showcase at GDC, but we ended up not winning but there will be other chances. We also met again on Friday to talk about the changes that each section of the game has come up with and what we need moving forward.

CONTENT WITH HOURS

• Completed general hospital models (2 hr)
• Attended the GDC contest (1.5 hr)
• Met with the team (1.5 hr)

POSITIVE OUTCOMES

• Was able to complete hospital items
• Got positive feed back from the GDC contest

NEGATIVE OUTCOMES

• Didn't win the GDC contest 

NEXT TASKS

• Complete Library general models
• Start Library Hero object

TOTAL HOURS LOGGED THIS WEEK: 5 hours

Utkarsh Dwivedi | Week 3: Some coding, some art

WEEKLY NARRATIVE

This week I worked on a little bit of code and some 3D modelling as well.
For the code part, I teamed up with Joseph and Tin to work on fixing the memento's programmed animation, which was pretty simple.
Because of the fact that we have 11 programmers and not many 3D artists, I decided to help the team in that area. Unfortunately, the shared vertex stuff took a little more time to understand than I'd expected because it was the first time I was doing it.

CONTENT WITH HOURS

• Game meeting (1 hr)
• Improving memento code (3 hrs)
• Bookshelf 3D model + UV (1.5 hr)

WORKFLOW EXAMPLES

POSITIVE OUTCOMES

• Learnt about low poly art-styles
• Learnt how shared vertices work in Unity

NEGATIVE OUTCOMES

• Spent way too much time on learning about shared vertices and how they work in Unity

NEXT TASKS

Work on mostly programming tasks, but also help the art department where needed.

TOTAL HOURS LOGGED THIS WEEK: 5.5 hours