Devblog Week 5: (15/11/2021)

Whew, another week gone by and it flew past. We're getting ready to show a prototype in two weeks and are getting a whitebox prepared. This alongside some bug-testing and the finalisation of some features has led to a lot of long days for us.

So, lets talk level-design. We've mapped out our entire first level in unity and have populated it with structures made of modular pieces. While still untextured you can see the detail in the models alone. A script was also written to merge all the modular pieces into a singular mesh for each building, this has vastly increased performance and reduced to number of setpass calls for materials. As you can see the level is layed out in such a way so that no matter where the player goes, so long as they head north they will reach the goal which we covered last week and are still quite pleased about. The dotted lines indicate combat areas. We're super happy with this design and you can see the top perspective on the level below too that we showed last week.

Another great system that's been implimented is the dialogue. One of our developers was hard at work writing a dialogue function into our game that required a whole system to be developed. The time was also taken to allow for a user friendly UI to be developed and integrated alongside it to enable a great deal on control over the dialogue system without needing an in-depth knowledge of the code itself. This is going to be very useful for the prototype to show that we have an developed plot and characters for our game and are excited to share them with everyone. We can use it to stop player input so the player is locked in place and can make the dialogue stretch as long as we want. (Don't worry there won't be pages of dialogue). This just gives us more control of how we can deliver the story and make the players experience what we want to tell.

Our other progress is a bit less visually impressive but nevertheless important as we managed to get the camera angle changing smoothly between buildings which was a point of concern for us. It still needs to refinement and tweaking with number values but it's very promising. It currently works after hitting hidden triggers throughout the level to rotate the camera to face a certain direction.

We got the AI working in sync with the combat zones and spawning correctly, letting us decide what enemies spawn where and when. The navmesh can prove to be difficult though in certain situations but for now we're working with it and over the next two weeks we are going to polish up everything in preparation for the prototype and can't wait to see how things turn out!