Arting Everything Up

This week, a lot of art went in game. I would have like to have been implementing it over a longer period of time, but because of setbacks in the design of the game, that unfortunately was not possible. Still, I put in a lot of long hours making sure that the art did not break anything, and if it did, fixed it as soon as possible. The game at this stage is completely functional.

Considering so much was implemented this week, I will be breaking this into various sections.

Trailer

Here is the trailer that I made for the game, uploaded on Monday. There will be more, and we have made many changes and fixes since then, but it should give a very good overview of our game.

Additionally, I would like to point out that the music in the trailer is part of the original soundtrack that Ravish Kamath is making for our game.

Character Textures

I unwrapped and textured Theseus, which caused some issues. The first time we tried implementing the textures into the scene, the weight painting disappeared, the second time, the bones disappeared, and the third time, the textures wouldn't show up. We have looked online, and talked to multiple other people about it, and nobody has any idea why that occurred, but we do know what is happening and we do have suspicions as to why. When we took the rig off of the character and left the textures on, using Mixamo's auto-rigging tool for expediency's sake, it worked. Therefore, we know that if we implement the textures before the rigging, it works, but if it is the other way around, it does not. Our suspicion is that Emma rigged and weight painted it in Blender, I unwrapped it in 3DS Max, and then we tried implementing it to Unity.

Having a major showcase at the local library on Saturday, we decided that we would leave the Mixamo rig in for now, and Emma would transfer the weight paint to the textured character next week, leaving this week open for cleaning everything else up.

Clipping Wings

Does this title make me sound like a bad person?

Anyway, I broke the Etherian Sol's wing off into the tower so that the player can climb on top of it as a path to reach one of the batteries.

Temple Textures

I quickly unwrapped and textured the temple, though there will be a lot of cleanup in the coming weeks.

Art for Level Design

The rubble acts as a barrier to stop the players from exiting specific parts of the map while the plants with the light blue tips spurt out poisonous pollen that will harm and eventually kill the player, resetting them back to their last checkpoint. As a third precaution, I will be creating some large rocks to use to kitbash the mountain together. Sheer cliffs that kill instantly should have a clear message that the player should not be here...

The rubble was implemented as I had planned in previous postings. One box was broken up using a varonoi system and each piece was distributed around the map. I then added a cube with a box collider to act as a full wall, making certain players would not be able to 'mountain goat' past it.

At the same time, there are parts that we want players to be able to climb up, so I tried to make that clear by:

1) placing them in a way that looked smoother and more inviting, rather than sharp and spiky like the rest

2) lowering the detail on their textures

3) darkening them

Once we playtest them, we will know whether or not we need to be even more overt, which usually ends up being the case

Turrets

Focusing on the fact that a primitive species has a supercomputer (the Oracle of Delphi) in their temple's basement, I needed to make sure that it looked like the fusion of the two. Additionally, I wanted it to look like it was based off of the Oracle itself, hence the circular shape with the sphere in the center.

Finally, I used a recreation of the Antikythera Mechanism (http://www.antikythera-mechanism.gr/project/overview) as reference, due to the fact that it was quite literally a computer created by the ancient Greeks.

Batteries

I created and implemented the battery based on a rose's design. While it may not immediately read as a battery, there are a few things we are doing to clear it up. At the start of the game, we will be telling the player to find all of the batteries and showing them an image of it. Additionally, I still plan on adding indications to show whether or not it is full, using a red -> yellow -> green light system. Thirdly, the most important piece to me is that it stands out from the rest of the objects in the scene, so I am using color, shape, and placement to achieve that goal.

Other Changes

I helped fix many of the parts of the scene that were not working right, including re-positioning some of the floor and wall colliders, making sure all of the crystals work, and cleaning up some of the prefabs.

The Next Few Weeks

Tomorrow, we will be presenting Etherian Sol at the Iroquois Ridge Library, and by the end of the week, we hope to have everything in game that we want for the final showing at Level Up on April 17. The weeks following that are set aside to make any polishes to our game that we want or need.

One Last Beauty Shot From Another Angle (Because Why Not)