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