GameMod Final Post - Nick Bint

First of all, I just want to say that I am so proud of my teammates. They worked extremely hard to get the game where it is with the time we had. Its amazing to see the progress that we made after each iteration. We had a solid idea and prototype from the get go and we ran with it.  As a team we preserved and made some really great design decision to solve problems that were plaguing the game.  Adam made sure that the game got A LOT of play-testing which was a huge factor in our success. We did a good job of taking the feedback and shaping the game the way it needed to be. I think Scurveball is inching towards that sweet spot where we can take the game to a whole other level.

Out of everyone on the team I did the least amount of work by far. I was reluctant to meet in person and missed a few but did attend all voice chats and dischord meetings. I had terrible personal things happen to me over the quarter and I wasn't able to function at 100% mentally. I wasn't able to contribute the way I wanted to and/or should have. I wanted to help with the art and implementing design but I didn't want to get in the way or slow us down so I focused on the sounds. I hope that when we continue this game I can contribute more. With all that I had going on over the past 3 months I was really lucky to be on this team. Adam, Ash, Jacob, Chayanne, and Will are one of the nicest and funniest people I have ever met. Our team chemistry was strong and I'm just so thankful that I had such amazing people on my team. I probably would have dropped the class if I was on any other team.


My Contributions: Sound Designer


Initial design

Created theme music and sudden death track
- made multiple tracks to find the right one

All sound effects
- made 4 of each effect for variety

Created a sounds manager
- Allowed us to play variations of all the sound effects randomly and/or at a certain time.
- Play a sound and stop

Created the instructions page

Took notes during each playtest

- I made sure that note were being taken whenever we got feedback. Whether it was on a piece of paper, google docs, or my phone  I made sure that notes were taken. I sat next to the play-testers and took a lot of notes. I would like to think that all my notes helped us.

Even though I did the least out of everyone on the team I still gave my all. I put a lot of hard work into my music tracks and making the sound effects juicy. I did my best to contribute to the design throughout and made sure that we got all the feedback that we could get recorded.

I used freesound.org and soundbible.com to find sounds. I then imported them into Audition and Ableton Live to make them juicy.

Scurveball: A post-mortem

Chayanne Khan

Scurveball was imagined by my team of six, and I helped bring that to life. They had a certain image in mind and with my tools, they made the game that they had imagined in their head.

I've learned so much just from making a this simple hot-potato style game. I've learned how to use the Animator, organize code structure, and has helped me reinforce certain conventions I've learned in previous classes.

Special Thanks: 

Thanks to Jeremy Crockett for helping with the water cannon. He quickly prototyped the idea that our designers wanted and I iterated it to suit our game. Thanks to John Groot for helping with the Scriptable Object Singleton, which sped up our development process.

Contributions

• Role: Programmer, Animator
• Kraken
• Tentacle animation
• Behavior
• Game Loop
• Cannon Behavior
• Bomb Behavior
• Ship
• Explosions
• Sail Physics
• Damage States
• Implement sound/music
• Designer Tools
• Adjustable Game Variables
• Singletons
• Sleepless nights combining everything

Final Build Executable and Video

Download:
http://tinyurl.com/scurveballfinal

Video:
https://youtu.be/7La7vK28Ev4

GameMod Final Post - Ashley Michalak

Ashley Michalak
Scurveball was a fun and unique work experience that really helped me get experience working with multiple teammates and polishing a fun game. Things I've learned through this project is how to better schedule and assign tasks that other group members will follow, and how to better animate within Unity.

Project Contributions

Production:
-Priority Lists
-Group scheduling
-scheduled time in Sound Lab


Programming:
-Camera Follow Bomb script
-Kraken Follow Bomb script
-Menu Light Follow Cursor script
-Cloud movement script


Animation:
-Kraken movement animation
-Cannon shooting animation
-Ship Bobbing animation
-Ship Explosion Knockback animation
-Curtain opening animation


Art:
-Skull and Crossbones image
-spark image
-sign model

Scurveball Final Thoughts (Beta)

My thoughts essentially boil down to, there's always more that can be done, but I'm pretty happy with the progress the game has made from even one month ago, nonetheless two.

Role: Designer/Director

• Lighting
• Scene arrangement/framing
• Cannon design (old & new) 
• Particles (Bomb, water, fire)
• SFX (edits/some new sounds)
• Bomb behavior design/implementation
• Game tuning (numbers/physics)
• Core game design
• Logos/fonts/marketing design
• Playtest conducting

ScurveBall Final Beta Post - Jacob Fragoso

What a rush this game has been. Overall I am proud about the end result more so than I have been about any project at DePaul. Here is everything I worked on


Concept:
Initial Concept Piece
Collecting Reference
Art Style Experimentation
Color Scheme Experimentation

Modeling:
Waves
Cloud
First Ship Variant
Second Ship Variant & Mesh Collider Cut-Outs
Kraken Head & Arms
Curtains
Bomb Cut Out
Stage Light

UVs: 
Most Everything

Texturing:
Boat Damage States 1-4
Kraken
First Ship Texture

Particles:
Confetti Water Stream
Fire Heat
Fire Cloth
Confetti Embers
Smoke
Broken Wood Planks

GameMod Final Post- William FitzGerald

What I contributed to the game:
Boat model and its various iterations.
Balcony model
Cannon model
Pirate model (not textured)
Rigging the Squid's tentacle
Other various odds and ends around the group
General Maya stuff.
Did some UV's in the beginning.
A lance model
A Unicycle model.
Bomb model (not implemented).
I am a part of the voices in the game, so I suppose I could say I voice acted for the game.
I modified and rigged a chest model so that when it pops up a sign comes out.

May 12th

This week we went to the sound studio and recorded sound and voice clips for the game. I worked on an updated camera script that follows the bomb as it moves across the play space. I also worked on adding in the animations for the wave and the kraken. In addition to the animations, I wrote a script that has the main body of the kraken follow the bomb back and forth as the bomb moves across the screen. I also added in a script to the main menu that controls a spot light which points at where ever the mouse is. This week we made a few changes to the mechanics, swapping out the cannonballs with a spray of water, which will hopefully fix some of the balance problems that playtesters brought up. 


-Ash   Programmer/Producer

Scurveball Alpha Footage

For the user's enjoyment: https://youtu.be/4cOr8S3UuT4

We've got alpha footage of the game with the core game loop working +  sfx & music.
The next steps would be animation and an end state. Incorporating the end state should be doable in about a week, the animation will probably be an on-going process until beta.

As far as what we're seeing in this video:

• Menu screen that plays one of our voice lines when the game is loading. 
• Core game mechanics of firing at the bomb in attempt to knock it into the opposing ship
• SFX for key game interactions (firing, collision, confirmation of hit)
• NEW - ability to charge your shot as tracked by the slider at the bottom, next to the player's ammo count.
• NEW - special spotlight that tracks the bomb's movements
• NEW - bloom lighting effects and edge-detection on camera
• NEW - Ship redesigned to give a better view of the top opening
• NEW - bomb now sits motionless in the air until first collision

May 8th

Anime central is around the corner ( 2 weeks!). I honestly can't wait.

We had a radical sound recording studio. Everyone had fun reading out the lines, which will be used as random dialogue that will trigger when the game starts, when the game ends, and when the game progresses stages. We have the same lines voiced by multiple actors (us!) and we have a bunch of variations of sound effects that we can use in our game. I'd argue this is the most we had ever done content wise in a day.

We're going to have about 5 different announcer voices. The announcer will change every play. That'll add some replayability.

May 4th

This week I worked on a particle effect sprite for when the cannons shoot and scheduled time in the Sound Lab. Next week we will have gone to the sound studio and recorded all, if not most of our sounds.

- Ash Programmer/Producer/whatever

April 27th

I almost forgot about this blog, but here's the gist of what happened on April 27th

We have a bunch of new art assests. We have a brand new ship and a battleblock-esque sort of stage. We have lighting and it actually looks like a stage where a pirate ship battle might happen. We have an amazing sign made by Ash, and it'll be on our main menu. We're beginning to implement the new ship's collisions. For now, there's just an invisible box collider. Will, our modeler is tasked with making the ship model modular so that precise collision can be used with the Mesh Collider component. In other words, his new ship model will be cleaner so that we don't have to duct tape our own collision.

April 27th

This week I worked on a sign model for the intro/main menu scene. I also scheduled time in the Sound Design Studio to be able to record our own dialogue/lines for added immersion for the game.

For next week, I plan on creating particle effects for the cannon's shooting and possibly get the sound manager implemented for the game, as we are currently still without sound effects and music.


-Ash
Programmer/Producer

Release the Kraken

As our art style becomes more and more realized we have run into complications with our holistic game feel. There is an obvious pull for me as the artist to push the stylized look of our puppet theater,  but if we get too stylized the overall game loses out on the clear readability of player interactions. As of right now, we have two models for our player ship, one with depth and one without - play testing will show us which make a more whole game experience.

In other art news we have developed a couple of aesthetic as well as practical props for the scene. Clouds and birds add some variety and motion to the background, while the new Kraken model can swat and lift the bomb ball in order to keep it inplay or cause some chaos.

Until next time

Jacob Fragoso

Artist

Week of April 20th:

This week I added the 'shield' mechanic to the ships, so that the 'shield' becomes inactive and then re-activates after a set amount of time. I had planned to change the scripting for the bomb and projectile physics, however decided against it since our designer was able to get the desired effect without changing the code. I finally created our team's work schedule with due dates for milestones that will help us stay on track and complete the game. For next week, I plan on adding the main menu logo and setting up the buttons and menu system.

Cool image of the hull 'shield' and the hatch 'shield'

4/25 Blog post

This week we have integrated new sliders into the build.
Also the modelers have fleshed out some of the assets for the game, such as the boat.

4.17 Design Thoughts - Physics Pass

Easter weekend was spent rebuilding the game scene from scratch in order to adjust minor compositional errors in the setup. With half of the core mechanics in the game already, I wanted to make sure that before we added any more that what we had felt good for the player so that we have a strong base to build off of.

The first step was to change the placement of the ships and cannons and bring them lower in the scene. The use of overhead space was not being utilized, and frankly it felt pretty awkward to have the bomb bouncing around the bottom half of the screen rather than the top half; cannons are meant to be aimed upward, so the more time players spent shooting up into the air the better. It's a lot less likely that the ball gets stuck at the bottom of the screen without actually hitting either ship.

The next step was fixing a small bug with the left cannon model that caused it to squish when rotating; ended up only needing to rebuild the prefab.

In adjusting this, I also slightly increased in the size of the bomb and the cannonballs just so that it was a little bit easier to hit your target; since we're planning on limiting the number of cannonballs the player can spam, the player needs to be able to semi-reliably hit the bomb, which proved somewhat difficult to do. This will continue to be monitored.

Fourthly, I changed the control scheme from up-down style control to left-right, simply because it felt better on my hands in conjunction with having to press shift to fire.

Lastly, the most important change was the physics. The game felt really floaty coming into this weekend. It felt more like launching foam balls at a balloon than cannonballs at a big heavy bomb. The adjustment to physics made it so that the cannonballs and bomb have more weight to them so that they fall faster, and the cannonballs specifically have more momentum so that they move the bomb further. This is also going to be an ongoing process of adjustment.

Now that all of these core game-feel issues were fixed, we can look to implement the last mechanic this week and spend the rest of our time on polish.

4/18 Blog Post

Our team continued to discuss different features to be added. We also talked a little about voice lines and are going to hopefully set up a date this week to get them recorded.

Week of April 13th:

Things are starting to ramp up. We've discussed some core features of the game that'll surely make it interesting to play. We just need to implement it and see if it seems fair and balanced. The next couple of weeks are going to be code heavy, but that's where the fun will start for Ash and I. 

As we think of these features, I remind myself that implementing all these features will eventually lead to feature creep and we'll have a tough time deciding what things we want to keep.

I've implemented a really nice menu that lets us change values of mechanics in the game. It's a very basic menu with a slider. It's sort of a hard manage because we have to create a new script for each value we want to control, but it'll have to do.

We're getting new assets this week and it'll help us imagine how we want the final game to look like. We're going for a 2.5D game, so this next prototype will actually have some atmosphere and define the exposition of the game.

-Chayanne (Programmer)

Week of April 13th:

This past week I met with my team to hammer out the finer details of how we want gameplay to work and I worked a lot more on the prototype making sure that the cannons have a sort of 'gravity' pulling them down, and also restricting their range of movement allowing the player to turn to face the ball easier as it bounces. Also regarding the cannon movement, I removed the cannons reliance on Unity's physics system, and reformatted the code in a way that allows better control and easier tweaking within Unity's inspector for the designers and other devs on the team to use. For the prototype, I also added in the cannon model assets and added movement to programmer art/blocked-out ships to simulate how ships bob up and down on waves. For the coming week, I plan to add the shield mechanic to the game, as well as better improve the bomb's reaction to the angle in which the player shoots at the bomb.

Ash - Programmer/Producer

4/11 post

This week I made several concepts of models for our pirate themed game. The models that were made were a pirate-ey cannon, and a super high effort sun. Currently working on more models with the other artist to flesh out the prototype that we have.
William FitzGerald--Art, Modeling, Rigging

Contemplating Concept

Last week we made the tough decision to radically change the idea of what our game was. One of the strongest critiques against our old idea was our art style lacks any kind of variety. The art teams new mission became finding something that hasn't been popularized but still fits the theme. With our new game being pirate-centric the obvious pull was to move to something like stylized boats. Our initial concepts had paper boats or steamships. What we eventually decided on was shadow puppets to break from the initial logical expectation.

The shadow puppet concept changed the whole staging of how our game existed in the game world. Instead of being a one to one representation of the action, the story became about two pirates retelling their stories at sea. This has shifted our sound focus to really focus on getting real voices for the announcers and the audience. It also gives our art and design some fun ways to bring legendary sea stories like the kraken into game events. Looking forward to next week the team will be in the proxy stage of development, getting as much in as possible to then flesh it out in the weeks to come.



Until next week,

Jacob - Art & Design

Week of April 6th:

This past week I met with my team to discuss a couple ideas for a two input game, in which we discussed Unicycle Jousting and a Pirate's Sport's game centered around cannons. We decided upon the Pirate Cannon Sports game, which currently still has no title, and myself and Chayanne created a prototype for it. For next week, I am going to continue creating prototypes and work with the artists and designers to better improve the vision and quality of the game.  

Ash - Programmer/Producer